About Jere Salmisto

Founder of CalcFi — free personal finance calculators built on primary-source data from the Federal Reserve, BLS, IRS, BEA, US Treasury, and Freddie Mac. Based in Helsinki, Finland.

Who is Jere Salmisto?

I'm Jere Salmisto — founder of CalcFi, an independent personal-finance calculator platform that makes the math behind every financial decision free, transparent, and citable. I'm based in Helsinki, Finland. I speak Finnish natively and English at working level. I hold a Bachelor's degree from Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK) and have spent more than a decade in B2B sales, operations, and product roles across Nordic industrial companies. Before founding CalcFi I was CEO of Topair Nordic Oy (industrial sales and operations, Finland, 2019–2022). The combination of operator background and a habit of pulling numbers from primary sources before trusting them shapes how I write about money on the internet.

The version of me you'll find quoted in NTD News, TechBullion, Financial Independence Hub, CFO Drive, and a growing list of finance publications writes about consumer finance with three rules: (1) name the number, (2) cite the primary source (IRS publication number, FRED series ID, BLS table name, or Freddie Mac PMMS week), and (3) show the formula. If you can't reproduce the answer by hand from the cited source, the answer doesn't ship.

CalcFi is the operating consequence of those three rules. Three hundred-plus free calculators, every formula traced to a federal publication, every dataset mirrored to a permanent DOI. No paid tier. No "premium." No "expert reviewed by [unrelated credential holder]" badges. Just the math, cited, free, forever.

Origin story — why CalcFi exists

The origin of CalcFi isn't a tidy founder mythology. It's an accumulation of small frustrations over years of watching the personal-finance industry sell complexity as expertise.

Spend any time in B2B sales and you learn the same lesson at three different price points: the customer is paying primarily for the explanation, not the product. A 3% AUM fee, a $300 tax-prep bill, a $40/mo "premium calculator" subscription, a $19 "buy my budgeting course" upsell — most of what consumers pay for in personal finance is somebody else's interpretation of arithmetic that is already free and already public.

The math is public because the inputs are public. The IRS publishes every withholding table in Publication 15 and every inflation-adjusted bracket in the annual revenue procedure. The Federal Reserve publishes every interest rate series via FRED. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes Consumer Price Index every month at bls.gov. The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes Personal Consumption Expenditures inflation at bea.gov. The US Treasury publishes daily yield curve rates. Freddie Mac publishes the Primary Mortgage Market Survey weekly at freddiemac.com/pmms. The World Bank publishes GDP and exchange rate history at data.worldbank.org. None of this costs anything. None of this is hidden. The formulas that combine these inputs into your tax bracket, your monthly mortgage payment, your retirement projection, or your real wage growth are high-school algebra. There is no proprietary edge.

And yet — Google "mortgage calculator," "tax bracket calculator," or "retirement calculator," and the top results are either freemium upsells, ad-saturated link-bait, or thinly-disguised lead generators for mortgage brokers, tax-prep services, and financial advisors. The math is free; the user experience around the math has been monetized to within an inch of its life.

CalcFi was built as the opposite of that pattern. Three commitments form the spine of the project:

1. Every formula traces to a primary source. If a calculator computes a federal tax bracket, the page cites the IRS revenue procedure number. If a mortgage calculator uses an interest rate, it pulls from FRED's MORTGAGE30US series. If an inflation calculator quotes CPI, it cites the BLS table number.
2. The math is reproducible by hand. Every page shows the formula. Not a black box. If the page says "your federal effective rate is 14.2%," you can take a calculator and reach the same number from the same gross income.
3. The data is free, forever, with a permanent identifier. The 34 time series powering CalcFi calculators are published as a CC BY 4.0 dataset with five permanent DOIs (Figshare, Zenodo, OSF, Kaggle, Mendeley). Anyone can use them, in any product, commercial or noncommercial, with attribution.

That's why CalcFi exists. Not as a startup pitch. As a working answer to the question: what would a personal-finance website look like if it took primary-source citations as seriously as Wikipedia does, refused to charge for math, and treated the user as an adult capable of reading a formula?

