In the Summer of 1986 a friend of mine showed me a magazine article, written by a military chaplain, on "How to quickly pay off debts". He knew I had a computer (Tandy 1000 SX) and asked me to help him build a payment plan just like the one described in the magazine. I used a spreadsheet program to calculate how to pay off all twenty-one of his debts. It took over 5 hours to manually figure it out. I remember thinking this was a good idea but not worth that much time.

So, I spent the next three months designing a computer program that would duplicate the results obtained with the manual spreadsheet method. The program was very crude but it worked. At this point it didn't have a name - I just referred to it as the "payoff program".

I showed this program to a few friends and they weren't very impressed. So, I copied it to a floppy disk and tossed it in a drawer. It sat there for about 3 years until one day I was looking for a programming project. I decided to create a more sophisticated version of that old "payoff program". My hope was I could sell it to people who needed help getting out of debt.

I spent an entire year of evenings and weekends creating the first retail version of that program. In December of 1990, I began marketing my software known as "Zilch" through various shareware vendors. Other well-known shareware authors told me not to expect any sales for at least six months to a year. Imagine my surprise when two months later I received my first order from Gifford Wherry of Kennewick, WA. I haven't looked back since.