Tools built to be used in front of someone.
If your work involves explaining borrowing costs to people who are already worried about money, these are free, need no signup, collect nothing, and print with the inputs on the page. Use them, cite them, send them to clients. No permission needed and no strings.
Which tool for which conversation.
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Rollover cost
Showing a client why a payday loan is expensive
Set the amount and the number of renewals. The chart shows fees accumulating against a principal that never falls. Most clients grasp the mechanism from the picture in a way that an APR figure does not achieve — because the problem is not the percentage, it is that the balance does not move.
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Offer comparison
A client has two offers and cannot tell which is better
Enter both and the tool names the cheaper one in dollars — including the common case where the lower monthly payment costs several hundred more overall. Both offers are stored in the URL, so you can prepare the comparison before a session and email the link ahead of it.
- Open
Payoff accelerator
Building a realistic payoff plan
Shows what an extra $25, $50, or $100 a month removes in interest and months. Useful for demonstrating that a modest, sustainable amount beats an ambitious one abandoned in month three — and it flags when a payment does not cover accruing interest at all.
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Affordability
A client wants to know what they can afford
Works backwards from income and existing obligations to a payment ceiling at a 36% debt-to-income limit, then to the amount that supports. Makes the ceiling-versus-target distinction concrete, which is often the more useful conversation.
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Paycheck planner
Bridging a gap without borrowing at all
Balance minus bills due, divided across days remaining. Clients can keep using it between sessions — everything stays in their browser, so there is nothing for them to sign up for and nothing for us to see.
- Open
State rules
Confirming what is legal in a client's state
Statutory limits, rate ceilings, rollover rules, and the regulator to complain to, for all 50 states and D.C. Please read the verification note below before relying on any figure — we are explicit about which entries have been source-checked.
Set up a scenario before the session.
Every calculator reads its inputs from the URL, so you can build a scenario in advance and send it. The client opens exactly what you configured, with nothing to enter.
Compare two offers
?a=amount,apr,term,fee&b=amount,apr,term,feeThis example shows the trap: B has the lower rate and the smaller payment, and costs more.
Try it →Price a single loan
?amount=&apr=&term=&fee=Fee is a percentage. Leave it at 0 if the lender charges none.
Try it →Payoff plan for an existing debt
?balance=&apr=&payment=Shows what an extra $25 through $200 a month removes in interest and months.
Try it →Affordability from income
?income=&debt=&apr=Derives the payment ceiling from a 36% debt-to-income limit, then the amount it supports.
Try it →Rollover cost
no parameters yetSet the amount and renewals on the page; URL state is coming to this one.
Try it →What we did so you can use these with clients.
No signup, no accounts, no email capture
None of the tools ask for anything. You can open one on a shared screen in front of a client without a login step or a privacy conversation.
Nothing is transmitted to us
The calculators run in the browser. The planner and debt tracker use local storage on the client's own device. We cannot see their figures, which also means we cannot recover them — the tracker offers an export for that reason.
Printable with context
Every calculator prints with a dated header carrying the inputs and the URL, so a handout is still interpretable weeks later rather than being a screenshot of unexplained numbers.
Shareable state
Inputs live in the URL. Prepare a scenario in advance, send the link, and the client opens exactly what you set up.
Cheaper alternatives named first
Credit union PALs, biller hardship plans, employer wage advances, and NFCC counseling appear throughout — including on pages where we earn referral fees from lenders and nothing from those alternatives.
You should know how we make money.
StraightSum earns referral fees when someone submits an inquiry through this site and a lender funds a loan. If you are considering recommending these tools to clients or colleagues, that is something you are entitled to weigh, and you should not have to dig for it.
We are not a lender
No credit decisions, no funds, no rates, no servicing. The loan request form is operated by a third party and labelled as such on the page.
The tools are separate from the referral path
No calculator asks for personal information or routes to a form as a condition of showing results. You can use every one of them without a client encountering a lender at any point.
We name options that pay us nothing
Credit union PALs at 28%, biller hardship plans, employer wage advances, and NFCC counseling appear across the site — including in place of a lender recommendation where they are genuinely cheaper.
Where we are uncertain, we say so
Our state law pages carry an explicit verification notice. 0 of 51 entries have been source-checked so far; the rest say plainly that they have not been, rather than implying a rigour that does not yet exist.
Please read this before citing our state data
Our state pages cover statutory limits, rate ceilings, rollover rules, and regulators for all 51 jurisdictions. The state figures are not source-verified yet, so no numeric state claim is published here.
None of the entries has completed source verification yet. Each page states its own status. Where an entry has been verified, it lists the statute and regulator publication it was read from, with a review date. Where it has not, it says so and directs the reader to the regulator instead.
If you are advising professionally, please treat unverified entries as a starting point for your own check rather than as a citation. And if you find an error, we would genuinely like to hear about it — email info@straightsum.com and we will correct it and credit you if you want the credit.
If these help, a link helps us back.
You are welcome to use everything here without doing anything for us — that is not a formality, it is the actual arrangement. No attribution required, no permission needed, no registration.
That said: if a tool earns a place in your resource list, your handouts, or a page on your site, a link would be genuinely useful. A small independent site competing against companies with considerably larger budgets lives or dies on whether people who know the subject think it is worth pointing at. A link from a counseling agency or an educator carries weight that no amount of our own writing does.
And if you would rather not link — perhaps because we earn referral fees, which is a reasonable position — please still use the tools. They work either way, and a client who understands their loan arithmetic is the outcome either way.
Ready-made attribution, if it saves you time
Plain text
HTML
With a note on what they do
Please include the referral-funded note if your context calls for disclosure. We would rather you disclose it than omit a link because you could not.
Requests and corrections
If a tool would be more useful with one change — a different default, an extra field, a Spanish version, a specific print layout — tell us. Requests from people who use these in practice get priority over our own ideas, because you know what a session actually needs.
info@straightsum.comSpanish-language tools
Two calculators are available in Spanish, with terminology following CFPB published usage. Every Spanish page states clearly that loan documents and the request form remain English-only, so clients know before they invest time.
Calculadoras en españolStraightSum is not a lender, loan broker, or credit services organization. We do not make credit decisions, issue funds, set rates or fees, guarantee approval, or service loan accounts. Calculators and guides on this site are educational estimates, not offers of credit and not financial, legal, tax, or credit advice. Actual terms depend on the lender, your state, verification, underwriting, and applicable law. Nothing on this site constitutes professional financial, legal, or credit advice, and it is not a substitute for your own judgement about a client's circumstances.