The tools to do the job

I got interested in personal finance right after we got married.  My husband and I attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and he was about to graduate.  The university held a seminar for seniors hosted by a finance  professor.  It was packed with practical advice as we were about to leave and (finally) have a real salary!

I took his advice to heart (the biggest thing I learned was to sound like a broken record when buying life insurance as we repeat the words: renewable, convertible, term life insurance.)  I had completed the first two years of my engineering degree and loved the engineering economy class (which I ace’d thank you!)  I started making spreadsheets and trying to budget.

The spreadsheets didn’t help - everything I set up was historical and only told me what I did.

I wanted to manage our money and needed a tool to tell me what I could spend.

Soon afterwards, we moved to Dalton, GA where my husband began his career as a chemical engineer with a major carpet company.  We have a marvelous radio station that is part of Moody Bible Institute and I started listening to (the late) Larry Burkette.  I learned to use the envelope system and he had forms in one of the books he sold that tracked what you could spend.  It was manual and tedious.

By now I was studying software engineering as a computer science major at Southern Polytechnic.  I worked as a computer programmer and had the skills to write software to manage our checkbook as a virtual envelope system.

That software, written in a DOS program called Foxpro, was the daddy to CheckMate!  It served our family well for many years.  When the kids wanted to order pizza, the answer was always the same - “Go ask the computer!”  That was the standard answer for every spending question we had and it was great to let the computer be the heavy.