Welcome!

Well, here starts another of my projects - writing a book! This is actually something that I have been kicking around for quite some time now, but only recently have some key ideas come to light, along with a concept for tying them all together and some motivation to do it. A confluence of factors, as they say.

The concept of the book is the basics of financial planning from the viewpoint of a father transcribing sage financial advice to his (now) young kids, for use in the future when they become financially independent. As such, the intent of the book is to lay out important "timeless" concepts and principles about how to think about financial planning and the individual components that make it up, rather than any specific advice that may only hold in some narrow range of time. I am considering writing it as a narrative, as if I was giving verbal advice to the kids, but I haven't decided on this yet. I think it would be an interesting "hook" for the book and make it a bit more fun to write, but we'll see.

At the moment, I don't know whether the quantity of output from this will be able to fill a thin pamphlet, a mass-market sized book, or a series of books. I'm sure readers of my other blog have seen how wordy I can be and have their opinions on how many words I can write on just about any trivial thing, so taking on an entire field of personal financial planning I'm sure will have them thinking in units of "truckloads" when it comes to my verbiage.

I also don't know what the exact outcome of this exercise will be - a "book" that I will merely share with my kids, something I will share with close friends, something I will self publish, or something that is "worthy" of being published by a major book distributor. What I am going to aim for is content worthy of a major publication, but happiness even if the only thing that comes of it is a self-printed binder that I can stick on a shelf. Either way I will have met my goal of writing the book, and will have a lot of fun doing so.

I don't know how much of the actual book content I'll be able to put here until I look into copyright issues - specifically, if I still retain the rights to any posts I make on Blogger.com or whether they retain certain rights making me unable to further post those words / ideas in another forum.

My first goal is to get the all the basic structure, principles, chapters and sections of the book together by April 15. I am sharing this idea and my progress with as many people as possible in order to help ensure that I'll actually take action and get this thing done.

Wish me luck!