Three new calculators with companions: house poor, true cost of owning, layoff runway

Three calculators the growth audit ranked as its top build-now picks are live, each with a companion playbook computed by the same engine.

The House Poor Risk Calculator stress-tests a housing payment against real life instead of a lender’s ratio: it stacks the full monthly cost of housing (PITI plus HOA, maintenance, utilities, and other recurring costs), reads the share of gross income against HUD’s cost burden bands, computes residual income on take-home pay, checks the savings cushion, and returns a plain verdict from comfortable to house poor. Its companion, the house poor test, walks the four checks.

The True Cost of Homeownership Calculator builds the all-in monthly and annual cost of owning beyond PITI: a maintenance reserve, utilities, HOA, and the forgotten recurring lines, with a labeled cost stack and a comparison against the mortgage-only number (30.85 percent above it on the default inputs). It hands its stack directly to the house poor calculator for the income stress test. The companion is the true cost of owning a home.

The Layoff Runway Calculator solves how long cash lasts after a layoff in two phases, a slower burn while unemployment benefits pay and the full burn after they end, from savings, severance weeks, a user-entered state benefit estimate, and side income. It returns the runway in months, the calendar month the money runs out, a cash-by-month chart, and a what-extends-it sensitivity table. The companion is layoff runway.

Four glossary terms shipped alongside: cost burdened, maintenance reserve, severance pay, and unemployment insurance.