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.