About

I'm Barron Hansen. I build calculator and tools websites because I got tired of recommending bad ones.

I've been a web and CRM developer for over 20 years, mostly with startups and small-to-medium businesses. Before that, from 1999 to 2003, I worked as a professional home energy efficiency consultant. That meant a lot of conversations with homeowners, prospective buyers, builders, and lenders about the real costs of owning a home, heating, cooling, maintenance, insulation, and the long tail of expenses people don't think about until they're paying them.

Two threads from that work shaped this site.

The first is that almost every "rent vs buy" calculator I came across was either too simple to be useful or so buried inside a financial portal that the math was an afterthought. They'd ask for two inputs and tell you to buy. Or they'd ask for forty and gate the result behind an email signup. Or they'd be technically correct but built in a way that made the answer feel like a sales pitch for something else. I kept telling clients, family, and friends to ignore them.

The second is that the people I was helping, actual buyers, not finance-blog readers, needed a tool that respected their time. They wanted to know: at my income, in my market, with the savings I have, does it make sense to buy? That question doesn't need a webinar funnel. It needs honest math and a result you can trust.

So I built this. Rent v Buy models the full 30-year cost picture: mortgage, property tax, insurance, maintenance, opportunity cost of the down payment, expected appreciation, and the cost of selling on the other side. No email gate. No lender form. No agenda beyond giving you the right answer.

The site's first regular user was my sister-in-law, a working real estate agent who advises buyers, sellers, landlords, and renters every week. She wanted a calculator she could open on her phone during a showing, run the numbers in front of a client, and trust the result. Most of what's on the site comes from refining what she needed for everyone else.

I also build other free calculator tools at Squarepeg Ideas. If you want to suggest a feature, file a bug, or tell me the math is wrong, send me a note.