[speaker001:] um the question was kind of interesting to me because I was just trying to put together a uh long term financial plan and a monthly budget the only thing I do now is uh put the data into Quicken I don't know if you're familiar with that
[speaker002:] yeah I've uh have some friends of mine who use Quicken and uh I considered using it once myself but I decided that the amount of information that would have to go in would be a lot of time keeping that up to date so I I kind of gave up on the idea of using Quicken at least for now
[speaker001:] um-hum hm I I've found that it's the only reliable way to keep a check book balanced actually because what will happen is my wife or I'll write a few checks and then we'll uh uh not bother to total it
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] and then it it comes comes in just to do all the arithmetic so it helps with that
[speaker002:] yeah well I have similar problems but uh we just have the one check book and we try to keep it up to date as much as possible and occasionally we'll get behind like you say but uh it doesn't really seem to be too too tight if we remember just remember to keep everything up up to date and balanced
[speaker001:] um
[speaker002:] well how do you handle the the long range or medium range planning on finances
[speaker001:] uh actually we haven't had to yet yet uh uh until just recently I guess we've got a a daughter who's eighteen months and another one on the way so
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] we need to start doing more of that just for uh you know saving for college and things like that we tried a way try to put away between two and four thousand a year just for that for
[speaker002:] yeah well that's pretty good if you can do that I know
[speaker001:] um
[speaker002:] I have a daughter who's ten and we haven't really put much away for her college up to this point but um we're to the point now where our financial income is enough that we can consider putting some away for college so
[speaker001:] um-hum
[speaker002:] we're gonna be starting a regular payroll deduction in the fall and then the money that I'll be making this summer we'll be
[speaker001:] hm
[speaker002:] putting away for her college fund
[speaker001:] hm sounds good yeah I guess we're we're just at the point my uh my wife worked until we had a family and then you know now we're just going on the one income so it's a lot more interesting trying to
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] find some extra I think payroll deductions probably the only way we'll be able to um do it just you know kind of enforce the savings
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] but uh it'll be interesting to see
[speaker002:] well our situation is just a little bit kind of the opposite of that cause my wife was not working for some time and was going to school and just recently uh took on a full time job well almost full time
[speaker001:] hm
[speaker002:] so it's only recently that we've had the money where we could start putting away large sums of it for uh long range goals like college and
[speaker001:] um
[speaker002:] significant travel and that kind of thing
[speaker001:] that sounds good but uh uh I was just curious what uh part of the country oh
[speaker002:] ah Wisconsin
[speaker001:] okay
[speaker002:] how about you
[speaker001:] um Cincinnati actually I was kind of wondering if they'd be collecting people with uh the western accents or something like that I don't know how many people are uh going to be involved in this but
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] uh well that's interesting I'm uh  uh um actually uh I was kind of interested if you found out about the study by uh reading Telecom Digest or was there another
[speaker002:] uh a colleague of mine at uh at work got some information over um the computer network called internet
[speaker001:] oh okay yeah that's how I got it as well but uh
[speaker002:] and he just forwarded that on to me and um it sounded like it'd be an interesting project to participate in so I
[speaker001:] um-hum
[speaker002:] sent
[speaker001:] yeah it'll be interesting to see what they
[speaker002:] sent back some E-mail
[speaker001:] it'd be interesting to see how the data base well I guess we're talking about the experiment and
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] probably try to get back on the topic but uh it's hard to talk about finances without without getting to uh dollar figures I guess
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] you know we could talk about some of the long range goals
[speaker002:] what other long range goals do you have besides college
[speaker001:] yeah um well I think either my wife or I would like to pursue advanced degrees at some point
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] uh I guess we'll have to factor that in if we're if we're not working for employers that happen to fund that it seems like every year my employer scales back you know a little bit of their tuition reimbursement
[speaker002:] um-hum
[speaker001:] I mean they use to reimburse it a hundred percent and now it's uh now it's reimbursement depending on the grade you get in class and uh it's it's a real shift from what we had before uh because we're