History
CountDaMoney was written by me, Kirk Hopkins. Here's the story of this software.
Not to long after my wife and I got married, we met with a financial adviser (Tom Friermood) that went to our church.
He went through our finances with us and helped us work up a budget.
'Budget', a bad word to many people, we found is actually very freeing.
We're at a point now where we don't really need a budget, that is, we have saved enough money that we're no longer scraping by.
If you look at a budget in that light, it is pretty negative.
'Ugh, I gotta work on the budget'.
But if you understand that you're really pre-planning, or I guess just, 'planning' how you want to spend your money, then it takes a whole new perspective.
We created a spreadsheet with categories and items and allocated money into each one.
This was all based on the envelope method from days of old.
Let's say you have $1,000.
The idea is that you decide how you're going to spend your $1,000 before you spend it.
Side note, my father-in-law used to tell me that his budget was 'spend it if you got, don't spend it if you don't'.
Good advice, but not super detailed.
Back to the $1,000.
You would create physical envelopes and put your $1,000 (cash, I mentioned it was from a long time ago, right?) in each envelope.
When you wanted to buy/pay for something, you looked in that envelope and if you had enough money in there, you would buy/pay for it.
Simple, right?
Kind of tough to plan ahead unless you're always keeping track of (and writing down) the amount in each envelope.
With a spreadsheet, you could relatively easily keep track of the money, and as a bonus, you didn't really need physical cash.
Faithfully, monthly we would create a new worksheet in our spreadsheet and designate our how much we wanted to save in each area, housing, transportation, food, clothing, etc.
It worked pretty well but we weren't super good at entering purchases on time (or at all sometimes).
The worst feeling was getting the credit card bill and hoping that you would have enough to cover it.
We always did, but not by much.
This is called living from paycheck to paycheck, and let me tell you it's not much fun.
Creating a new budget each month in the spreadsheet was a pain.
It took a lot of time and was prone to copy/paste, data entry problems.
Fortunately our small group at church did a study on finances, and we used a book by Dave Ramsey.
Dave talked about baby steps, had an easy to follow plan, and was/is kind of my money managing hero.
First, save $1,000 for an emergency fund.
Next, pay off all of your debt (excluding a mortgage), starting with the smallest amount credit card at a time.
Then create a fully funded emergency fund (6 to 12 months living expenses).
After that, tell your money where to go.
Finally, plan for the future.
We continued to do our budget in the spreadsheet using Dave's plan.
Then a few years back our church offered 'Financial Peace University', a course by Dave Ramsey.
That cemented our prior learning and added something new.
The course was not free, and our awesome church covered part of the cost of attending the course, but as part of the course we purchased an app to manage our money.
The app was WAAAAYYYYY better than my spreadsheet.
I really really liked the app, and still do, but there were some things that I thought could be done better.
There were ads to upgrade, boo.
We would have to re-sign in more and more often, and since it was an app and not a web page, I had to look up the password.
My wife and I shared one account, and we would often ask each other, 'did you put in the xyz purchase?'.
I was forever scrolling up or down because I couldn't remember where the restaurant budget was, or the gas budget.
When I went to enter a restaurant transaction for Penn Station, it would suggest Pet's Smart.
No, I don't eat at Pet's Smart.
The premium features in the upgraded app offered a way to automatically import transactions.
I thought Dave's plan, though, was to see if you have the money before spending it.
So, even though it seems like a nice feature, I didn't want it.
Let's go back to the envelopes method.
When you physically take money out of the envelope, it's gone.
You can't see it, you don't have it, you feel it.
When you buy with a debit card or a credit card you don't feel.
So the act of manually doing something can be helpful.
Creating a new budget each month in the app was easy, but it just copied over the previous month.
You could setup things as funds or not, a neat but kind of hard to explain concept.
You could see money that was planned, spent, and remaining, but not all at the same time.
Now don't get me wrong, I think it's a great app, the best thing I've ever used to manage money.
Basically, I thought the app could be smarter.
And so I worked on creating Budget, I mean Allocate, no I mean SaveMeTheMoney, er I guess I'll go with CountDaMoney, a play on Count the Money.
I wrote the software for me and my family but pretty quickly decided to share it with the world.
The name of my 'app' changed a few times but I finally landed on a catchy name that was available as a dot com address.
The name Save Me The Money was based on a phrase used in popular movie from the 1990's, 'Show me the money'.
It's 2023 and pretty much any dot com name that you can think of is taken.
I tried tons of names and landed on CountDaMoney.
It actually reminded me of a character played by Harvey Korman called 'Count de Monet' in 'History of the World, Part I'.
Now I'm not recommending that you watch it, since it's rated R and all, but I thought his name was pretty catchy and CountDaMoney is pretty catchy.
CountDaMoney is not an app, it's web page or a 'web app'.
You go to a web page to use it.
The bad news is that you have to be online (have an internet connection to use it).
The good news is that there's pretty internet connectivity everywhere I go and offline computing creates a sharing and updating nightmare that I'm not into.
To make it easy to get to, I followed the standard steps on my phone to create a button on my phone's home screen so it looks like an app.
Now I have an 'app' on my phone that's easy to get to, and you can too.
Who Can Use It?
As I mentioned before, I wrote CountDaMoney for me and my family, but made it so anyone can use it.
Use at your own risk, I agree, accept cookies, yeah, all of that stuff applies.
I wrote this system in good faith, with security that would keep my information secure, for me, because I'm using the software.
So whatever I did in creating the system, I did so I wouldn't have problems.
I'm not only the system creator, I'm the main user.
So use it if you like, but don't try to take legal action against me.
I don't sell the software, or make anyone pay for a license for it.
There is an option to donate though, if you create an account and you don't have any debt.
I don't expect to get rich from CountDaMoney but I do expect to have a better, more stress free life, by using CountDaMoney.