About Move Up Mapper

The centerpiece of the site. Rather than giving you a single break-even number, this tool models the full financial picture across a custom time horizon of 5 to 30 years.

Monthly Cost Comparison tracks every dollar you'd spend renting versus buying, year by year, across your full horizon. The buying side includes principal and interest, property taxes with annual growth, PMI with automatic drop-off when your loan-to-value ratio reaches 80%, homeowner's insurance, HOA fees, and maintenance costs that scale with your home's appreciated value. The renting side compounds rent at a realistic annual increase and inflates renter's insurance at the general inflation rate — the same rate applied to homeowner's insurance on the buy side. The chart shows exactly where the crossover happens — the year buying becomes cheaper on a monthly basis.

Equity vs. Invested Capital Growth answers the harder question: which path builds more wealth? The equity line tracks the value you've actively built through ownership — principal paid down plus home appreciation above your purchase price. The invested capital line models what happens if a renter invests the same initial capital at a market rate of return, while also reinvesting the annual savings from lower monthly costs. Both scenarios get a fair comparison.

Supporting detail panels break down Year 1 monthly costs by category, show cumulative totals over your full horizon, and display how your amortization split — the ratio of principal to interest — shifts between early and later years of your loan.

Designed for people weighing a move from one home to another — or modeling a first purchase for the very first time. Enter the details of your current financial position and a prospective home side by side to see a full cost breakdown, including your post-purchase cash position, monthly affordability relative to income benchmarks, and how your buying power shifts over the next decade.

The Affordable Price Range section lets you set a target monthly housing cost and instantly see what purchase price that budget supports — along with an absolute ceiling based on the 36% of income lender threshold and a comparison to your prospective price. The Buying Power Over Time chart shows how income growth, home appreciation, and cost headwinds interact to expand or compress your range over ten years, letting you stress-test both optimistic and conservative scenarios.

First-time buyers and existing owners each get a tailored input mode. Scenario A/B tabs let you run two complete comparisons side by side without losing your work — useful for comparing two properties, two down payment strategies, or a "buy now vs. wait" decision.

Built for anyone modeling long-term savings or investment growth — whether planning for retirement, a major purchase, or simply understanding how compounding works over time. Unlike basic compound interest calculators, this tool accounts for dynamics that simple models miss.

Growing Contribution Schedule models what happens when you save a fixed percentage of a salary that rises over time. Instead of assuming flat annual deposits, the calculator compounds your contribution amount at a separate annual growth rate — producing the accelerating deposit curve that more accurately reflects real saving behavior. Contribution Frequency lets you choose weekly through annual deposit schedules, each using the correct sub-annual compounding rate so more frequent contributions properly reflect the additional time they spend earning returns.

A Return Variance Band adds optimistic and pessimistic scenarios around your base rate, while Purchasing Power Adjustment expresses every projected balance in today's dollars — making the real gap between a nominal balance and its inflation-adjusted value concrete over long horizons. An Advanced section adds expense ratios, advisory fees, and tax drag, all of which reduce the effective return before simulation so their compounding cost is fully captured.

The Withdrawal Phase extends the simulation into the drawdown period, showing how long your portfolio lasts under a fixed or percentage-based withdrawal — and what the sustainable withdrawal rate is given your projected balance and return.

A second tab — the Retirement Goal Planner — reverses the calculation entirely. Instead of projecting forward from what you have, it starts from what you want: a target annual income in retirement (in today's dollars), a withdrawal horizon, and your expected return. From those inputs, it calculates the required nest egg using the present value of an inflation-adjusted annuity, projects your existing savings forward, and solves for the annual savings needed to fill the gap. Two scenarios are presented side by side: a flat contribution amount you'd save every year, and a growing schedule that starts lower and increases annually — useful for anyone whose income is expected to rise over time.

Designed to answer the central question of any refinance decision: does it actually make financial sense, given your rate, loan balance, closing costs, and how long you plan to stay? Enter your current loan terms alongside the new rate and estimated costs to get a clear read on whether the numbers work.

The calculator surfaces three key outputs: your monthly savings (or increase, for a shorter-term refi), the break-even timeline showing exactly how many months it takes to recover closing costs, and a net benefit figure that accounts for the opportunity cost of deploying that cash into a refinance instead of the market.

A detailed breakdown shows how closing costs, discount points, gross savings, and opportunity cost combine into your final outcome. For rate-and-term-reduction refinances — where the new loan is shorter than the remaining term — the calculator automatically switches to a lifetime interest savings view, since the standard monthly savings framing doesn't apply.

Built for homeowners weighing whether to make extra principal payments — and whether that money would work harder paying down the mortgage or invested in the market instead. Enter your remaining balance, interest rate, and term alongside an extra monthly payment or one-time lump sum to see the full impact on your payoff timeline and interest cost.

The calculator runs a month-by-month amortization for both the standard and accelerated scenarios, surfacing four key outputs: time saved, total interest saved, the estimated investment gain if the same dollars were invested instead, and a net benefit that shows which path comes out ahead on paper. A side-by-side amortization table lets you see the first 12 months of both schedules at a glance.

Because extra payments deliver a guaranteed return equal to your mortgage rate while investment returns are market-dependent, the verdict section frames the trade-off explicitly — including a close-call branch for scenarios where the two paths are financially equivalent and the decision comes down to personal preference.