About this site

Home Affordability Simulator exists because the standard answer to "how much house can I afford?" is a payment-to-income ratio invented for mid-century mortgage underwriting — a rule that can't see your savings, your taxes, your market risk, or the retirement you're trying to protect. The question deserves a real model: thousands of simulated futures with crashes, layoffs that cluster in downturns, real tax treatment, and the full carrying cost of owning, graded by whether the purchase still leaves you on track for financial independence on your timeline.

It's an independent project — no lender, brokerage, or real-estate company is behind it, and nothing here is trying to convince you to buy a house. Half the time, the honest output is "not this house, not yet."

What happens to your data

Nothing. The simulation runs entirely in your browser — there is no server-side computation, no account, and no database. The numbers you type never leave the page. Saved scenarios live in your own browser's storage; share links encode the scenario in the URL itself, which is why they work without anyone storing anything.

How the site makes money

The tool is free and stays free. The site may carry clearly disclosed sponsored links (they're always labeled, and they never affect the simulation), and there may be an optional way to support the project directly. That's the entire model. There are no ads networks, no popups, and no selling of anything you enter — there's nothing to sell, because nothing is collected.

What the model is honestly good and bad at

Good at: pricing the trade-off between a specific purchase and your financial independence date, under uncertainty, with taxes and correlated risks taken seriously. Bad at: predicting anything. It doesn't know where rates, prices, or markets go next — it shows you the distribution of what could happen, not the future that will. Every simplification is documented on the methodology page, which is written to be checked, not skimmed. If you find something wrong, that page also explains exactly what the engine computes so you can point at the step you disagree with.

Where to start

• The planner — your income, savings, and timeline; a verdict in about a second.
• How much house each salary affords — the model's answer, salary by salary.
• The guides — where the simulation disagrees with the usual rules of thumb, with the numbers to show it.