Earlier career — sales, operations, and the math gap

Before CalcFi I spent roughly a decade in B2B sales, commercial leadership, and operations across multiple Nordic companies. Most recently I was CEO of Topair Nordic Oy, an industrial sales and operations company based in Finland, from 2019 through 2022. That role and the ones before it shaped my view of the personal-finance industry in three durable ways.

Sales taught me what a fee actually is. Every fee structure in a business-to-business contract is a story about who is doing the work, who is taking the risk, and who is capturing the surplus. When you write commercial contracts, you stop being mystified by AUM fees and percentage commissions. They are pricing. They are not magic. And they are usually a markup on labor whose actual cost can be itemized.

Operations taught me where complexity hides. Industrial sales is a domain where the difference between a profitable quarter and a loss is measured in basis points, throughput cycles, and inventory carry. You learn to read a P&L. You learn that the things presented as "complex" — yield variance, labor absorption, working-capital management — are largely arithmetic dressed in jargon.

Tax-prep convinced me consumer finance is broken. Filing taxes in a system with two tax jurisdictions (Finnish personal, Estonian corporate prior to consolidation) means dealing with multiple national tax agencies, accountants charging consultant rates, and tax software charging subscription fees for math the agencies themselves publish. The IRS publishes Publication 15. HMRC publishes its equivalent. The Finnish Tax Administration publishes its full schedule. Three jurisdictions, three publications, free downloads, every page identical to what professionals will quote you for $300. The information is identical. The professional adds explanation. The explanation is what costs money.

If you stack those three lessons, you arrive at CalcFi: build calculators that explain, cite, and reproduce the math the agencies have already published. Charge nothing. Cite everything. The thesis writes itself.

What I write about

Topics I cover regularly across CalcFi's blog, in Featured.com expert commentary, and in syndicated press placements:

Personal finance math

• Mortgage amortization — formula P × [r(1+r)^n] / [(1+r)^n − 1] with worked examples by rate and term
• Paycheck math — gross-to-net for all 50 US states, Social Security and Medicare withholding, federal brackets
• Tax brackets — marginal vs effective rate, why most people overestimate their tax by 30-40%
• Compound interest — FV = PMT × [(1+r)^n − 1] / r, decade-by-decade breakdown of why starting at 25 vs 35 matters more than almost any single investment decision
• Debt payoff — avalanche vs snowball, why minimums-only stretch a $5,000 card to 30 years
• Retirement planning — safe withdrawal rate, coast FIRE, lean FIRE, barista FIRE math
• Real estate math — rent vs buy break-even, PITI breakdown, PMI cancellation at 78/80 LTV

Macro indicators and primary-source data

• Yield curve recession indicator — the 2s10s spread from FRED T10Y2Y
• CPI vs PCE inflation — why the Fed targets PCE, not CPI, and how the two diverge structurally
• Federal Funds cycle — the policy rate as the price of every other rate in the economy
• Freddie Mac PMMS mortgage rates — weekly survey methodology, how the 30Y average is computed
• Hourly earnings growth vs inflation — real wage progression from BLS
• Treasury yield curve — daily snapshots and historical mortgage-spread analysis
• Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) deflator from BEA

Open financial data + citation methodology

• Why personal finance content needs primary-source citations (and why "Expert Reviewed" badges aren't enough)
• How to publish a CC BY 4.0 dataset with permanent DOIs across Figshare, Zenodo, OSF, Kaggle, and Mendeley
• FAIR data principles applied to consumer finance (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable)
• Why Wikipedia-style transparent provenance beats fabricated expertise

AI and personal finance

• What budgeting apps with AI can realistically automate (categorization, anomaly flags, recurring-charge detection)
• Where AI fails in personal finance (tradeoff judgment, values calls, hallucinated categorization of one-off transactions)
• Why AI cannot replace budgeting itself — budgeting is allocation of future dollars, not categorization of past spending
• Security model for OAuth-based data aggregators (Plaid, MX, Finicity) under the CFPB Section 1033 rule (12 CFR Part 1033, effective January 2025)

Tax-strategy and government data

• Donor-advised fund vs private foundation math — when each makes sense (the $1-2M threshold)
• Robot tax and FICA depletion — the 2025 SSA Trustees Report projects OASI depletion in 2033 at 77% of scheduled benefits
• Standard deduction strategy — the OBBBA non-itemizer charitable deduction and DAF exclusion
• Marginal vs effective tax rate education
• ICHRAs and individual coverage HRAs under IRS Notice 2019-49

