Thanks for stopping by on this blog tour, book review, and giveaway! When asked to join this blog tour, I found myself intrigued by the subject. Someday we all want to have the ability to retire—some sooner than others. I wanted to see if my plan was anywhere close to what it should be and hopefully learn something new along the way. It's been my experience whenever I've spoken with finacial people, I find my head spinning, wondering what language they're speaking. So I braced myself for that same type of experience with this book. I was pleasantly surprised that I could understand most of it. John takes the technical aspects of the finacial world and makes it understandable. In reality I found this book enjoyable to read, as long as I didn't try to read too much at one time. One or two chapters was enough and I had to let it diguest. :)
RetirementQuest explained pitfalls to watch out for, what drive the media has in investing, the type of advice to be wary of. It gave me several things to look into myself and for me, I took away that it is ultimately our responsibility in the long run. I throughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone, especially those starting out or are even halfway to retirement. It gives great guidance and clarity to what can be a very confusing issue. I will definitely be referring back to it in the years to come.
Be sure to stop by their website. They have wonderful tools to help you get started, classes, a message from John, and tons more info. My inteview below also has some great information for readers and writers.
:):):):):)
RetirementQuest: Make Better Decisions was written by a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ practitioner who has been counseling clients since 1992. Drawing from his twenty years of experience, John Hauserman has developed a unique ability to communicate complex financial subject matter in easy to understand terms. Readers are guided through the basics of financial planning, while threads of politics, history, and psychology are woven together to create a tapestry of deeper understanding into the financial planning world. Complete with hard hitting insight into the practices and sometimes abuses of the financial services industry, John has created a masterpiece designed to help those responsible-minded investors who are seeking to avoid common planning mistakes.
Giveaway
Now for the giveaway. John has donated a copy of RetirementQuest for one lucky reader. How to enter? Easy.
- Make sure you're a follower of my blog. Leave a comment telling me how you follow and an email address to contact you if you win.
- For an extra entry, leave a seperate comment telling me what the two sources of inspiration for John are. (Hint: It's below in the interview.)
Feel free to spread the word and make sure to enter by midnight on Feb 16th. Good luck! And may random.org be with you.
RetirementQuest: Make Better Decisions
By: John Hauserman, CFP®
What made you decide to become a writer?
I feel that I have a very important message that has the potential to dramatically impact peoples’ lives. I am a financial advisor who cares a great deal about my clients, profession, and community, and I am pained to watch people make some very costly, yet common mistakes. In many cases these financial errors are preventable if a person has a minimal level of understanding.
Who inspires you?
I have two major sources of inspiration. My clients would be the first source. It is tremendously fulfilling to know that I have guided so many around the potential calamities of the past two decades, including such debacles as the dot com bubble burst and the real estate implosion. Sadly, my other source of inspiration comes from the inexcusable state of the financial services industry. Now don’t get me wrong, there are many excellent advisors around our great nation who hold their client interests first and foremost it is not them who inspire nearly as much as some others. In this case I am referring to a negative inspiration; my blood simply boils when I hear the snake-oil sales pitches which are all too common in the current state of the financial services industry. Built on an industrial revolution era business model, many of these slick suited dinosaurs simply see their clients (and potential clients) as a convenient means to make a quick buck. They tell half-truths, churn, bully, deceive, and abuse the trust that millions place in them. Then they simply ramp up their marketing efforts to find their next victim. They seem quite immune to any sense of morality by recommending dot com stocks to a retiree and knowing that it caused them to lose most of their life savings, then recommending real estate partnerships which often resulted in the loss of the rest of any remaining nest egg. In many cases those same so-called “advisors” now hulk gold as the next can’t miss opportunity, or annuities with smoke and mirror promises of free money and too good to believe rates of interest.
What would you like your readers to get out of your writing?
I hope to empower my readers with a lifetime of better financial decision making. In particular I have sought to detail the pervasive shortcomings of the financial services industry and compare them to a newer and better model which puts clients first (known as fiduciary). In so doing I hope that my readers will be able to tell the difference and be in a better position to avoid the financial vampires who suck the financial life-blood out of their victims.
Secondly, I hope to make my readers better investors. This does not require advanced expertise, simply a lay understanding of a few core concepts. By grasping these basics and understanding how the media tends to hype dangerous trends, investors may just be able to side step some of those most avoidable (and common) mistakes.
Where did this idea come from?
The idea for this book is based upon my twenty years as a financial advisor, but was spurred by the hysteria that swirled around the events of the financial crises which made itself known in fall of 2008. I tried in vain to raise warning flags regarding the obvious bubble that was welling up in the real estate markets. While I am quite proud that I was able to steer my clients away from making tragic mistakes in this regard, I was nonetheless frustrated that I could not reach a broader audience. My many letters to editors, article submissions, and requests for media interviews all fell on deaf ears; it seems that all the media was interested in at that time were stories that confirmed the nation’s manic belief that real estate was a sure bet investment. As the events unfolded, messages became dominated so-called news that was often little more than masked political spin doctoring or clever manipulations by those previously mentioned financial vampires. It soon became clear to me that people needed a calm voice of reason.
Any advice for aspiring authors?
If your writing is focused on a regulated industry, make sure you submit your manuscript to your compliance team early and often. When I first discussed this with my compliance department they asked that I have the book blocked before sending it to them. While there was logic behind the request, since certain disclosure needed to appear on the same page as the related text, it still caused a great deal of expense and delay as we had to redesign the book a number of times in order to incorporate or reword required disclosures and then again to get them on the same page as the required text. Had I sent the manuscript in advance we could have had the disclosure language correct from the beginning and that would have resulted in less revisions.
What can we expect next from you?
I have a financial education website www.Retirementquest.com which complements the book a great deal. My next project is to add videos to the site which will verbally and visually explain some of the charts, graphs, and more complicated details from the book.
Where can we purchase your book?
The book is available at Amazon. Please be aware that when searching, RetirementQuest should be entered as all one word, as it appears in the book title, or follow this link:
Bonnie,
ReplyDeleteThank you for the kind words! Your experience in reading this book are exactly the gift that I hoped to give readers.
John Hauserman, CFP(R)
Jentry, jentryharris@yahoo.com
ReplyDeleteI follow on gfc as Alex W! :) allicat0818[at]yahoo[dot]com thanks!
ReplyDelete