Why I Built This

2025. Unemployed. Deep in a job search and running salary math at 3 a.m. like it was my second job. Every new listing was a different number in a different state. $85k in Austin, $110k in New York, $200k in Seattle. I’d plug them in, try to figure out what the paycheck actually looked like, and get different answers from every calculator I tried.

Dream salary in, reality out.

Every tool I found was either design-friendly or accurate. Never both. The slick ones (shoutout to Talent, my go-to) ran on old brackets, skipped FICA entirely, or rounded so aggressively that thousands of dollars just disappeared. The accurate ones looked like they were designed before smartphones existed. Tiny inputs, dense tables, zero mobile support. You needed six tabs open just to compare two cities.

And none of them answered the question I actually cared about:
What does this salary feel like where I’d actually live?

The cost-of-living tools were worse. They’d tell me Manhattan rent is $4,000/month versus $800 in Cincinnati and call it a day. But I wasn’t going to solo a luxury one-bedroom in Midtown. I’d get roommates, find a deal (I ended up in a $1,250/month 4br1bath apt in Chinatown with 3 random roommates off a Facebook Marketplace listing), and make it work like everyone else does. Generic medians don’t tell you that story. And almost nobody factors in NYC’s city income tax, which quietly takes another 3-4% before you even think about rent.

So I built the one I wished existed.

Beautiful, intuitive, and accurate.

IRS brackets updated the week they change. All 50 states plus DC. NYC city tax built in. FICA broken out line by line. Every number sourced, every rate something you can verify yourself.

Then I added the comparison tool I couldn’t find anywhere else: pick two cities, see the full tax delta, and set your own rent. Because the real question was never “what’s the median?” It was “what will Ipay for rent, and how far does the rest of my paycheck actually go?”

Unemployment gave me one thing I hadn’t had in years: time. I used it to upskill with AI tools and build something I’d actually use every day. This project was where those two things collided.

Here’s the thing I didn’t expect to learn while building it: I cut hair in dorm bathrooms for $5 a head in college. The jump from that to $50k is enormous. From $50k to $80k, genuinely life-changing. But from $200k to $230k? After taxes, you start to feel it a little less. The marginal utility of an extra dollar quickly diminishes. Seeing it drawn out in real numbers, not econ theory, changed how I thought about every offer I was chasing.

That realization changed how I thought about job offers entirely. I stopped fighting over every single dollar and started asking different questions. Who will I be working with? What will I be learning? What’s the culture like? What are their values?

Who am I? And who am I becoming?

And don’t get me wrong. Another dollar always helps. I probably should have negotiated harder when I didn’t. But some things give you more than money ever can: giving back, building real relationships, doing work that means something, living authentically. And ironically, the research backs this up.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies on happiness ever done, found that the #1 predictor of life satisfaction wasn’t income, status, or career success. It was the quality of your relationships. Not some of the time. Consistently, across decades.

So yeah, run the numbers. Know exactly what that offer means after taxes. Then ask the questions the calculator can’t answer.

I built this for myself. If it helps you too, whether you’re comparing offers, planning a move, or just running that 3:47 a.m. math on what a raise actually means, then it’s working exactly as intended. And if it does, I genuinely appreciate you sharing it with someone else who needs it.

As Blind would say: “TC or GTFO.”

Right now there are no accounts. No emails. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Your numbers never leave your device. Prior calculations are saved to your browser’s local storage so they’re there when you come back, but right now, that data never touches a server.