About CarVerdict

What it does

Tell it what you earn, what you already owe, where you live and roughly where your credit sits, and it works out the most car your income actually supports. Not the loan payment. The whole monthly cost: payment, insurance, fuel or charging, maintenance, and the licensing you forget about until the sticker arrives.

Then it says something about it. Under ten percent of your gross income is easy. Past fifteen it starts squeezing the rest of your life, and it says that out loud rather than letting a green button imply otherwise.

It also shows the two things car calculators leave out. How long you would owe more than the car is worth, month by month. And what the payment costs you in mortgage approval, which for anybody thinking about a house is often the most expensive part of the decision.

Why Ontario first

Because insurance is usually the biggest variable in the whole number, and it is provincial. The same driver in the same car pays wildly different premiums across Canada, and Ontario is the extreme: premiums here are among the highest in the country and they swing hard between cities. A calculator that ignores that is not estimating, it is guessing.

Ontario also has tax rules that catch people out. On a private sale the province charges thirteen percent on the higher of what you paid or what the car is booked at, so a cheap deal can be taxed like an expensive one. That rule is in the arithmetic here rather than in a footnote.

Today the insurance estimate covers 25 Ontario cities, because those are the ones there is a sourced premium figure for. More cities and more provinces arrive when the data does, not before.

How it works, briefly

Every number comes from a dated figure with a source you can open, all of them listed on the assumptions page, and each result shows exactly which ones it used. Where sources disagree we publish no number at all rather than pick a side, which is set out in the editorial policy.

Your answers live in the page address, which means a result is a link you can send to someone, and it means every figure is really on the page rather than assembled by a script after it loads.

What it will not do

• Ask for your name, your email or your phone number. There is no account and no sign-up.
• Run a credit check, or talk to a credit bureau. The credit question is your own estimate and it never leaves the range you picked.
• Sell what you type. See privacy for what is recorded, which is an anonymous banded count and nothing else.
• Tell you a single flattering number where the honest answer is a range.
• Pretend to be advice. It is an estimate, and the figures that count are the ones a lender, an insurer or a dealer puts in writing.

Who is behind it

Mike Hamata built it. Nobody pays for it and nobody advertises on it, which is set out on how we make money.

If a number looks wrong, if a city is missing, or if the thing you needed to know was not on the page: hamata.mike@gmail.com. That is the whole feedback process.