The right tool for every season of life.
Life comes at you in seasons — growing up, launching out, building, harvesting. Each season has its own hard problems. This is a map of those seasons, with a practical tool for each problem: free tools that are free forever, and a roadmap of deeper tools being built over time.
See a roadmap tool you need? Tap 🔔 Notify me on its tile — you’ll get one email the day it launches.
These don't belong to one season. They walk the whole road with you.
60-Second Book Insights
Big ideas from great books in 60 seconds — so a busy family covers ground, and kids learn early how much great thinking came before them.
The Learning Loop
Learning to learn, as a tool: pick a target, use evidence-based techniques, run sessions, prove it with a self-test. Retrieval, spacing, interleaving, Feynman.
Book Insights Action System
Highlights die in the app. Spaced action prompts turn what you read into what you do — the missing half of every reading habit.
Grow
Ages 0–18Raising capable kids. Curiosity, confidence from validated performance, humility about how much there is to learn.
Built by a dad of seven, for his own family first. These are the tools running in our house.
Kids Life Skills Tracker
191 real life skills on a six-rung ladder — Help, Participate, Perform, Own, Manage, Teach — with validations, 25 challenges, and an age-18 readiness test.
Money Ladder
Personal finance in seven age-pitched rungs — ages 5, 8, 12, 15, 18, 21, 25+ — with 47 chapters and 245 questions. One file, works offline, nothing tracked.
Kids' Money OS — Bank of Dad
Allowance becomes wages, savings earn real interest, and investing starts with family money. The operating system for raising kids who understand money.
Chore Auction
Nobody wants to clean the bathrooms. Let the kids bid the price up and watch the worst chore become the best-paid one.
Screen-Time Contract Manager
Rules without a negotiated, signed contract collapse in a week. Terms both sides agree to — and can point to.
Family Meeting OS
Agenda, rotating roles, and a decisions log. The operating system that keeps family meetings alive past week three.
Homeschool Transcript Builder
Years of activities and projects become a transcript colleges accept. Built by a homeschool dad.
College Application Tracker
Deadlines, essays, recommendation letters, and cost comparison across every school — in one calm place.
College ROI Calculator
$320k degree vs. earnings premium by major and school, with the debt payoff timeline attached. Decide with numbers.
Teen Driver Cost + Readiness Coach
Insurance quotes, the car fund, and an honest readiness checklist — before the keys change hands.
Launch
Ages 18–25First money, first decisions. First paycheck, first apartment, first time the fine print is yours to read.
Small decisions compound. Getting these right early is worth more than getting them right later.
Interview Prep OS
Question bank, STAR stories, and company research — the prep system that turns interviews into offers.
Health Plan Picker
Your first open enrollment: premium vs. deductible breakeven under low, medium, and high usage. Pick like an actuary.
401(k) Fee X-Ray
A 1% fee looks small and eats six figures over 30 years. See your own number before you pick your funds.
HSA Triple-Tax Optimizer
Pay medical out of pocket now, invest the HSA, reimburse decades later — with a receipt vault so it actually works.
Subscription Audit
The average person bleeds thousands a year on forgotten subscriptions. The audit plus the cancel scripts, in one sitting.
Buy vs. Lease vs. Keep
Three spreadsheet tabs of conflicting math, resolved. The real answer to the car question, with your numbers.
Moving Cost Estimator
Quotes vs. DIY vs. pods, with weight-based math instead of vibes. For the first of many moves.
Side-Income Tax Planner
Quarterly estimates for 1099 income, so April has no surprises. Freelance, creator, gig — covered.
Wedding Budget Forecaster
Per-guest cost modeling before the deposits lock you in. The most expensive party you'll ever throw, planned.
Protein Meal Planner
Hit your protein target without the $400/week grocery bill. Budget-first meal math for lifters.
Strength Tracker
What plates, what progression, when to deload — the program that runs itself while you lift.
Race Time Predictor
Your current mile becomes a predicted 5K becomes exact training paces. Train at the right effort, every run.
Decision Journal
Log decisions and predictions, review what you actually knew. The habit that compounds judgment.
Build
Ages 25–50Compound everything. Career, family, wealth — the decades where the big decisions stack up fastest.
This is where the most expensive mistakes hide: equity left on the table, fees compounding against you, purchases made on vibes.
Compounding Calculator
Month-by-month growth projections with safe-withdrawal modeling — 4%, 3.5%, 3% — and real tax math. Watch the curve bend.
Equity Cliff Planner
RSU vest schedules are spreadsheets of anxiety. Answer "what do I lose if I leave in March?" and "what does life after the cliff look like?"
Offer Letter Comparator
Two offers, different base, bonus, RSUs, refreshers, state taxes — compared honestly over four years.
ISO/NSO Exercise Decider
Exercising startup options can trigger an AMT bomb you discover at tax time. Model it before you exercise.
