The Outcome Ledger

The Outcome Ledger is a free calculator for working out what money turns into over time. There is no account to make and no email to hand over. Nothing you type is sent anywhere — every figure stays in your own browser, which is also why your settings are still here when you come back and why nobody else can see them.

All eight tabs answer one question in different forms: what does this money actually become, once the things that quietly eat it have been counted? That means inflation, tax, fees, maintenance, depreciation and the years where the number goes down. A projection that leaves those out is not optimistic, it is just wrong, and it is wrong in the direction that costs you money.

The numbers each tab opens with are not picked at random and they are not predictions. They are long-run averages and current rates. The S&P 500 has returned about 10% a year since 1928 with dividends reinvested, which is nearer 7% once inflation is taken off. The Stocks tab opens at that historical rate: 8% price growth with a 2% dividend on top. These are nominal figures, so if you want the real one, tick “Show in today’s dollars” rather than lowering the growth rate — doing both takes inflation off twice. Inflation starts at 2.5%, roughly what central banks aim at, and the house price, mortgage rate and rent are close to the US medians for 2026. Every field’s i button says where its starting number came from, and every one of them is meant to be replaced with yours.

Where something is deliberately left out of the maths, the tab’s own explainer says so and says why. None of this is financial advice, and none of it knows anything about your situation.

One pot of money, compounded once a year. The rate it grows at is price growth plus the dividend yield, less the fund fee, so the three fields work together rather than one overriding the others. Contributions land through the year rather than all on 1 January, so a year’s deposits earn roughly half a year of growth — assuming otherwise is the most common way these projections quietly overstate things.

Two of the switches change the method rather than the numbers. The Monte Carlo fan runs the whole projection a thousand times with returns drawn at random around your growth rate, then shows the spread instead of a single line. Historical mode does something different and stricter: it replays actual S&P 500 years from 1928 to 2024 in the order they happened, starting from three random years, so crashes arrive in real sequences rather than as an average.

Rates here are before inflation. Tick “Show in today’s dollars” for the real figure rather than lowering the growth rate yourself.

Two lines that answer different questions. One is what the car is worth as it depreciates, steeply at first and more slowly later. The other is what it has cost you all in: the loan interest, insurance and fuel, and repairs that rise as the warranty runs out and the car ages.

The lease comparison is a running total of both habits, not a monthly payment contest. Leasing is cheaper month to month and owns nothing at the end; buying costs more up front and leaves you with a car. Because the cost lines are net of the vehicle you still hold, they can be compared directly, and the crossover is usually the year the loan ends and the payments stop while a lease just starts again.

Depreciation follows a typical curve, not any particular model’s resale record. A car that holds value unusually well, or badly, will not match it.

The simplest engine on the site: your balance earns the stated yield, the interest is reinvested once a year, and it compounds. That is genuinely how a held-to-maturity GIC or CD behaves, which is why this tab has fewer switches than the others.

What it does not model is the bond market. If you hold to maturity, a rate move does not touch you — you get the yield you agreed to. If you hold a bond fund and rates rise, the price of what you own falls, and this tab does not show that. The rate shock option exists to make the reinvestment problem visible instead: it changes the rate your money is renewed at partway through, which is the risk that actually bites a ladder of maturing certificates.

Interest is normally taxed as ordinary income rather than at capital-gains rates, so the tax setting here is on the generous side.

Gold and silver produce nothing. No dividend, no interest, no rent — the entire return is whether someone later pays more than you did. So this tab is a price assumption compounded, minus a yearly drag for storage and insurance, which is the cost most metals projections leave out entirely and which compounds against you the same way growth compounds for you.

That is also why the comparison against stocks is switched on by default. Over long stretches the difference is not mainly about which price rose faster; it is that one asset paid you along the way and the other charged you to hold it.

Metals have gone decades without recovering a peak in real terms — gold bought in 1980 took until 2008 to be worth what it had been. Use the time machine above with gold selected to see it rather than take the point on trust.

Your balance earns the savings rate, compounded as often as you choose, with deposits added as you go. Monthly compounding on a 3.5% rate is worth a few dollars more a year than annual — real, but far smaller than most people expect, and this tab exists partly to show that.

