Frequently Asked Questions

It is an independent household reference with three calculators and a body of plain explanation. It is not a lender, broker, adviser, bank or government body. The name refers to a place, and the almanac is not affiliated with the City of Lake Oswego or with any institution.

No. The instruments carry out arithmetic on the numbers you provide. They do not know your income, your taxes, your other obligations or your goals, and they never recommend a product, a lender or a course of action. For decisions that matter, consult a qualified professional who can see your whole situation.

No. The pages make no network requests at all. They load a single stylesheet and a single script from the same folder, and every calculation happens in your browser. The only thing stored is the optional net-worth statement and the last values you entered, kept in your browser’s local storage on your own device.

An empty calculator shows nothing, which is a poor way to learn what it does. The starting values are labelled illustrations so that the charts and tables have something to draw. They are not quotations, not averages and not a description of current conditions. Replace them with your own figures.

The yearly rate is divided by twelve to give a monthly rate. The payment is the loan amount multiplied by the monthly rate, divided by one minus the quantity one-plus-the-monthly-rate raised to the power of minus the number of months. In words: the level payment that exactly retires the loan, interest included, by the final month. At a rate of zero, the loan is simply divided by the number of months.

Interest is charged each month on the balance still owed, and the balance is largest at the start. The payment is level, so in the early months most of it covers interest and a small remainder reduces the balance. As the balance falls, the interest portion shrinks and the principal portion grows. The monthly view of the table shows this crossing clearly.

Every extra dollar applied to principal removes that dollar from the balance on which later interest is charged, for every remaining month. The effect compounds in your favour: the earlier the extra payment, the more months it spares. The page compares two complete schedules, with and without the extra, and reports the difference in total interest and in time.

Property taxes, homeowner’s insurance, mortgage insurance, association dues, fees, closing costs, and any change of rate over time. A real monthly housing cost is usually larger than the principal-and-interest payment shown here, so treat the figure as one component of the whole.

Lenders round each payment and each month’s interest to the cent, may count days rather than whole months for the first period, and may apply payments on particular dates. Those conventions can shift individual lines by small amounts. If your lender provides its own schedule, it governs.

A forecast claims to know the future. This page claims only to follow an arithmetic rule: a constant rate, applied monthly, to a balance that receives a fixed addition each month. Real accounts do not behave so smoothly, and nobody can promise a rate over decades. The result shows how time and steady saving interact, not what will happen.

It re-runs the same plan at the rate you chose minus two percentage points and plus two percentage points. The gap between the dotted lines at the horizon shows how sensitive the outcome is to the one number nobody can know in advance. The band is not a range of likely outcomes; it is a reminder that the assumption matters.

Divide 72 by a yearly rate, in percent, to estimate the years a sum takes to double with no additions. At 6 percent that is about 12 years. It is an approximation useful for mental arithmetic and is shown here as a reading aid only.

No. Amounts are nominal dollars, and no tax, fee or withdrawal is modelled. If you want a sense of purchasing power, try a lower rate, which crudely stands in for a rate net of inflation, and treat the result with the same caution as any other.

The page cannot value anything; it adds what you enter. A sensible habit is to enter a conservative estimate of what the item could be sold for today, net of nothing but your own judgement, and to use the same method each time so snapshots can be compared.

In your browser’s local storage, on this device only. Use the clear button on the statement page to erase it, or clear this site’s data in your browser settings. If your browser blocks storage, the page keeps your entries in memory until you close it and tells you so.

Because nothing is synchronised. There is no account and no server, so each browser holds its own copy. Print the statement, or save it as a document from your browser’s print dialog, if you need a record elsewhere.

Yes. Each instrument has a print button that produces a clean page without navigation or controls. The mortgage schedule prints in the view you have selected, yearly or monthly.

The almanac follows your system setting. With reduced motion requested, chart lines appear fully drawn and nothing animates. Without it, a line is drawn once when a chart first appears and then stays still while you change inputs.

Yes. Every control is reachable with the Tab key. The chart sliders respond to the arrow keys, Home, End, Page Up and Page Down, and the tables scroll with the arrow keys once focused. A skip link at the top of each page jumps straight to the main content.