Prospective first-time home buyers are gaining a new personal finance tool today.

Homebuyer Decision Engine, the name of the product launched today by SmartAsset, gives prospective homeowners personalized loan recommendations and information, Michael Carvin, chief executive and founder tells Bank Innovation. The idea of the tool is to let prospective homeowners know what they can afford and why.

The platform works like this: Consumers are asked a series of questions about themselves, such as what their incomes and debts are, which are factored into broader data sets, such as census data, tax codes, property databases and mortgage rates to show what products work best for consumers. SmartAsset, for example, will let a prospective homeowner analyze his tax consequences, cash flow implications and net wealth considerations. The mortgages will be ranked by their affordability, Carvin says.

“All our content is personalized,” he says. “It’s written by our technology platform. We [explain] why we recommended down payment value because we want people to understand the advice we are giving them.”

The new tool will also show a user a graph that details the financials of renting versus buying, for example. “We want to measure the quality of decisions they make,” he says. “We aren’t a calculator. This type of analysis isn’t being run with addition or multiplication.”

The impetus for launching the technology came from Carvin’s personal experiences. When he was seeking to purchase a home, he discovered the process wasn’t so straight forward, even though he worked in finance for years.

“It was more of a complicated decision,” Carvin recalls. “I had realtors and brokers telling me I can afford twice what I thought would work for me.”

Though he found a lot of content related to his effort, none of it was personalized, which rendered it meaningless, he says.

“These decisions are so local,” Carvin says.

That’s when Carvin built out a financial model for himself, which “gave me the confidence to see my financials in different scenarios. …I wanted to know I wasn’t throwing away money.”

The housebuying tool is just the start of SmartAsset’s ambitions. The startup, funded by Y Combinator and angel investors, hopes to serve as the Kayak.com for consumers making all big financial decisions. The investment amount is not disclosed.

“The vision is to become the first point of reference for any big financial decision,”Carvin says.

The home module is just the first effort of SmartAsset. He says he plans to launch 24 modules and build out more than 200 additional questions. In the near-term, he says SmartAsset will finish building out the home ownership piece. By the end of 2012, he expects to start using its decision engine to help consumers decide whether they should buy or lease a vehicle.

Though free to end-users, Carvin says SmartAsset operates off of a lead generation business model. That said, Carvin says each lead will earn SmartAsset the same amount, which is “why we have no incentive to recommend one product over another.”

To engage an audience, Carvin says SmartAsset runs a blog and is “doing some things” with SEO.

“The truth is a lot of people are searching for what we provide,” he says. “People are looking to find a house and type [that query] into a search engine. Google’s job is to find the best content for the query. …We are the best content.”

Still, it’s the application itself that serves as SmartAsset’s content, which is why he says the efforts won’t center on writing a lot of content.

“For every person who comes to the site, he will have a slightly different experience,” Carvin says.