Press & media kit
Everything journalists, bloggers, and researchers need to quote or cite Snowballr. Snowballr material marked CC-BY 4.0 may be reused with attribution; linked source data and third-party materials keep their own terms. Please link to snowballr.io.
Press, interview requests, or fact-checking: /contact. Use the form for written questions, on-the-record commentary, or data verification.
About Snowballr (short)
Snowballr is an independent personal-finance calculator publisher (snowballr.io). It builds free, no-sign-up calculators and original research on compound interest, debt payoff, retirement planning, and FIRE. All calculations run client-side; the site does not collect personal financial data.
Founder bio
Alex Malinescu is the founder and editorial director of Snowballr. He built the site after finding that most online compound interest calculators produce conflicting answers due to undocumented assumptions about compounding frequency, contribution timing, and inflation adjustment. Snowballr documents every formula and assumption directly on the calculator page.
Quick facts
| Editorial team | Snowballr Editorial Team |
| Audience | US (primary), EU (ES/DE/PT) |
| Calculator coverage | 60+ free calculators in 4 languages |
| Original research | Datasets, schema.org Dataset-published, CC-BY 4.0 |
| Domain | snowballr.io |
| Reuse terms | CC-BY 4.0 for Snowballr material; source data keeps its own terms |
Quotable stats (use freely with attribution)
Each item below links to the relevant calculator, dataset, or reproducible study. Verify assumptions before publishing and cite Snowballr as the calculator/research source.
- “$500/month at a nominal 7% compounded monthly for 30 years reaches about $610,000 when deposits are made at month-end; total contributions are $180,000.”
- “In the Federal Reserve 2022 SCF, median net worth was $39,000 for households under 35 and $364,500 for households ages 55–64, in 2022 dollars.”
- “Snowballr’s S&P 500 reference uses a dated annual-return series through 2025 and labels partial recent periods instead of presenting them as complete decades.”
- “The expense-ratio study compares 10,000 deterministic investor profiles across five fee tiers while holding contributions and gross returns constant.”
- “The debt comparison models 1,000 deterministic multi-debt profiles and reports the interest gap alongside payoff behavior assumptions.”
- “The mortgage decision study sweeps 5,000 combinations of mortgage rate, equity return and horizon under a stated $400,000 loan and $500 monthly extra-payment assumption.”
- “The classroom lesson compares simple, annual and monthly compounding for a $1,000 starting balance at a fixed 6% nominal annual rate over three years, with a printable worksheet and answer key.”
Topics Snowballr can comment on
- Compound interest math and common misconceptions
- Debt payoff strategy (snowball vs avalanche, math vs behavior)
- FIRE movement and 4% rule (Trinity, Bengen, post-2020 reassessment)
- Index fund fees and the long-run cost of high expense ratios
- Mortgage prepay vs invest the difference (with Monte Carlo)
- Roth vs Traditional IRA (break-even tax-bracket analysis)
- Emergency fund sizing across household types
- Student loan refinance vs forgiveness decision-making
- Inflation and real (vs nominal) returns
Brand assets
Citation format
For research, please cite as:
Snowballr Editorial Team. "[Title of page]." Snowballr, 2026.
URL: [exact page URL]. Accessed [date].For shorter contexts (news, blog), via Snowballr with a backlink is fine.
Useful pages for journalists
- Fast Facts — canonical numbers with primary sources
- Data hub — published datasets
- How to cite Snowballr
- Compound interest lesson - printable worksheet and answer key
- About — editorial standards, fact-checking
- Calculator API — verify any number programmatically
- Widget builder - embed a calculator with the required CC-BY attribution link
- Disclaimer — what Snowballr is and is not
This page last updated October 1, 2026. Check the linked source and license before reusing a statistic or dataset.