The number that matters here is the one after inflation. Cash is the one asset where the nominal figure is actively misleading: 3.5% interest against 2.5% inflation is a real return near 1%, and in years when inflation runs above the rate on offer, a savings account loses purchasing power while the balance on the statement still goes up.

None of which makes cash a mistake. Money you might need within a few years does not belong anywhere it can fall 30%. This tab prices what that safety costs, so you can hold the right amount of it rather than all of it.

One pot split across stocks, bonds, cash and metals, with each slice growing at its own rate. Rebalancing, on by default, sells a little of whatever has run up and tops up whatever has lagged, so the mix stays where you set it instead of drifting into whatever performed best. Left alone for twenty years, a 60/40 portfolio does not stay 60/40 — it becomes a stock portfolio wearing a bond label.

The blended growth rate is a weighted average of the four, which is the honest simplification and also the limitation: real asset classes do not move independently, and in the worst weeks they fall together. A blend of averages will not show you that. Historical mode is the better test, since it replays years that actually happened rather than assuming everything behaves itself.

Weights are yours to set; the defaults are a conventional 60/20/10/10, not a recommendation.

Minimum payments are always made. The only question this tab asks is where the money above the minimums should go, which is the question people actually face.

Avalanche attacks the highest interest rate first and is mathematically optimal — it always clears the debt for less money. Snowball clears the smallest balance first, costs more, and finishes debts sooner, which is worth something the arithmetic cannot see. Both are shown so you can decide what the difference is worth to you.

The invest-instead view compares paying debt down against putting the same money in the market. Paying off an 8% loan is a guaranteed 8% return; investing is a hoped-for return with real chances of being negative for years. The comparison treats the two as if they carried the same certainty. They do not, and that difference should weigh on the side of clearing the debt.

This compares buying a home with renting the same home and investing the difference. The owning side carries the mortgage, property tax and insurance, ongoing maintenance, and the cost of selling at the end. The renting side invests the down payment and the closing costs on day one, adds whatever renting saves each month, and pays its own renter’s insurance and a security deposit that sits in a landlord’s account earning nothing.

Major repairs are optional and kept separate from the maintenance percentage, because nobody replaces a roof in smooth annual instalments. A water heater, a furnace, a roof and a catch‑all bucket each carry their own cost and their own replacement cycle, so they land as single large bills in specific years, each inflated to the year it actually happens.

Tax is switched off by default. Turned on, it treats the two sides as the law actually treats them: a home you live in gets the primary residence exclusion — the first $250,000 of gain, or $500,000 filing jointly in the US, and no cap at all in Canada — while the renter’s portfolio gets nothing of the kind. That asymmetry is real, it is large, and it favours buying.

Some of what decides this is not arithmetic at all. Buying is a savings plan you cannot skip: the payment leaves your account whether or not you felt like saving that month, and each one buys a little more of the house. The payment is fixed while rent is not, so owning tends to look better the longer you stay and the higher inflation runs, and in most places the gain on a home you live in is taxed lightly or not at all. You decide what happens to the place, you can stay as long as you like, and you get to belong somewhere. Against that: a house is slow and expensive to sell, every repair is yours, it holds you in one city, and it is a single asset on a single street bought largely with borrowed money — which multiplies the gain and the loss in equal measure.

Renting buys freedom instead. You can leave at the end of a lease, it costs far less to start, the repairs are somebody else’s problem, and your money stays liquid and spread across hundreds of companies rather than sunk into one building. Against that: you build no equity, the rent keeps climbing for as long as you pay it, and somebody else decides whether you stay. And the whole case rests on one condition the numbers quietly assume and most people never meet — that the difference actually gets invested, every month, for decades. The “surplus actually invested” slider exists to test that. It reduces the amount invested on whichever side is investing, and which side that hurts depends on which one has more left over each month.

Defaults are roughly 2026 US medians: a $410,000 price, a 6.5% mortgage and $2,000 rent. Your settings save in your browser, so changing a default here never disturbs numbers you have already entered — only “Reset this tab” brings in new ones.