Press placements and published commentary

Selection of publications where I've been quoted, cited, or contributed expert commentary on personal finance, fintech, and consumer-finance topics:

• NTD News — Social Security real-spending-power math
• TechBullion — live data feeds, multi-entity consolidation
• Financial Independence Hub — ETF allocation strategy
• Freeduhm — fintech SaaS regulatory navigation
• Marketer Magazine — calculator-page conversion design
• CFO Drive — finance team resilience playbooks
• The Business Navigator — salary thresholds and paycheck math

Each placement is linked to a live URL. If you're a journalist looking for sourced commentary on a personal-finance topic, the easiest path is the email below.

The calculator above is live. It pulls from CalcFi's open dataset. Change the inputs, watch the numbers update, see the formula referenced. That's the model: explain the math, cite the source, never charge for it.

Research output and citable identifiers

Research outputs I maintain are deliberately durable — every dataset and methodology paper carries a DOI so the work is citable, indexable in scholarly databases, and preserved beyond the lifespan of any single platform.

• ORCID: 0009-0000-0916-8684 (Open Researcher and Contributor ID)
• Figshare DOI (primary): 10.6084/m9.figshare.32332290 — CalcFi Open Data: 34 free CC-BY financial and macroeconomic time series mirrored from primary sources
• Zenodo DOI (CERN-operated): 10.5281/zenodo.20302283
• OSF DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/PUMKT
• Kaggle DOI: 10.34740/kaggle/dsv/16356447
• Mendeley Data DOI: 10.17632/jsnwhy6vjn.1
• SSRN methodology paper (under review, 2026): citation transparency in consumer-finance calculator platforms

Software I maintain (all CC-BY data / MIT code):

• Python: calcfidata on PyPI · jeresalmisto/calcfidata on Anaconda · API docs at Read the Docs
• JavaScript / Node: calcfidata on npm
• Go: pkg.go.dev/gitlab.com/jere.salmisto/calcfi-open-data/go
• Julia: CalcFiData.jl
• dbt: dbt-calcfi-open-data

The transparency thesis

The argument I'm trying to make with CalcFi — and the reason I'd rather host long-form essays on a static GitLab Pages mirror than gate them behind a Substack paywall — is that consumer finance has a structural credibility problem that no amount of "Expert Reviewed by [CFP]" badges can solve.

Here's the issue: credentials don't validate math, primary sources do.

If a calculator says your 30-year fixed mortgage payment on a $400,000 loan at 6.5% is $2,528.27, the credibility of that number doesn't come from whether a CFP reviewed it. It comes from whether the formula matches the standard amortization formula, whether the interest rate matches the Freddie Mac PMMS weekly survey for the relevant week, and whether you can take a pencil and reproduce the answer. A Certified Financial Planner's signature adds nothing to that chain. The CFP could be wrong. The CFP could be reviewing for a different question. The CFP's signature is a brand badge, not a proof.

This is why CalcFi cites primary sources rather than expert reviewers. The page links to IRS Publication 15, to the FRED series, to the BLS table, to the BEA release. If the number is wrong, you can audit it yourself. If the number is right, you don't need a third party to vouch for it.

The credential model serves a useful purpose in domains where the practitioner adds irreducible judgment (medicine, law, structural engineering). In personal-finance arithmetic — where the math is undergraduate-level and the primary sources are free — credentials function mostly as a barrier to entry, a brand badge, and an implicit referral path to the gatekeeper's preferred product. CalcFi's bet is that a tightly-cited, transparent calculator is more trustworthy than a calculator wrapped in a CFP badge whose math is opaque.

This thesis isn't a moral claim. It's a structural one. The math is reproducible. The data is public. Charge nothing for the arithmetic; cite the source; let the user check the work. That's the whole project.

Above: a federal tax-bracket calculator that cites IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32 for the projected 2026 brackets. Change the income, watch both marginal and effective rates compute live. The formula is visible. The source is linked. The "Expert Reviewed" badge is conspicuously absent — because the cited primary source does the work the badge pretends to do.

What is CalcFi?

