The journey
Every number below is real, and every one of them leads somewhere.
Meet Ada and Ben. They earn $96,000 and $64,000, rent for $2,400 a month, have $90,000 saved, and are looking at an $800,000 home. What follows is their plan, computed by the same engine that would compute yours — no illustrations, no round numbers chosen to look good.
01
It starts with who is in the plan
Canada has no joint return. Two people are two filings — their own brackets, their own personal amounts, their own CPP and EI ceilings — and only what is left over meets in the same bank account.
$10,615 a year of difference, from the brackets and the spousal amount alone.
02
Then what actually lands
Ada’s $96,000 becomes $69,969. Not an estimate and not a rate of thumb: federal and Ontario tax computed from the brackets, the personal amounts, the surtax and health premium, CPP, CPP2 and EI — each constant carrying its source.
- Federal tax$13,573
- Ontario tax$6,689
- CPP and CPP2$4,646
- EI$1,123
- What you keep$69,969
$96,000 gross, one person, one year.
03
Where the next dollar should go
The question every saver actually has. Four accounts, the same $10,000 before tax, priced at their own marginal rate and followed for twenty-five years — with what each one gives up to get there.
The same $10,000 before tax, in your hand after 25 years.
04
Then the house arrives
Not a mortgage calculator bolted on the side: the cash to close is assembled from the accounts they hold, in the order that costs least, and what the home takes to hold is separated into the part that is gone and the part that is theirs.
$1,116,682 of payments over the plan, split into the part you lose and the part you keep.
05
And the question underneath it
The same household is run twice — once buying, once renting for good and investing the difference — so “should we buy?” has an answer with a year attached rather than a feeling.
- Buying
- Renting and investing
On these numbers, renting and investing stays ahead.
$586,674 behind by the end of the plan. The same household, run twice.
06
Then we try to break it
A plan that only works when nothing goes wrong is not a plan. Each shock is the whole projection re-run with one input changed, and the question is whether it still funds itself — not how much smaller the number looks.
−2% a year on every account — $555,183 off where the plan ends up.
07
And say what we still do not know
This plan raises 5 disclosures — pension splitting we do not model, benefits tested on a base we never ask for, an eligibility we assume rather than verify. None of them sits in a wall of text: each one lives on the number it qualifies, one click from the rule behind it.
- household splitting not modelled
- family benefits not modelled
- bands not indexed
- housing carrying basis
- rent ends at purchase
Every one of them is written out in the wiki, in plain language, with what the engine does about it and what it deliberately does not.
Now do it with your numbers.
Four questions, and the projection is about you instead of Ada and Ben. Nothing is sent anywhere; it is computed in this browser and saved in it.