Willem De Beer
I build and maintain My Tax Freedom Day — the tax engine, the calculators and the guides. Everything here is one person's work, so there is one person to hold responsible for it.
Who I am, and what I'm not
I'm a software developer. I am not an accountant, a tax adviser, or a financial planner, and nothing on this site is personal advice. I want that stated plainly at the top rather than buried in a disclaimer, because on a subject like tax it changes how you should read everything else here.
What I do bring is the thing this site is actually built on: the tax engine behind every calculator is mine — I build it, maintain it, and I am the one who gets it wrong when it is wrong. It models personal income tax and social contributions for 14 countries — including US state taxes, Canadian provincial rates, Scotland's separate bands, the UK's personal-allowance taper, Australia's Medicare levy and HELP repayments, and India's Section 87A rebate. That engine is the reason the numbers here are worth anything, and it is the part of this project I can genuinely stand behind.
Why this site exists
It started with a simple irritation: tax is one of the largest expenses in most people's lives, and it is described in language that makes it easy to ignore — percentages, brackets, thresholds, acronyms. Almost nobody knows their own effective tax rate. Most people can't say what a raise actually costs them at the margin.
A percentage is easy to ignore. A date is not. Turning an effective tax rate into a day on the calendar — the day you stop working for the government and start working for yourself — made the number mean something to me, and building the tools to compute it properly turned out to be a genuinely interesting engineering problem.
How I try to earn your trust
Since I have no professional credential to point at, the only thing I can offer is verifiability. That means:
- The numbers in the articles come from the same engine as the calculators. They are generated from it, not typed in alongside it, and an automated check fails the build if any published figure disagrees with what the engine computes. This exists because it once went wrong: hand-written figures drifted out of sync after the engine was improved, and some articles were wrong for a period. That was my mistake, and the check is how I stop it recurring.
- I publish the parameters, not just the answers. Where a bracket, threshold, credit or levy rate drives a result, the intention is to show it, with a link to the authority that publishes it, so you can check my work rather than take it on faith.
- I say what the tools don't model. Consumption taxes, property taxes and most personal circumstances are outside these calculators. Pretending otherwise would make the output look more authoritative and be less true.
- Corrections are welcome and acted on. If a figure here is wrong, I would rather hear it from you than leave it standing.
How this site is paid for
Advertising, and nothing else. There are no affiliate links, no sponsored placements, no lead generation, and nothing here is written to steer you toward a product. Nobody pays for coverage, because there is no coverage to buy — the site recommends no financial products at all.
Get in touch
Corrections, questions and suggestions are all genuinely welcome — reader corrections are how errors get caught. The contact page is the way to reach me. If you are reporting a wrong figure, telling me the country and the income you entered makes it much faster to reproduce.