About Hearthfork

Who builds it

Hearthfork is built by a team with hands-on experience in luxury residential construction, real-estate development and project finance. We are not licensed financial, mortgage, tax, legal or real-estate advisors, and this tool is not a substitute for one.

Content and methodology on this site are published under the name Hearthfork Research. We do not list individual credentials we do not hold. What we can offer instead is transparency: the methodology page is a complete specification of the model, every default carries a source and a date, and the worked examples on every guide are generated by the same code that runs the calculator, so anyone can check the arithmetic.

Why it exists

The renovate-or-move question is asked constantly and answered badly. Most published advice is a list of things to consider with no way to weigh them. The few calculators that exist add up a renovation quote and a commission estimate and ignore the things that actually decide the outcome: the interest-rate gap between an existing mortgage and a new one, the value a renovation fails to recoup, the slow amortization of a new thirty-year loan, and what the cheaper path’s cash could have earned. In a market where roughly half of homeowners hold a mortgage rate under 4% and new loans cost substantially more, that omission is not a rounding error.

We built Hearthfork to do the comparison properly: a month-by-month simulation of both paths, a verdict with a close-call band, break-evens that show where the answer changes, a lock-in figure that isolates the rate, and a sensitivity analysis that tells you how much to trust the result. And because some reasons for moving have nothing to do with money, the calculator asks why you want a change and says plainly when renovation cannot deliver it.

Independence

The calculator is free and the results are not influenced by any commercial relationship. We do not accept payment to change defaults, formulas, verdicts or rankings. If we introduce referral partnerships in future (for example, to lenders, contractors or agents), they will be disclosed on the page where they appear, they will never alter the numbers, and they will not receive your inputs without your explicit action. The defaults come from public sources named in the methodology and are refreshed on a schedule recorded in its change log.

What we ask of you

Treat every output as an estimate conditioned on what you entered. Replace the national defaults with your own quotes. Read the drivers and break-evens before the verdict. And if you find an error in the model, a stale source, or a case where the explanation is misleading, tell us; corrections are the fastest way this gets better.

Contact

Email hello@hearthfork.com or use the contact page. We read everything, and we answer questions about the model first.