About Calcubear

01 What Calcubear is

Calcubear is a free mortgage and home equity calculator. You enter what you would borrow and what you would pay; it shows the monthly payment, projects the property's value forward, and tracks how equity builds year by year as the loan balance falls and the value rises.

Most mortgage calculators stop at the monthly payment. That number tells you whether you can afford a house this month. It tells you nothing about what you will own in a decade. Calcubear was built to answer the second question — the one that actually matters when you are deciding between two properties, two down payments, or two loan terms.

02 Who runs it

Calcubear is built and maintained by Lakshya Bharadwaj, based in the United States. It is independently owned, self-funded, and not connected to any lender, brokerage, or bank. There is no team, no investor, and no sales department.

Background

I hold a Master of Science in Financial Economics and have spent four years working in consulting and market risk. That background is why the model underneath this site is built the way it is — amortization, compounding, and sensitivity to assumptions are the everyday furniture of risk work.

I want to be straightforward about the limits of that, because it matters for how you should read anything here. My professional experience is not in home loans or mortgage origination. I am not a loan officer, mortgage broker, or licensed advisor, and I have never worked inside the lending industry. What I bring is the quantitative side: making sure the arithmetic is right and the assumptions are stated out loud. What I cannot tell you is what you personally qualify for, or what any particular lender will offer you. Only a licensed mortgage professional can do that.

Why this exists

It started as a spreadsheet for my wife. We were working through different lending scenarios — how much to put down, which term to take, what happens if we move in six years instead of fifteen — and I kept rebuilding the same model to answer one more question. Turning it into something she could open and change herself was easier than explaining it again.

She found it genuinely useful, which was the point at which it seemed worth putting somewhere other people could reach.

The gap I kept running into with existing calculators was that almost all of them stop at the monthly payment. That number tells you whether you can afford a house this month. It tells you nothing about what you will actually own in eight years, which is the question that decides between two down payments or two loan terms. So Calcubear projects equity forward year by year and shows the loan balance and property value moving against each other, because the gap between those two lines is the thing people are really asking about.

Every message sent to the address below reaches me directly.

03 How it works under the hood

The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is stored on a server or attached to your identity, and the figures disappear the moment you close the tab. The one thing that leaves your device is the ZIP code, which is sent to our own lookup service to return an estimated local property tax rate.

Where the numbers come from

• Payments use the standard fixed-rate amortization formula — the same one lenders use to build a payment schedule.
• Property tax is estimated from average effective rates by ZIP code, falling back to a state average when a ZIP is not in the dataset. It is a starting estimate, not your bill.
• Home value is projected using a flat annual appreciation rate that you control, applied evenly across the projection period.
• Equity is projected value minus remaining loan balance, before any costs of selling.

Every one of those is a simplification. The Disclaimer lays out exactly which real-world costs are left out and why that matters.

04 How Calcubear stays free

The Site is funded entirely by display advertising, served through Google AdSense. There is no paid tier, no email capture, no newsletter upsell, and no arrangement under which we are paid to send you to a lender.

Ads are chosen and served by third parties, not by us. Their presence is not an endorsement, and advertising revenue has no influence on the calculator's math or on anything written here. If an ad on this site ever appears misleading, please report it using the contact address below.

05 What we do not do

• We do not ask for your name, address, phone number, income, credit score, or Social Security number
• We do not sell your personal information
• We do not accept payment for referrals to lenders or financial products
• We do not take loan applications or produce quotes, pre-approvals, or offers of credit
• We do not give personalized financial, tax, or legal advice

The Privacy Policy covers the data side of this in detail.

06 Corrections and feedback

Financial tools are only useful if they are right. If you find a calculation that looks wrong, a property tax rate that is off for your area, or an assumption that should be documented more clearly, we want to know. Corrections are made promptly and the change is reflected on the Site.

Feature requests are welcome too — this Site grows based on what people actually ask for.