About Check The Damage
An independent Irish mortgage calculator and information project built to make mortgage numbers easier to understand before you speak to a lender.
What Check The Damage is
Check The Damage brings together mortgage calculators, worked examples and plain-English guides covering borrowing, affordability, repayments, first-time buying, switching and existing mortgages. The aim is practical: help a reader understand the numbers, identify the questions they should ask, and see how changing an assumption changes the result.
The site is not a lender, mortgage broker or financial adviser. It does not arrange mortgages, make lending decisions or provide personalised financial advice.
Why trust the information?
The site separates three things that are often confused:
- Official rules: regulatory and tax information is checked against primary Irish sources where possible.
- Mathematics: repayment and overpayment figures are calculated from the inputs and assumptions shown on the page.
- Real-world lending: lender criteria, affordability assessments, product availability and approval decisions are treated as separate from the calculator estimate.
That distinction matters because a mathematical result can be correct while still being unsuitable as a prediction of what a particular lender will approve.
How research is done
For Irish mortgage rules, the preferred source is the Central Bank of Ireland. For property tax information, the preferred source is Revenue. Consumer-process guidance is checked against the CCPC where relevant.
When a source is time-sensitive, the page should state the relevant date. Published lender rates are treated as snapshots rather than permanent facts, and illustrative rates are clearly labelled as illustrations.
How the calculators work
What the site does not know
A calculator cannot see a lender's internal affordability model, credit assessment, underwriting rules, product eligibility, employment assessment or current offer. It also cannot know the exact legal, valuation, insurance or household costs that will apply to an individual transaction.
For that reason, the site's figures are deliberately described as estimates, illustrations or planning figures. They should be checked against the lender and official source before a financial decision is made.
Updates and corrections
Mortgage rules, tax rates, lender products and market rates change. Important pages are reviewed when a material assumption changes, and pages include review dates where appropriate. If an error is identified, the relevant calculation or explanation should be corrected rather than silently relying on an outdated figure.
The site's sources page records the main official references used across the project, while the methodology page explains how those references feed into calculations.
Start with the numbers, then verify them
The most useful workflow is to use a calculator for a scenario, read the relevant guide to understand the assumptions, and then confirm the current position with the lender or official authority. This site is intended to make that process easier, not replace it.