About Calculator Basics

My name is Dexter Umel, and I'm a support engineer — I've spent the last five years in IT, where my job is making sure systems return the right answer and figuring out why when they don't. That instinct is the reason this site exists.

I helped my parents buy and sell homes. They're retired, in their late 70s, on a fixed income, and I'm their only son — so I was the one reading the loan paperwork. We'd moved from the Bay Area to Jacksonville, and bought here in 2017, then went looking again in 2021. Both times the same thing happened: the free calculators online showed us one comfortable number, and then the lender ran our information and quoted something noticeably higher.

The gap was never explained well. Property taxes ran higher than we expected in Florida. HOA fees were steep. There were fees on the loan we didn't understand, which we were told were "normal." And on a fixed income, there was a real fear of overleveraging ourselves past a healthy debt-to-income ratio without realizing it. Our realtor referred us to their loan officer — the way it usually goes — but I had no independent way to check whether the rate we were quoted was actually fair for the market.

As an engineer, that bothered me. I don't like trusting a number I can't verify. So when AI tools made it possible for someone who isn't a developer by trade to build real software, I built the calculator I wish we'd had: one that pulls real data instead of rough estimates. Property tax rates come from U.S. Census Bureau data. Current mortgage rates come from the Federal Reserve's FRED database. I used this data myself to shop lenders for my own family and check that the rate we were offered was fair.

That's the whole point of Calculator Basics. It's the tool I needed, built by someone who actually needed it — so you can see the true monthly cost of a mortgage, in your state, before you ever sit across from a lender. No ads. No sign-ups. No paywalls. Just the real number.