About Mortgage Ledger — Who Runs It and How It Works

Mortgage Ledger publishes free mortgage calculators and plain-language guides for people who want to understand what a home loan actually costs before they sign for one. There is no account to create, no email gate in front of the results, and no lead form waiting at the end. You enter a loan, and the site shows you the whole thing: the payment, the interest, the schedule, month by month.

Who operates this site

Mortgage Ledger is written, built, and maintained by Dominic Wu, who can be reached at pacificledgerstudio@gmail.com. “Dominic Wu” is a pen name, used consistently across everything published here; the same person writes every article, maintains every calculator, and is accountable for every number on the site. It is not a rotating byline or a stand-in for a content team, and nothing here is published anonymously or under a fabricated title.

The site is independently run. It is not affiliated with, owned by, or compensated by any bank, lender, mortgage broker, or loan-origination service. It does not originate loans, take applications, sell leads, or accept payment for a favorable mention. Mortgage Ledger is also unrelated to mortgageledger.com, a separate mortgage-industry news publication with no connection to this site.

Why the site exists

Most consumer mortgage calculators are marketing. They show you a monthly payment, hide the amortization schedule behind a signup, and hand you to a lender before you have understood a single number. The result is that borrowers arrive at closing knowing their payment but not knowing what the loan costs — that on a $400,000 loan at 6.5% over thirty years, the interest alone comes to roughly $510,000, more than the house.

Mortgage Ledger exists to close that gap. The goal is narrow and unglamorous: show the arithmetic, show the assumptions behind it, and explain what the result does and does not mean, so that the person reading is harder to sell to.

Relevant experience — and its limits

Dominic Wu’s background is in corporate real estate operations: years spent around commercial leases, property financing, and the spreadsheets that sit underneath them. That is where the interest in amortization math comes from, and it is the reason this site treats a loan as a schedule to be worked out rather than a product to be sold.

It is important to be equally clear about what that background is not. Dominic Wu is not a licensed mortgage loan originator, mortgage broker, real estate agent, attorney, CPA, enrolled agent, CFP professional, or registered investment adviser, and holds no license or credential in any of those fields.

What this site can help with: explaining how mortgage arithmetic works, showing what a given set of loan terms produces, defining the vocabulary, walking through the trade-offs in a decision, and pointing you to the primary sources — the CFPB, HUD, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the IRS — that actually govern the rules.

What this site cannot help with: telling you which loan to take, whether to refinance, what you can afford, which lender to use, or how a rule applies to your specific situation. Those are questions for a licensed professional who can see your full financial picture, your credit file, and your actual loan documents. Nothing here is personalized financial, legal, tax, lending, or investment advice, and nothing here creates a professional relationship of any kind.

How the calculators and articles are checked

Every calculator on this site is built from the standard, published formulas rather than from a third-party widget or an embedded script, which means the arithmetic can be audited. The formulas, the compounding and rounding conventions, and the assumptions behind every output are documented in full on the calculation methodology page.

Calculator outputs are checked against independently worked amortization schedules and against the published reference examples used by consumer regulators, so that a payment produced here matches a payment produced by hand.
Rules and thresholds — PMI cancellation, mortgage-insurance duration, escrow, tax treatment — are sourced to the statute, regulation, or agency handbook that actually sets them, not to another blog's summary of it.
Every article is reviewed, fact-checked against those primary sources, and approved by a human before publication, and is re-reviewed on the schedule set out in the editorial policy.

Content on this site is not reviewed by an outside licensed mortgage professional, attorney, CPA, or CFP professional. If that changes, the reviewer will be named on the page they actually reviewed. Mortgage Ledger will not claim a professional review that did not happen.

Errors

If a number here looks wrong, it may well be. Reader corrections are the main way mistakes get found, and they are welcome — report one through the contact page or at pacificledgerstudio@gmail.com. What happens next is set out in the corrections policy: material errors are fixed, disclosed on the page, and dated.

How the site is funded

Mortgage Ledger has no paywall, no subscription, and no affiliate or referral arrangements with lenders. It is intended to be supported by advertising. Mortgage Ledger may use third-party advertising services, including Google AdSense, after approval; no advertising is being served on this site at present. If and when ads do appear, they will be labelled, kept away from the calculator controls, and will never be allowed to determine what the site says. Advertisers have no input into editorial content. See the Privacy Policy for what advertising would mean for your data, and the editorial policy for how conflicts of interest are handled.