About Monetools

Monetools builds free financial decision tools for people the traditional financial industry mostly ignores — freelancers, side hustlers, and landlords who need a clear answer, not another spreadsheet.

Why We Built This

Most financial calculators online give you a number and leave you to figure out what it means. Search "should I form an LLC" and you'll find dozens of generic articles that explain the concept but never actually tell you what to do given your specific income, state, and situation.

We built Monetools around a different idea: every tool should end with a decision, not just a number. Instead of "here's what an LLC is," our tools ask about your actual income, your actual state, your actual risk profile — and give you a specific next step.

In 2026, a startup called Rox reached a $1.2 billion valuation with a simple thesis: AI's real value isn't automating more tasks — it's turning a tool from something that just reports information into something that helps you decide what to do next. It's the same principle we built Monetools on from day one. Every calculator we build outputs a clear recommendation, not just a number — because a number without a decision attached to it isn't actually useful.

Who This Is For

Monetools is built for three groups of people who share a common problem — the tax and financial rules that apply to them are more complex than what a W-2 employee deals with, but they don't have a company finance department or a full-time CPA managing it for them:

• Self-employed people and solopreneurs — freelancers, consultants, and independent contractors navigating LLC formation, S-Corp elections, quarterly taxes, and retirement planning on their own.
• Side hustlers — people balancing a W-2 job with gig work or a small side business, trying to understand how that income actually gets taxed on top of their salary.
• Landlords and short-term rental hosts — property owners navigating depreciation, passive loss rules, and the tax mechanics of selling or holding real estate.

How Our Tools Work

Every calculator on Monetools follows the same principle: a short series of questions about your actual situation, followed by a specific result — not a generic explanation. Where it's useful, we show our math so you can see exactly how we got to your number, and we tell you what to do next, not just what the number means.

Who Writes This

Everything published on Monetools — the tools and the guides — comes from the Monetools Tax Content Team. We are a small team that builds financial decision tools full time, and we write about the same rules our calculators implement.

Our working standard is simple: every figure we publish traces back to a primary source. Rates, thresholds, and dollar limits come from IRS publications and forms, Treasury regulations, and Social Security Administration data — never from other blogs. Tax constants used across the site live in a single shared file, so when a threshold changes, every tool and article that depends on it changes with it rather than drifting apart.

Here is exactly what "checked" means here, because the word is doing a lot of work on most tax sites and we would rather be specific than reassuring:

• The arithmetic is tested automatically. Every calculator has a test suite covering edge cases — income exactly at a bracket threshold, net losses, phase-out ranges — and it runs before anything goes live.
• The figures are checked against the source that publishes them. 51 of the 85 tax constants this site uses are compared automatically against IRS and SSA primary text, and the live IRS pages are re-checked monthly. The ones that are not yet covered are listed by name in our own records rather than quietly assumed correct.
• The rules were re-derived independently. In September 2026 all fifteen calculators were audited against IRS publications by someone working only from those publications, without access to the code. That found fifteen genuine defects, including a self-employment tax error worth $9,300 a year to someone with both a salary and a business. All fifteen are fixed, and each one is written up.
• No CPA has reviewed these tools. That is the honest state of it. A machine can check a number against its source and arithmetic against itself; it cannot tell you whether a simplification we have disclosed reads fairly on the page you are actually looking at. We are not going to imply otherwise.

When we find an error, we correct it and update the affected articles.

The full methodology is here — which figure is checked against which document, how often, what the independent audit found, and the list of what has not been checked at all.

Found something that looks wrong? Tell us — corrections are the fastest way to make this more useful.

What We're Not

We're not a CPA firm, a law firm, or a financial advisory service. Every tool on this site is built for informational and educational purposes — to help you understand your situation clearly enough to have a more productive conversation with a qualified professional, or to make a well-informed decision on your own. We cite official sources (IRS publications, Treasury regulations, Social Security Administration data) wherever our tools rely on specific numbers, and we keep those numbers updated as tax law changes.

Free, No Signup Required

Every tool on Monetools is free to use, with no account or signup required to get your results. We support the site through affiliate partnerships with services we think are genuinely useful for self-employed people (business banking, bookkeeping software, LLC formation services) — if you click through and use one of these services, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. This never affects which services we mention or how we present your results.