The Chuckle Brothers

April 1994.

It was apparent that Ken Marlton was not enjoying the new responsibilities or consequences of being Stress Office manager. That's not a reflection on Ken, who was a great chap, but I suppose part of his daily burden was the subtle office psychological onslaught from a group of bored permies.

If I think about it though, we were making fun of ourselves in the process, mainly as most of the permanent members of the group acknowledged that the contracting life had definite benefits, usually associated with a lack of responsibility or consequence with the added seasoning of lots of money.

There were a few jobshoppers that I talked to on a regular basis. There had been the legendary Tony Burgess, a great chap who had moved up in the world to head TDM technical services, a contracting agency and who was my agent back in 1990 when I had my brief stint at Menasco.

John Jefferies of course, Pete Malaguti, Jim Collins and even though Ken Marlton was now a manager, I still considered that he was a jobshopper at heart.

Frank Sapala was another great guy, who's motto was "We don't talk about Frank" when it came to what rate he was on. In my time learning PATRAN in the CAD room, I would talk to Frank about life, the universe and everything. When the weekly contractor pay envelopes would come around, Frank would open his, smile insanely and then methodically rip the pay slip into fifty pieces.

Then there are the two that I am affectionately nicknaming the Chuckle Brothers.

Dave Rutherford and Pete Clark held varying places either side of me on the Dowty squash ladder, and we had great battles over at the sports centre of a lunch time. Dave was installed on a desk near the back of the stress office and Pete was usually in the CAD room. The friendly competition on the squash courts resulted in a lot of office banter that was especially comical when either one of them had beaten me, or vice versa.

The light teasing that I was applying to Ken paled in comparison to the quality work that Dave and Pete were subjecting me to on a daily basis, it was a similar process though, a couple of competent jobshoppers provoking a permanent member of staff. It was not always about performance in the squash arena either, their speciality seemed to focus on ridiculing career decisions, failed jobshopper attempts and the general financial struggle.

It seemed like torture at times, office bullying I suppose they would call it nowadays, but what they effectively did was change my state of mind and I suppose what we permanent staff were subjecting Ken Marlton to had the same effect.

The countdown was on.

Spreadsheet Queen

I'll step back a year for a moment.

In those early months of 1993 the honing of the financial plan had continued, it was the usual RRSP time and Graeme Wright and myself were enjoying the various free seminars (and coffee and Donuts) that were offered in the Durham region.

In fact the financial discussions had spread to other members of the design office.

Ken Miller was our financial guy at the time, he was a pleasant man and he was recommended as a trusted soul by Jim Collins. A few of us in the office had subscribed to the Gordon Pape financial newsletter and in general, we were all learning about investing, Ken Miller actually organized a little get together at the local pub for those that were interested and the general discussion was good and positive and beer was alaways welcomed.

In 1992 Graeme had salvaged a little pocket computer (Chris Brookfield had thrown it away) and financial amortization formula had been adapted to BASIC and installed. In addition, we had programmed the Lotus 123 clone for this mortgage predictor and had both been using it to see the effect of balloon payments, interest rates and payment frequency on our respective loans.

It helped that I had grovelled to have a PC on my desk, A monochrome PC that had sat unused next to the Decwriter in the plotter room and the chief had reluctantly allowed it to be installed on my desk. As I have mentioned before, I was still very much the bad monkey and any sort of perk was frowned upon, so I felt "lucky" to have been given the opportunity of using an obsolete computer at my workstation.

Once the spreadsheet was constructed, Graeme was a regular visitor to my desk, and playing with mortgage numbers became a fascination in our lives.

It was obvious that the Weldon mortgage on our townhouse was not open enough, so we approached the bank to change that. Initially the bank came up with some huge penalty payment (in the thousands) but Graeme informed me that there were two variants of this penalty, one if you were changing institutions and another if staying with the same bank.

So, I trotted back to the bank and educated the clerk, who happily charged us $600 penalty for changing our mortgage to an almost fully open lower rate and in addition we changed from monthly payments to bi-weekly.

It only took about ten weeks to make that six hundred bucks back.

The original houseplan spreadsheet was used to budget the Weldon finances even more fanatically and almost on a weekly basis we were paying an extra fifty or a hundred dollars off the loan, I would nip up on a lunchtime, pay the mini-balloon payment and ask for a print out of the remaining principal and amortization period which of course was then checked with the mortgage spreadsheet to ensure accuracy.

This "second front" of financial smarts was the beginning of the end of the debt game for Graeme and myself and we both started to finalise our "Mortgage Free" or MF events.

The pair of us would both be "Out from under it" in the following two years, the Wrights received their "Mortgage Free Bucket" on the 20th August 1993 and the Weldon bucket arrived on June 17th, 1995.

And that was that.