About the Developer

Hello, I’m Lee Roesner, developer of MoneySlinger. I own a marketing, graphic & software design business in Northbrook, IL, and I solve communication problems using a variety of mediums. MoneySlinger is a personal project of mine and actually a solution to one of those problems.

I’m a creative at heart, and naturally look to solve problems…whether I want to or not. It’s a curse sometimes as I see so many opportunities to solve problems and improve life…and not enough time do it

I’m also a producer. Efficiency and productivity are always on my mind as I don’t like wasting time. Especially effort that is so out of proportion to the benefit it produces.

And as Henry Ford learned long ago, and others have learned in a million other manufacturing plants around the world, a little variability reduces efficiency and productivity considerably.

And that brings me to my personal finance and family money management effort.

In 1988, I had read countless personal finance and budgeting books and was following all the rules and doing what everyone was telling me to do, but I wasn’t satisfied with the effort/result ratio. It was terrible actually and the thought of doing this for the rest of my life was not acceptable. This wasn’t brain surgery: it was bean counting. Is there no way to automate this? I had better things to do with my time. So I focused on why something so simple consumed so much time.

Around the same time, the company I was working for was developing a new product. This product was focused on tracking the chemical data readings in the water used in large boiler equipment and identifying chemical patterns and trends. The software used for this product was heavily based on statistical analysis. I was creating the marketing materials for this product so I was learning a bit about statistical analysis.

One of the most basic statistics there is, is identifying your “mean” or average. I learned that I can “see through” variability by identifying my mean, and discovered somewhere along the line, that I could physically manage my financial “mean” by consolidating and using dedicated bank accounts (containers). And I also discovered I could group and use individual variables against other variables to reduce variability. The right combination of these things happened to be the secret formula and with some trial and error, it must have worked well.

I say “must have” because pretty much the next thing I remember happened 15 years later.

How invisible can money management really be?

Now, I know you won’t believe this but I’ll say it anyway: Yes, we were managing our money for 15 years and were fully unaware of the fact that we were. Money management was that far removed from our everyday lives.

I discovered 15 years later why: what we were doing was so routine and repetitive and predictable…that it unconsciously moved to the back of our minds, and then our lives, and became absolutely transparent. So, while we were watching people crying about money problems on Oprah with the professional money coaches and all, we were invisibly maintaining a 820 FICO score. How can that be? There were a lot of mixed signals over those 15 years, but life was too busy with the kids to think about it.

Cut to 15 years later: we bought a personal computer and thought it was time we should finally get serious about our finances and purchased some money management software. Hey…it would be “fun”. Some four hours later after trying to “set this thing up” I realized this is exactly the same thing I was told to do 15 years ago, but now it’s on a computer  (it all started to come back to me). I again realized that no matter how well I maintained this “monstrosity”, it was not going to get me even close to the level of precision and perspective we already had by doing what we were already doing.

But exactly what were we doing? I still had no idea at the time and I remember literally asking myself: what the hell are we doing? How can I not even know what I’m doing, and manage my money light years beyond this “professional” monstrosity before me. It wasn’t adding up and now there was too many of these little “clues” to be a coincidence.

It was at this point I decided to reverse engineer the system to figure out what I’ve been doing for 15 years. Soon after I was handing out spreadsheets to friends, but then got tired of explaining it over and over when asked, so then I wrote a manual. Then I started selling the spreadsheet and manual online. In 2002 I created a Window’s version called The B Word™, and now MoneySlinger™ is the next generation, fully digital online version.

The answer may not be where you think it is

Being an entrepreneur and creative problem solver all these years, I have a philosophy that guides me to finding solutions: I don’t try to find solutions. Instead, I focus on finding the problem.

And I’ve learned not to be fooled by thinking symptoms are problems. Make sure you dig deep enough to find what’s causing the symptoms. Then you’ve found the problem.

Why focus so hard on identifying the problem? A problem and its solution is a lot like a lock and key. Defining the lock in full detail will, by nature, reveal the key, because the key is always the exact inverse of the problem. The perfect solution will make itself evident all by itself. And most interestingly, the key is most likely in a place you may never have thought it would be.

I would recommend that even if you don’t understand the workings of MoneySlinger…that you try it. There may be a confusing transition period as you’re trying to create order out of chaos, but that’s the point. Once you accomplish that task…that order is forever.

I promise you this: you won’t be able to manage your money with less time or effort because there’s no more time or effort to remove.

Lee