About FinanceToolz

FinanceToolz is built and maintained by Alexandre Bernier, LLM (UK), CFP®, CIM®, PFP®. I am a financial planner with 18 years in banking and wealth management. I hold a master of laws from a UK university, and the CFP®, CIM® and PFP® designations, which are Canadian.

That combination is the reason this site is British rather than generic. UK tax rules are full of traps that a general-purpose calculator gets wrong: the 60% effective band between £100,000 and £125,140 that no one legislated on purpose, five student loan plans with different thresholds and interest rules, Scottish income tax running on six rates and its own Budget timetable, a stamp duty regime that has changed repeatedly. Legal training means going to the statute and HMRC's own guidance and building the calculator from that, instead of copying another website's summary.

Every calculator and article here is written and reviewed by me. There is no anonymous "team of experts": one named person is accountable for the numbers, and my credentials can be checked independently in the public registries linked from my author page. To be explicit, those planning designations are Canadian and are not UK regulatory authorisations, which is why nothing on this site is regulated advice.

Every rate, threshold and allowance used on this site comes from a primary official source: HMRC, GOV.UK, the Scottish Government, Revenue Scotland, the Welsh Revenue Authority, DWP, the Bank of England or the FCA. Each calculator lists the exact pages it relies on in a Sources section at the foot of the page, so you can check any figure in one click.

All UK tax constants live in a single dated configuration file, with the source URL beside each value. That matters more than it sounds: it is what stops a rate being updated in the calculation and missed in the surrounding copy, which is precisely how an expired stamp duty threshold once survived on this site longer than it should have. Every calculation is also covered by an automated regression test, and when a bug is found a test for that specific defect is added so it cannot come back unnoticed.

Rates are reviewed every April, on Budget day, in September when student loan interest resets, and after each Scottish Budget. The full process is set out in the editorial policy.

Currently applying 2026/27 rates. Last full review: August 2026.