Hey!
I bought a house a couple of years ago. It was at a time when both house prices and interest rates were zooming upwards, so I knew that I’d want to pay it off as quickly as possible. I like math and I like money, so I’d visit my bank’s mortgage payoff calculator fairly regularly, playing with different values.
The calculator had the ability to show me how sooner things would get paid off and how much I’d save if I threw in extra on a monthly or annual basis, but not both. That bothered me because I was going to throw in extra monthly, and also once per year during bonus season, throwing some at the mortgage as well.
I found another calculator online that allowed that, but it had other fields that just felt confusing.
I thought I should just build my own. And not only would I make a mortgage payoff calculator the way I wanted, maybe I could build other calculators just the way I like them, too.
After seeing a youtube video talking about some calculator megasite that was out there and how easy it was to set up nowadays, that was enough for me to get going. After all, I’m a web developer. And though my day job is more about managing web developers, this was a project I could tinker with, and maybe others would find it useful, too.
It seemed like this would be a good site that could be done all on the front-end, so I started with AstroJS and Tailwind. I also knew that the math of the calculator would be the hard part, so I am leaning on Claude to help with this, which is something I wanted to learn more about. I quickly realized that Claude doesn’t always do things exactly the way I liked, so I’m using Claude Code with VS Code so I can see my files and edit as needed.
The first calculator made is Mortgage Extra Payments Calculator. I can’t have a calculator directory with just one calculator, so I also created the Mortgage Payoff Goal Calculator, wso they go hand in hand.
I hope you find them useful. I’m up for feedback if you’ve got it. Check the Contact Us page to see how to deliver it to me. And thanks again for reading.