Concentrated Stock Exit Planner
80% of your net worth in one stock and no staged, tax-smart exit plan. Build the ladder out.
Layoff Runway Planner
Severance plus COBRA plus cash flow, modeled month by month. The output: the date by which you need the next thing.
Promotion Case Builder
A year's scattered evidence becomes a narrative becomes the ask. Promotion packets that write themselves — almost.
Consulting Rate Setter
Salary becomes billable rate with utilization, taxes, benefits load, and bench time. Know your number before the first call.
Rental Deal Analyzer
Listing price lies. True cash flow needs closing costs, vacancy, and capex reserves in one honest number.
Tax-Loss Harvest Tracker
Harvest losses without tripping wash sales across brokerages. The robo-advisor feature, without the robo-advisor fee.
Roth Conversion Ladder Planner
Which years, how much to convert — filling tax brackets without tipping into higher ones.
Wheel Strategy Tracker
Covered-call and put premium income across positions, with assignment scenarios and true return on capital.
FIRE Pro
The free calculator answers "what if 7%." Pro answers "what if I'm wrong" — Monte Carlo bands plus real tax modeling.
True Car Cost Comparator
Purchase price is 60% of the story. Insurance, depreciation, fuel, repairs over five years — that's the decision.
Used Laptop Deal Scorer
Is this listing actually a deal? Spec-adjusted fair value against sold comps, before you click Buy It Now.
eBay Fair-Value Checker
Sold-for data exists; nobody normalizes for condition, specs, and outliers before bidding. Now someone does.
Contractor Bid Comparator
Three bids, three formats, no line items in common. Normalized into one format so the bids can fight fairly.
Family Emergency Binder
If something happened to you tomorrow, could your family find everything? Accounts, contacts, documents — one binder.
Home Maintenance Scheduler
Roofs, HVAC, and water heaters fail on their own schedule. The reserve fund should exist before they do.
Relocation Analyzer
Salary, state tax, housing, and cost of living in one honest comparison. A $20k decision, made on numbers.
Pet Lifetime Cost Planner
Breed plus insurance plus vet plus food over 12–15 years — before the puppy eyes win the negotiation.
SMB Reorder Point Calculator
Small businesses reorder by gut and pay for it in stockouts. Demand variability in, reorder points out.
Landed Cost Calculator
Product plus freight plus duty plus fees equals the true unit cost nobody computes before pricing.
Supplier Scorecard
Supplier choice runs on relationships. Weighted on-time, quality, and cost scoring makes it a decision.
Dead Stock Detector
Aging inventory and the markdown math that turns it back into cash. Liquidation is a 50%-off business; avoid it.
PO Tracker for Tiny Ops
Open orders, expected dates, follow-ups — the spreadsheet that outgrew itself, replaced by the tool that won't.
Safety Stock Simulator
Monte Carlo stockouts vs. carrying cost, so the buffer is a number instead of a hope.
Freight Quote Comparator
Per-unit freight across modes and quotes, normalized. Brokers take margin on opacity; this is the antidote.
Harvest
Ages 50+Protect it and pass it on. Turn wealth into freedom, keep the machine running, make the transfer clean.
The work of decades, defended. Several Build-season tools reach peak relevance here — marked where they also live.
Estate Checklist Builder
Will, beneficiaries, guardians, accounts — the checklist that turns years of avoidance into one organized afternoon.
Roth Conversion Ladder Planner
The gap years between work and required distributions: convert bracket by bracket, keep more of what's yours.
FIRE Pro
Decumulation with real taxes and Monte Carlo bands. The plan that got you here, now running in reverse.
Tax-Loss Harvest Tracker
Harvest losses without tripping wash sales. In the harvest years, every basis point kept is a basis point earned.
Home Maintenance Scheduler
Aging in place, funded in advance. The reserve fund keeps the house you love from becoming the house that owns you.
Health Plan Picker
Open enrollment returns at Medicare age — higher stakes, worse fine print. Same breakeven math, new variables.
I started Build Useful Things for one reason: raising capable kids — and putting together the tools, the resources, and the insights on how to do that. The journey grew from there: the same kid who needs a skills tracker at 8 needs a Roth conversion planner at 58. The seasons change; the job doesn't — stay curious, earn your confidence, keep learning.
Three rules. Everything on this site follows them.
- 01
No hype. Every tool does the thing it says it does, on the day you open it. Roadmap items say "roadmap" — not "coming soon!!"
- 02
No gatekeeping. Capability belongs to the person using it. Free tools: no accounts, no tracking, no lock-in.
- 03
Built to be used. No software that exists to justify its own existence. If it doesn't make someone more capable, it doesn't ship.
Find your season. Solve the problem.
Start with a free tool today. The roadmap is being built slowly — one tool at a time, each priced next to it like everything else.