Introducing My Book – Beyond the Basics: Maximizing, Allocating, and Protecting Your Capital

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My book is now out in hardcover, paperback, and eBook and available to order here .

For those of you following this self-promotional journey from the beginning, thanks for putting up with it!

The idea for a personal finance book first came to me in 2011. I was working at a mid-sized money manager with a killer investment track record and awesome sales force. A lot of us were doing well. Some thought it would last forever. My closest friends and I knew it wouldn’t. The investment world doesn’t work that way.

So, we wondered how to turn our early financial luck into something more sustainable, which would also allow us to help our clients in the same boat. I’m passionate about assisting people with their finances because it’s hard for most and leads to undue stress. Eleven years into my career this question of what successful people should do to take their finances to the next level tugged at me. So, like any good finance nerd I did my research, but it didn’t lead to much. There were lots of personal finance books about debt management, saving money, and the other basics. There were also books on brilliant DIY investing. No thanks. The worst bear market of my lifetime had just ended (and the second one in a decade) and working with clients during this span taught me one thing – it’s extraordinarily difficult to excel at managing your own money in your spare time. And more importantly, it’s not necessary to try to outperform the pros in a hyper-competitive landscape to grow wealthy. I could write pages on this (and have), so I’ll spare you here. The bottom line was I didn’t find the information I wanted.

Now what? I joked that maybe I’d write the book we needed. Nobody laughed, so I thought about it some more. Real life intervened. A few years passed. I read different things, continued to think about it, and realized that what I was trying to figure out years ago was a decision-making framework for how individual investors should allocate their capital to increase their net worth and accomplish their goals. I had my book! 

Time to write it. My wife and kids went away for a couple of weeks one summer, leaving me with a freezer full of steak tips and lots of brown rice and broccoli. I planned to rip through a first draft before they returned, and complete the book that summer. That was five and a half years ago.

“How did you have time to write a book?” is a question I’ve been getting a lot lately.

It turns out I didn’t, although that’s only partly the story – the kind of deflection I’m great at whenever I’m asked about my book. Someone once said they write to figure out what they think. It took multiple bad drafts to turn the idea buried in my head into the book available today.

I’m proud of it, loved the entire process of creating it, and hope you get something useful out of it.

Beyond the Basics: Maximizing, Allocating, and Protecting Your Capital provides a three-part framework for individuals looking for more advanced ways to increase their wealth and accomplish their financial goals. 

Part 1 focuses on maximizing your capital with chapters about initial career success, saving money, and minimizing taxes.

Part 2 covers growing that capital through cash management, debt, investing in stocks and bonds, common investment mistakes to avoid, and investing in alternative assets like real estate.

Part 3 helps with protecting your capital along the way through proper estate planning, insurance coverage, and other financial planning moves.

Thanks for checking it out.