About and methodology
A small independent site publishing UK money calculators that show their working. Built and maintained by one person, with unusually strong opinions about not collecting your data and about where money should not be made.
Who runs this
Budget and Bricks is an independent site run by an individual rather than a company. It is not owned by a lender, a broker or a comparison service, and no lender pays to appear here. If that ever changes, it will be stated plainly on every page it affects.
Why it exists
Most financial calculators give you a number and stop there. Very few tell you which formula produced it, what it assumed, or where it stops being reliable. That last part matters most: a mortgage calculator that does not mention overpayment limits or reverting rates is technically correct and practically misleading. Every page here publishes its formula, a worked example, its assumptions and its limitations.
How the calculators are built
Each calculation is written as a set of plain functions kept separate from the page itself. Those functions are then tested against figures worked out independently, covering the ordinary case, zero-interest and interest-only variants, and deliberately awkward inputs such as blank, negative and impossibly large values.
A calculator is only published once every test passes and its headline result has been checked against an established calculator from a bank or comparison site. If a test fails, the tool does not go live.
Your figures stay with you
Calculations run entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is stored, transmitted or passed to any analytics tool, which is also why there are no accounts and nothing to sign up for. The privacy notice explains this in full, including the one third-party request the site currently makes.
Keeping pages current
Anything that changes with the tax year or the market carries a visible review date. Pages are revisited when rules change and reviewed periodically regardless. If you spot something out of date, telling us is genuinely useful.
How this site makes money, and what it will not do
Right now, it does not. There is no advertising, no affiliate arrangement and nothing sponsored anywhere on the site. In time the intention is to earn something, most likely through clearly marked advertising, disclosed partnerships or paid tools such as budgeting templates. That is an honest ambition and there is no point pretending otherwise.
What matters more is where that stops, so here it is in writing.
- The debt pages carry no commercial content of any kind. No advertising, no affiliate links, no sponsored placements and no referrals. Not now and not later. Someone working out whether they can clear what they owe is not a sales opportunity, and the free advice services listed there are named because they are free and good, not because anyone pays for the mention.
- No referrals to firms that charge for debt help. The charities named on this site provide the same service without charge. We will not accept money to send anyone to a company that would bill them for it.
- Nothing paid for will ever be presented as advice. If a link earns a commission, it will say so on the page it appears on, not in small print somewhere else.
- Advertising will never appear before a result. If ads arrive, they sit below the calculator. You came here for a number, not for whatever is being sold that week.
- Results are never influenced by money. No lender, broker or provider can pay to change a figure, an ordering or a recommendation.
These are commitments rather than aspirations. If the site ever breaks one of them, it will have stopped being the thing it set out to be, and telling us so at the address below would be doing us a favour.
Corrections
If you think a number is wrong, please say so. Email moneyplanadmin@gmail.com with the calculator, the figures you entered and what you expected. Errors in a finance calculator matter more than most, and a correction will be made promptly and noted on the page.
What this site is not
It is not regulated financial advice and it is not a substitute for speaking to a qualified adviser. Please read the financial disclaimer before acting on anything you read here.