About — CanuckFI

Why this site exists

Financial independence is the point where what you have saved and invested can carry your living costs, and continuing to work becomes a choice rather than a requirement. Getting there is a long run of ordinary decisions — what a mortgage really costs, whether borrowing to invest is worth the risk, what a rental property actually returns, and what tax takes along the way.

CanuckFI exists to help Canadians understand those topics, and to provide tools for working through them. Where an answer turns on tax or mortgage rules, the rules used here are Canadian ones — federal and provincial tax brackets, and Canadian mortgage conventions.

That's the whole intent: understand the topic, then run your own numbers on it.

What's here today

The site is early. This list is the extent of it, not a preview of it.

Tools — calculators for Canadian money decisions: mortgages, loans, investment growth, margin accounts, leveraged-investing strategies, income tax, and rental properties.
Learn — plain-language explainers on the concepts behind the tools.
Help — how to use them, starting with reading the results chart.

How the numbers are handled

Tax is bracket-walked, not estimated. Where a tool needs your income tax, it walks your province's brackets rather than applying a single flat rate. Ten provinces are covered; the three territories are not.
Canadian mortgage conventions are modelled, not assumed. The mortgage calculator asks which compounding convention your rate uses, because Canadian fixed-rate mortgages are quoted with semi-annual compounding and other borrowing generally is not. The difference is small each month and real over a full amortization.
Ranges, not predictions. Where a tool simulates market returns, it reports a spread of outcomes rather than one confident number.
Limits are stated. Where a model deliberately simplifies, the tool spells that out on the page rather than leaving you to find out later.

What this site is not

If a number here looks wrong, please tell us. A correction to the math is the most useful message this site can get.