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Saturday, December 22, 2012

Do you have "FU money"? Find out.

About two years ago, I started wondering if I had what it takes to go out into the world on my own and run my own little business. One question I had was how long I'd be able to run from savings before things ramped up to the point where my business income would support my monthly "burn rate". I also had questions about what sort of changes would matter more: making more money, having more in the bank, or cutting expenses?

While it's possible to just sit down with a calculator to do a bunch of operations by hand, it gets annoying. I decided to build it as a simple web page to make it very clear exactly what sort of results I'd get from different input values. It also gave me a perfect excuse to play with things like CSS and jQuery. A lot had changed since the last time I had wrangled web pages, and having a reason to use the latest versions of things was nice.

I called it the "FU money calculator". It starred in a very old post here not long after I started writing these posts. What's different now is that I've cleaned it up and brought it into the broader scope of my "fun" pages. It now reflects an improved understanding of how to use all of these web technologies without creating as much of a mess.

Have you ever wondered if you could quit? Give yourself an audit. Go figure out how much money you have in the bank which you're willing to spend, and then figure out how much you spend every month. Plug it in and see what happens. Mess with the numbers to see what makes things better or worse.

This all happens in your browser and no data leaves your machine. Play with the numbers and have fun!

Try it now.

Finally, as per my original post, "FU" officially means "freedom unfurled". Any other interpretation is entirely up to you.