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Calculators to Change your Life

Why not? Calculators sure changed mine.

A lifetime ago, in a safe but stifling job, I found an online mortgage calculator that visualised the power of extra repayments. Having just borrowed to buy a home, it opened my eyes.

I was hooked.

Learning that early escape from debt was possible made it my obsession. I checked that calculator after every stymied project and pointless restructuring. So, like, twice a day.

With few opportunities to flex my skills in my IT role, I wrote other calculators to rationalise and strategise my approach to life.


They answer specific questions like:

  • How much should I borrow?
  • How much is my overtime worth?

That the then-nascent internet only had vague touchy-feely articles on work. How to influence, manage, and, if worst-comes-to-worst, cope.

But hard math was more satisfying than soft skills.

Running scenarios through these calculators helped me decide what was 'enough' and how soon I could reach it.

I slapped them up on free ISP-provided webspace so that I could game-plan wherever and whenever. And also to, y'know, flex.

The mortgage was discharged in 2005, about 25 years early.

With it, the need to labour to service it.

The calculators remained online, updated sporadically whenever people wrote in requests.

In May 2023 my ISP announced the cancellation of free webspace. So I moved the calculators to glitch.com, added a couple more, and wrote some upgrades.

Programming has obviously changed.

I originally used an unholy combination of Notepad and Frontpage to create the calculators, uploading them via janky freeware FTP clients. 20 years later, I'm using Visual Studio Code - an industry-grade free IDE - with integrated remote Git publishing. Higher-level libraries like jQuery and the Pure style module slash line counts. 

Once a slog born of desperation, insecurity, and thwarted ambition, coding has evolved into colourful fun.

I (would like to) think that these calculators are less transient. The reason being that they deal less in absolutes than in ratios. Your wealth is better understood as a ratio of your income, your salary as a ratio of money over actual time worked.

Balances and ratios often imply trade-offs. And the larger lesson I've learned from these calculators is that most absolutes in life are actually trade-offs.

Trade-offs can be optimised, or with knowledge of their parameters, deliberately undertaken or avoided. I have happily dodged, for example, the trade-off of me-time for parenting.

The trade-off for playing with these calculators is that they may change your life.

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Location: Adelaide SA, Australia

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