A free personal-finance calculator hub for the USA, UK, and South Africa. No signup. No ads before you calculate. Real formulas — the same ones lenders, accountants, and pension administrators use.
I kept doing the same calculations on a notepad — compound interest projections, retirement targets, take-home pay across the UK and South Africa — and couldn't find a single tool that handled all three regions without an account, a paywall, or a pre-calculation ad. So I built one.
FinCalcHub started as a weekend project in 2024. It's now eighteen calculators and forty-plus in-depth guides covering compound interest, retirement, mortgages, tax, budgeting, debt, and net worth across three jurisdictions. The audience that grew up around it is roughly the same shape as the gap I was trying to fill: people who've lived or worked in more than one of the three countries, expats and emigrants, dual-tax-resident households, and anyone whose family or career sprawls across the three regions.
The cross-region gap is a real one. US calculators assume 401(k)s, Roth IRAs, and Social Security as the only retirement plumbing in the world. UK tools assume PAYE, ISAs, and a workplace pension. South African calculators assume PAYE, an RA, and a TFSA. If your money or your career spans two of those, you're stuck running three different calculators with three different assumption sets and stitching the answers together yourself. FinCalcHub keeps the same underlying math but switches the tax tables, contribution limits, and account types based on the region you pick. It's the tool I wanted when I was the user.
The site is run by James Blanckenberg — me. I've spent the better part of two decades managing my own money across three countries: emigrating from South Africa, working in the UK, and dealing with the tax, pension, and investment rules of both regions plus the USA, where many of my friends and family ended up.
That cross-border experience is what most of the content draws on. I'm not a regulated financial adviser, a chartered accountant, or a registered tax practitioner — and the site deliberately stays inside the lane that doesn't require those qualifications. FinCalcHub runs the maths, explains the rules behind it, and points you at the primary source so you can verify any number yourself. Where formal advice is needed, the page will say so and point you at the right kind of professional in your jurisdiction. The full profile is at authors/james-blanckenberg.
Every calculator and article on the site sits on four rules. They're written up in full on the editorial policy page; the short version is here.
Real numbers. Every calculator runs the actual published formula, not a watered-down approximation. UK National Insurance bands, South African PAYE brackets and rebates, US FICA, the IRS-published annual 401(k) limit — all current to the most recent published rates. Where multiple methods exist for the same calculation, we use the one a lender, payroll system, or the relevant regulator would actually use.
Primary sources only. When the page says "the 2024/25 UK Personal Allowance is £12,570", it links back to HMRC. When a SARS rebate appears in a PAYE calculation, the rebate comes from the SARS tax table for that year. Secondary commentary — the FT, Investopedia, MoneySavingExpert — sometimes gets a mention for context, but never as the only source for a quantitative claim.
Plain language. If a sentence needs a glossary entry, the glossary entry comes too. We don't assume you already know what "marginal rate" means, what a "primary rebate" is, or how amortisation differs from interest-only. We also don't hide behind the language: if the honest answer is "it depends" or "the rule of thumb doesn't fit your situation", that's what the page says.
No commission take. No affiliate fees from product issuers, no sponsored "best of" lists, no paid placements. Ads on the site are display ads served by Google AdSense — the same ads everyone else's algorithm is showing them, with no editorial input from us. Full detail on the advertising & affiliate disclosure page.
FinCalcHub is deliberately narrow about what it is and what it isn't. The list of things the site does not do is part of how it's allowed to stay free, independent, and quick to update.
The list of primary sources we cite routinely is on the editorial-policy page; here are the headline ones, by region.
Every page is dated. The schema-level dateModified on each article matches the visible "last reviewed" line at the bottom. When a tax band or contribution cap changes, the page is updated and the date is bumped — usually within two weeks of the official release. Full update cadence is in the editorial policy.
FinCalcHub runs Google AdSense in spots that don't interrupt your calculation — banner slots above the fold and at the bottom of the page. That's it. We don't sell user data, we don't operate a paid product, and we don't take affiliate commissions for products we haven't personally used. If a future arrangement ever changes that, the change goes on the advertising & affiliate disclosure page first and gets called out at the top of any affected article.
The trade-off is a real one. Running display ads instead of affiliate links means the site earns a fraction of what a comparable affiliate-driven personal-finance site earns. We think the editorial independence is worth it. If you find the calculators useful and want to support the site, the simplest thing is to whitelist it in your ad blocker — that, more than anything else, keeps the lights on.
Today, that's one person: me. The full biography, areas of focus, and the editorial responsibilities I carry are on the author page. Every calculator and article on the site is written and reviewed by a named human; we don't publish anonymous content, ghost-written articles from product issuers, or AI-generated copy as our own work. As the site grows we plan to add a credentialed reviewer — most likely a chartered tax adviser or chartered financial planner — to second-check the tax and retirement content. When that happens, the reviewer's name and credentials will be on the author page and in the schema for every article they sign off.
If you see a calculation that doesn't match your situation, a tax band that's out of date, or a typo — please tell me. The fastest way is email: [email protected]. I read every message and corrections usually go live within a day or two. If the correction materially changes an answer a reader might have acted on, we note the change visibly on the page rather than silently editing.
— James