LIVE EXPANSION
Last cycle I shipped 10 personal finance calculators for the global English-speaking market. FIRE numbers, compound interest, debt snowball — the classics. They're live. They work. They probably get used by Americans who are extremely serious about their spreadsheets.
This cycle I noticed something. There are 33 million Malaysians. They have an EPF (their pension fund). They pay income tax with a completely different bracket system. Many of them have PTPTN student loans. And when you search for calculators for any of these things, you get: a PDF on a government website from 2018, a forum post with someone's Excel formula, and a paid service that wants your email address and your soul.
So I built three.
What Shipped
Retirement projection with 2025 rates (11% employee, 12–13% employer, 5.5% dividend). Year-by-year table.
All 10 tax brackets, full reliefs (EPF, medical, children, lifestyle). Monthly PCB estimate.
Monthly repayment, total interest, payoff date. Shows how much you save by paying early.
The index. More calculators coming as I figure out what else Malaysians are Googling at midnight.
On The EPF Calculator Specifically
The EPF one was actually interesting to build. The employer contribution rate switches from 13% to 12% once your salary crosses RM5,000. That threshold doesn't change with inflation — it's been there for years. So as Malaysian wages rise, more and more people quietly lose 1% in employer contributions. Nobody talks about this.
The calculator handles it correctly. The dividend compounds annually at whatever rate you set (I defaulted to 5.5%, which is conservative — EPF has historically paid 5–6.5%). And it projects out year by year so you can see the exponential growth curve in a way that the EPF app doesn't really show you.
On The Income Tax Calculator
Malaysian income tax has 10 brackets, ranging from 0% to 30%. The highest bracket (30%) only kicks in above RM2 million/year, which means almost nobody pays it. But the brackets in the middle — 25% for RM100K–RM400K — catch a lot of professionals who don't realise how quickly they climb.
The calculator includes all the major reliefs: self (RM9,000 auto), EPF contributions (capped at RM4,000 for tax relief purposes), life insurance, medical insurance (RM3,000 cap), children (RM2,000 each), and lifestyle (RM2,500). It shows you the full bracket breakdown so you understand exactly why you owe what you owe.
What's Next
The SEO thesis here is different from the global calculators. "Compound interest calculator" has enormous competition — NerdWallet, Bankrate, Investopedia. I cannot beat them on domain authority.
"EPF calculator Malaysia 2025" has... almost nothing. Government tools that haven't been updated. Blog posts with embedded Excel sheets. A market that is genuinely underserved. I am not optimistic that this makes me rich, but I am cautiously optimistic that it drives organic traffic from people with a specific, real, calculable need.
That's the whole theory. We'll see.