The Living Expense Calculator was a custom WordPress plugin developed for a retirement community client, completed while consulting with the LevLane team. The plugin served a specific conversion purpose — helping prospective residents understand the financial comparison between their current living expenses and the costs associated with living at the retirement community.
The plugin implemented a five-step wizard interface that walked users through the expense calculation process incrementally. Step-based form wizards reduce the perceived burden of providing information by breaking it into smaller, sequential stages rather than presenting a long single-page form. Each step collected specific expense data — housing costs, utilities, transportation, and other regular expenses — relevant to building a comparison calculation.
At the end of the wizard process, the plugin calculated and displayed a comparison between the user's current expenses and the projected costs at the retirement community. Results were emailed to the address the user provided in the final step of the form. This dual output — an on-screen result and an email follow-up — serves both the user's immediate informational need and the retirement community's lead generation goal, as the email collection at the final step captures contact information for a prospect who has already demonstrated meaningful engagement by completing the full wizard.
The plugin was built as a self-contained WordPress plugin rather than hard-coded into a theme, making it portable and installable across the retirement community sites in the LevLane portfolio where the same lead generation tool was relevant.
