Site want – validate the tools and methods I use to track/monitor personal finance.
So engineers want to learn, build, learn again, build, find how it works, refine, build, test, validate, test, and go to production. That’s how we’re built. That’s what we do. This blog’s intention is to cloud build a method of keeping our personal finances in line with the need statement of what we want our lives to be.
There are a ton of other great blogs out there for personal finance – Get Rich Slowly, I Will Teach You to be Rich, and I’m sure many more I have yet to come across. The point is that they approach things differently than engineers would. They write to the masses. Engineers have an inherent different outlook on things – generally to solve a problem and put in a permanent fix.
So I can’t do this alone – imagine a new project thrown at you with no team. Yeah, that will work as long as I don’t need to have it completed in the next quarter, or 42… I need help. Take a look at what I’ve done so far, peer review, shoot off parts of a DFMEA, how it won’t work in a B10, whatever else you can think of. The point here is that there isn’t a personal finance site for engineering minded people.
Here’s the starting point. I show you what I’ve done, you review, comment (please) and provide some criticism. Then either propose a new solution or I do, then review, test, rebuild, etc. The want in the end is to have a system that will work for you in the long term to manage and track finances. How cool would it be that you can anticipate a failure mode in the next 6 months that you wouldn’t have expected, but you have the resources available to fix it before hand.
A little background. I’m a tinkerer. I studied mechanical engineering at Texas A&M, class of ‘98. I’ve worked at Ford Motor Company since 2000. I have an MBA from the University of Michigan with a focus on finance. So I’m a mixed bag of stuff, but always have liked being near hardware.
So experience in an engineer’s mind is a little different. I now have a family with 3 kids, a house with a mortgage, all the goodies that come with family life. There are experiences I have that I wish I could have told myself before they happened – home buying, car buying, toy buying, etc.
So what’s the product here? A product? A process? A Gantt chart of events? Certainly not hardware – wait, yup there’s hardware. A house, college funding for the kids, the cars – OMG the beach house and vacations. I never thought about life insurance – but we have a kid now. The crappy part about life is that there isn’t an awesome set of equations to figure out where or when to put money. Usually it’s just like production. You try your best to build something, then there’s some unforeseen f-up that you never saw coming, and you’re looking at fixes right at launch or after the problem has been put in production.
The end result for all of us professionally and personally is to mitigate errors, improve robustness, and ensure that there is profit. So is the intention of this blog. Provide personal finance for engineers or like-minded people with processes, tools, and most of all, group feed back and ideas of how to make everything work out. So far, as far as I can tell, there aren’t a good set of equations, constants, models, tools, probability, quality control or anything I can relate to that makes personal finance something that is easy – or even works out well without either living less than what you’d like or winning the lottery.
So what would you like to get out of this site?
Examples, experiences, hard-core math, let me know and I’ll do my best to steer in the direction you’re looking for!