About FinRise Tools

Why we built this site

Most people meet money math at the moment they need to make a decision. A job offer lists an hourly rate and you want to compare it with your salary. Your manager offers a 4% raise and you want to know what it means for each paycheck. A lender calls about refinancing and you want to know if it is worth the closing costs.

Plenty of calculators give you a number. Few show you how they got it. We built FinRise Tools so that every result comes with the formula behind it and a worked example you can follow with a pen and paper, so you can trust the answer, or spot where your situation is different.

What we cover

We publish more than 35 free calculators and a growing library of step-by-step guides, all focused on personal finance in the United States:

• Pay and taxes: paycheck, federal income tax, pay raise, hourly and salary conversions, overtime, time cards, tips, and state paycheck calculators for Texas, Florida, Tennessee and Nevada.
• Home and loans: mortgage payments, home affordability, refinancing and cash-out refinancing, home sale proceeds, auto, motorcycle and personal loans, and gas costs.
• Debt payoff: credit card payoff and snowball or avalanche plans for paying off several debts at once.
• Savings and safe investments: compound interest, savings goals, emergency funds, CDs, Treasury bills, I bonds and bond yields.
• Retirement: retirement savings, 401(k), Roth IRA, investment growth, required minimum distributions and inherited IRA RMDs.

You can find every calculator on our homepage, and plain-English explanations with worked examples in our guides.

We add new calculators and guides regularly, but we would rather publish fewer tools that are correct and clearly explained than many that are not.

How we build every calculator

Every calculator on this site goes through the same process before it is published:

• The formula is shown on the page. We use standard, widely accepted formulas, such as the standard mortgage payment formula, and write them out in plain language.
• Results are checked by hand. We test each calculator against manual calculations, and every worked example on the page is recalculated before publishing.
• Rules come from official sources. Where a result depends on a rule, such as federal overtime law or the tax treatment of mortgage interest, we use the official source directly: the Internal Revenue Service for tax brackets, deductions, contribution limits and RMD life-expectancy tables; TreasuryDirect and the U.S. Treasury for T-bill, I bond and Treasury yield data; the U.S. Department of Labor for overtime rules; the Social Security Administration for benefits; and the Federal Reserve and Freddie Mac for interest-rate data.
• Numbers are updated when rules change. When the IRS publishes new tax-year figures or Treasury announces a new I bond rate, we update the affected calculators, examples and FAQs, not just the date.
• Pages are reviewed and dated. Each page shows when it was last reviewed. When rules change, we update the page and the date.

Who writes our content

Pages on FinRise Tools are researched, written and reviewed by the FinRise Tools Editorial Team. Before a page is published, every worked example is re-run and each figure is checked against its official source. Guides link to the calculator they explain, so you can test the numbers with your own situation.

We are not a bank, lender, broker or financial adviser, and we do not sell financial products or earn commissions from lenders.

Advertising and independence

FinRise Tools is free to use, with no sign-up. To keep it that way, we may show advertising, including ads served by Google. Advertisers have no say in our calculators, formulas or content, ads are always kept separate from results, and we never accept payment to rank or recommend a financial product.

Your privacy

Our calculators run in your web browser. The numbers you type are calculated on your own device and are not sent to or stored on our server. You can read more in our Privacy Policy.

Corrections

If you find a mistake in a calculator or on any page, please tell us. We check every report, fix confirmed errors as quickly as we can, and update the page's review date when we do.