CalcFi is the operating outcome of the transparency thesis. The site at calcfi.app hosts more than 300 free personal-finance calculators across tax, mortgage, retirement, paycheck, debt, real-estate, investing, and small-business categories. Every calculator's underlying formula is cited to a primary source. Every dataset is published as open data with a permanent DOI. The site is entirely free; there is no paid tier, no premium upsell, no email gate for the calculators themselves.

The data layer powering CalcFi is the CalcFi Open Data project — 34 financial and macroeconomic time series sourced verbatim from FRED, BLS, BEA, US Treasury, Freddie Mac, the World Bank, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and the EIA. The dataset contains 117,956 observations covering roughly 1947 through 2026 depending on series. It is distributed under CC BY 4.0 and mirrored across eight static landing pages, twelve package registries, five DOI registrars, ten interactive HuggingFace Spaces, three Streamlit dashboards, three Observable notebooks, six CodePen demos, and one Tableau Public dashboard. See the CalcFi organization page for the full distribution mesh.

The combination of cited calculators + open dataset + permanent identifiers is unusual in personal finance because none of those three components is independently expensive — but stacking them together produces a structurally different product than what the freemium personal-finance category usually ships. CalcFi calculators are not "the same calculator with citations bolted on." They are calculators where the citation is the product — the reason you'd trust the number.

Contact and bio variants for press

Short bio (50 words)

Jere Salmisto is the founder of CalcFi, a free personal-finance calculator platform where every formula traces to a primary source. Helsinki-based, available for commentary on consumer finance math, open data, and personal-finance tooling. ORCID 0009-0000-0916-8684.

Medium bio (120 words)

Jere Salmisto is the founder of CalcFi, an independent personal-finance calculator platform built on primary-source data from FRED, BLS, IRS, BEA, US Treasury, Freddie Mac, and the World Bank. The site hosts 300+ free calculators with every formula cited to a federal publication, plus a CC BY 4.0 open dataset of 34 financial time series across five DOI registrars. Before CalcFi, Jere was CEO of Topair Nordic Oy (industrial sales and operations, Finland, 2019–2022) and led B2B commercial execution across multiple Nordic companies. Based in Helsinki, Finland. Bachelor's from Tampere University of Applied Sciences. Available for commentary on consumer finance, mortgage and tax math, retirement planning, and the politics of financial data transparency.

Long bio (250 words)

Jere Salmisto is the Helsinki-based founder of CalcFi, an independent personal-finance calculator platform where every formula traces to a primary public source — IRS publications, Federal Reserve series, Treasury yield tables, Bureau of Labor Statistics tables, Bureau of Economic Analysis releases, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau guidance, and the World Bank. The site at calcfi.app hosts more than 300 free calculators across tax, mortgage, retirement, paycheck, debt, real estate, investing, and small-business categories. None of them charge. None of them carry "expert reviewed by" badges. All of them show the math and link the source. Before CalcFi, Jere was CEO of Topair Nordic Oy (industrial sales and operations, Finland, 2019–2022), led commercial execution at multiple Nordic companies, and accumulated more than a decade of operator experience in B2B sales and operations. He holds a Bachelor's degree from Tampere University of Applied Sciences. His operator background shapes how he writes about personal finance: numbers must reproduce by hand, sources are cited on the page, and tools are free forever. Jere also publishes the CalcFi Open Data dataset (CC BY 4.0, 34 series, 117,956 observations) across five permanent DOI registrars and 38 distinct distribution surfaces. He is available for commentary on consumer finance math, paycheck/tax/mortgage arithmetic, retirement planning, the financial-data publishing landscape, FAIR open-data principles, and the structural argument for transparency over credential-gated expertise in personal-finance content. ORCID 0009-0000-0916-8684. Languages: Finnish (native), English (working).

Contact

Email via the CalcFi about page — the contact route there reaches Jere directly. For data-licensing or research-collaboration inquiries, please include "research" in the subject line. Featured.com / HARO / Connectively / Qwoted journalists are welcome and typically receive a same-day response.

Press kit

Headshot, logo, and screenshots available at calcfi.app/press. Suggested attribution: "Jere Salmisto, founder of CalcFi." Photo credit when applicable: courtesy of the subject.

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