Concepts the institutions use, on your own numbers
Pension funds, endowments, and insurers reason about money with a small set of durable ideas — present value, compounding, asset–liability offset, replacement cost. Each instrument below takes one of them and lets you work it with your own figures. Two sentences of framing, then the tool, then what your number means.
Tax Impact
The true pre-tax cost of a purchase, once sales tax and the income you had to earn to pay it are counted.
Fee Impact
How an expense ratio measured in fractions of a percent compounds into a six-figure lifetime drag.
Mortgage Acceleration
Standard payments, extra principal, and HELOC chunking — three payoff schedules, side by side.
Retirement Capital
The capital required today to fund an inflation-adjusted income stream across a multi-decade retirement.
Household Labor Replacement Cost
The pre-tax salary a second earner would need just to replace the services a stay-at-home spouse provides.
Investment Growth
Actual compounding vs. the average-return illusion, and the single CAGR that reconciles them.
Mortgage Offset
How much of the all-in-one mortgage's promise is the offset engine, and how much is just paying more.
HELOC Chunking
Whether velocity-banking a paycheck through a credit line beats just paying the surplus onto the loan.