About Move Up Mapper

Most lenders will tell you what you qualify for. That's not the same thing as what you can actually afford. The people involved in your home purchase each have their own perspective and their own incentives. The only person in the room truly looking out for your monthly budget is you.

This calculator uses the standard 28%/43% debt-to-income limits as a ceiling, not a recommendation. The more useful output is the full monthly payment breakdown covering principal, interest, taxes, insurance, HOA, and PMI where applicable, so you can see what that number actually means for your cash flow, not just whether a bank will approve it.

A rate sensitivity table shows how your buying power shifts at different interest rates. All results update automatically as you enter or change inputs, so you can immediately see how seemingly minor rate changes shift what you can afford.

Most homeowners have a version of this feeling: at some point, the equity I've built in my current home is going to open the door to something bigger or nicer. It's more instinct than math. I built this calculator to make this process more math than instinct.

What surprised me was that nothing like this seemed to exist. Plenty of tools model the cost of buying a home from scratch. None that I could find specifically modeled swapping one home for another, netting the sale proceeds, rolling that into your down payment, and comparing the new monthly costs against what you're paying now. So I set to work building this in Excel. Unfortunately, the result was super clunky. So I built this instead.

The calculator is detailed by design. I'd rather have more information than not enough. Too few inputs and I begin to doubt the output. First-time buyers and existing owners each get a tailored input mode. Scenario A/B tabs let you run two comparisons simultaneously without losing your work, useful when comparing two properties, two down payment strategies, or a straightforward "buy now vs. wait" decision.

At some point, most homeowners were renters. The question of when to make that jump is one of the biggest financial decisions most people will face, and it deserves more than a simple break-even number.

I added this calculator because I would have benefited from it when I was weighing this decision. Comparable tools that existed at the time were too simple to trust for a decision that size.

It's the most detailed calculator on the site. Rather than giving you a single crossover point, it models the full financial picture across a custom time horizon: monthly costs year by year for both paths, equity vs. what a renter would have if they invested the difference, and how the amortization split shifts over time. Every assumption is adjustable, because the right answer depends entirely on your specific numbers.

This calculator sits slightly outside the housing theme, but the opportunity cost question comes up in almost every other calculator on this site. I thought that thread deserved its own tool.

Compound growth calculators are everywhere. Most show you a projected balance and call it done. They skip inflation and tax drag, which means the number they show you is overly optimistic. And almost none of them let you run the calculation in reverse: instead of projecting forward from what you have, starting from what you want and solving for what you need to save to get there.

That last scenario was the one I kept running into. The Retirement Goal Planner tab helps solve this. Just give it a target income in retirement, a withdrawal horizon, and an expected return, and it works backwards to tell you the nest egg required and the annual savings needed to hit it, all while accounting for inflation and tax implications.

The conventional wisdom is that a bigger down payment is always better. Lower monthly payment, less interest, no PMI. It feels responsible. What's harder to see is what you're giving up by locking that extra cash into home equity instead of leaving it in the market.

When I bought my home I put about 20% down, mostly focused on keeping the monthly payment manageable. I didn't spend much time thinking about what that same money could have done if I'd put down 10% and invested the difference. A few years later, weighing a move up to a larger home, I found myself wondering if I'd made the right call. I think I probably hadn't.

This calculator is designed to answer that question. Enter a purchase price, your available savings, and a rate of return, and it compares the PMI cost of a smaller down payment against the opportunity cost of a larger one, including the exact month PMI drops off for each scenario. Don't just guess like I did. Do the math.

Refinancing sounds simple until you factor in the closing costs. I hadn't fully accounted for those when I started planning a refi shortly after buying my home. Suddenly the question wasn't just "will my monthly payment go down?" It was "how long before the monthly savings actually offset what I paid to close?"

I tried to work through it in Excel. Same result as always: clunky, hard to iterate on, and not detailed enough to fully trust.

This calculator is built around that break-even question. Enter your current loan terms alongside a new rate and estimated closing costs. The calculator tells you exactly how many months it takes to recover what you spent, what you'd net over your full expected stay, and what you'd have if you'd invested that closing cost cash instead.

As my income grew through periodic pay raises, I started wondering whether putting extra money toward my mortgage principal made sense for my situation. The standard case for early payoff assumes you're going to hold the loan to term, which I wasn't planning to do. With a likely sale or refinance somewhere in the coming 5 to 10 years, the math looked different, and I wasn't sure extra payments would move the needle as much as just investing that money instead.

This calculator is built to answer exactly that question. Enter your remaining balance, rate, and term alongside a monthly overpayment or one-time lump sum, and it runs a full month-by-month amortization for both the standard and accelerated scenarios, then compares the outcome against what you'd have if you'd invested the same dollars at a market return instead.

The key output is the net benefit: which path comes out ahead, by how much, and how that changes depending on how long you actually stay in the home.

If you're like me, you probably don't like unfavorable financial surprises. This calculator helps you determine how much you'll actually walk away with after selling your home, after accounting for agent commissions, closing costs, and seller credits. Enter your expected sale price and costs to see a full breakdown of where the money goes before (hopefully some of it) reaches you.

The verdict flags whether you're in positive equity territory, close to breaking even, or underwater, so there are no surprises at the closing table.