The Author
The author is a retired software engineer and manager. The tool and the manuscript have been a retirement hobby project. The tool came first. The tool was motivated by an exchange with an annuity sales professional who threw up the “I bet you don’t know where your money is coming from” challenge. He was right, but I showed up at his office with a spreadsheet that was already more comprehensive than his sales tool. It spiraled “out of control” after that. The book grew from what I learned with the tool and the fact that the tool became complex enough that it called for stand-alone documentation. A contributing factor is that I have been unable to find any books that focus on the modeling process. The tool will remain free: I spent my almost my entire career developing commercial software. It was great, but I am not going back there. The manuscript may be offered for sale at some point.