A Bit of History

I  created Pageamonth Home Budget in 1980 with the beginning of Windows 3.1.  But I had been developing it as a personal home budget long before that--since Tandy (Radio Shack) offered 40-character widths, in fact, and before that as a hand-ruled pen-drawn matrix of rows and columns on plain paper that I filled in by pencil and changed by eraser--lots of erasures as you might imagine.

My attempts to keep a personal budget go back even further.  I was noting my income and expenses in spiral notebooks by 1970, as a single man in living in Chicago.  It seems I've been obsessed with financial recordkeeping my whole adult life.

When the Internet spread, I offered my Pageamonth Budget for $19.95 through Spreadsheet Marketplace and other affiliates, and sold a few dozen of them to U.S. buyers, eventually building my own website, www.pageamonth.com to support those spreadsheets with setup and help pages. 

In the past several years, however, with the economy sliding into severe recession, my ad costs far outweighed my earnings, and I switched to giving my budgets away to anyone who wanted them, with no limits.  I realized people needed to budget more than ever but couldn't afford to buy a good home budget themselves.  I also hoped that by giving them away I could attract enough more visitors to click the budgeting-relevant ads Google placed on my pages, that my ad revenue could offset my rising Pagemonth ad costs.  I also set up a donation button in case people downloaded my budgets and benefitted from using them and wanted to give back something to help defray my costs.

I truly believed, naively, that users would spread the word and others would visit, download, spread the word even further, and grow my ad and donation revenue..

It didn't work out quite that way.  I was soon unable to advertise to the US market, the most expensive on earth, and had to keep minimal ads going worldwide on only the $1.00 per day I felt I could afford,  A dollar a day given away to advertise a free spreadsheet didn't generate enough ads to enough places enough of the time, even to the world markets, to generate more than a few cents return on my dollar cost, didn't work.   As for donations, no one has ever donated a penny. Not even once. 

A year ago on July 10 I determined to try to sell my spreadsheets again, contacted my former affilite www.spreadsheetmarketplace,com, and asked them to sell my budgets again, which they agreed to do pending editorial preparation. 

If and when they do place my spreadsheet on their pages again at $9.95, I will again quit giving them away and cost them at or above their price so as not to undercut them, and from then on I will rely on them and other affiliates.

Today Pagemonth Home Budgets remain free and unrestricted in any way to anyone who wants them.  They are available at the bottom of our homepage for instant, unlimited  downloads, as are the free blank templates that match them in Excel and Works formats..

We urge anyone interested to get them free now, however, because our free giveaway could change to a cost basis at any time.

--N.B. Kauffman