About this calculator

A friend of mine was getting divorced and had to decide, fairly quickly, whether to keep the house or sell it. Every article he found either said "it depends" or gave him a rule of thumb that ignored the thing that actually mattered — a 3% mortgage he could never get again, and four bedrooms he could rent. So I built him a model.

It started as a spreadsheet, became a chart, and then — because the answer kept changing every time he learned something new about the settlement — became a calculator where every assumption is a dial. Once it worked for him it seemed a waste to keep it private. This is that calculator, with his numbers left in as the defaults and everything editable so it can be yours.

What it is and isn't

It is arithmetic, done carefully. A month-by-month simulation of two futures over thirty years: sell the house and invest what you walk away with, or keep it, take in tenants and carry the settlement. It handles mortgage amortization, rental income and the tax on it, depreciation and recapture, selling costs, capital gains and the primary-residence exclusion. The how it works section explains each piece.

It is not financial or legal advice, and it isn't a substitute for a CPA or a family-law attorney. It is meant to make the conversation with them shorter and better, because you will walk in already knowing which assumptions your decision actually turns on.

Who

I'm Chris. I run a small event-medical business in Colorado and build tools like this when a problem is bothering me. The site is hand-written, has no server and no database, and is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. If something looks wrong in the math, I want to know — the contact page is the way.

Money

The calculator is free and always will be. The page may show a small number of ads, and the reading list uses Amazon affiliate links, which pay a commission if you buy something at no extra cost to you. That is the whole business model, and it does not influence the numbers.