Sarah Klein, CFP

Fifteen years translating mortgage tables and amortization schedules into decisions that actually help real borrowers.

Sarah Klein is a Certified Financial Planner based in Chicago with fifteen years of experience helping individuals navigate the mechanics of borrowing, from evaluating first mortgages to structuring multi-debt payoff plans. At Lakefront Wealth Advisors, she works primarily with middle-income households confronting concrete lending decisions: whether to refinance at a new rate, how aggressively to pay down student loans before investing, and what a given APR actually costs over the life of a car note. Her earlier tenure at Midwest Community Credit Union gave her direct exposure to the underwriting side of consumer lending, which sharpened her understanding of how lenders price risk and where standard calculator assumptions can mislead borrowers.

Klein holds an M.S. in Personal Financial Planning from Kansas State University, one of the field's most respected graduate programs, and completed her CFP certification in 2010. She is also an Accredited Financial Counselor, a credential that reflects her focus on behavioral and situational factors, not just spreadsheet math, in financial decision-making. She has advised on loan structures for clients across a wide income spectrum and has presented on mortgage literacy at Chicago-area credit union member workshops and Illinois FPA chapter events.

At OnlyCalculators, Klein authors and reviews tools covering loans, mortgages, debt payoff, and credit. She stress-tests each calculator against real loan disclosure documents and standard actuarial formulas, flags edge cases such as mid-cycle extra payments or irregular compounding periods, and rewrites explanatory copy whenever a result could be misread by someone without a finance background. Her goal is that every number a user sees can be traced back to the same arithmetic a bank's back office would produce.