If you follow us on Twitter (@informedchoice, @martinbamford, @andrewneligan or @nickbamford) you may well know that on Tuesday 20th August we sat down in the front meeting room at Sundial House to write a book.
Our goal was to write a book in a day; yes that’s right, write a complete book in a day!
Not just any book however, but a book that would enable people to do exactly what it says it the title – take control of their finances.
This might seem something of a challenge and of course it is.
But when you think that between the three of us we have over 60 years of collective experience in the financial services world and that each of three of us is either a published author or regularly writes articles for magazines or is a prolific ‘blogger’, it means that we are never short of an opinion on the subject of personal financial planning!
In Martin we have probably one of the fastest typists in the financial services world at over 500 words a minute (just joking – but he is seriously quick!)
This means that getting our thoughts turned into the written word can be done pretty quickly.
We decided on twelve chapters and worked out that to give the reader some real value and give ourselves enough space to express ourselves that we would need to write about 1,500 to 2,000 words per chapter.
We wanted each chapter to be a logical step towards the next so that the diligent reader could consider all aspects of his or her financial life.
We also wanted to seed each chapter with some challenging thoughts and questions. Most importantly we wanted to give the reader a track on which to run and help them by indicating the type of information that they would need to have to hand as they started to take control of their finances.
We kicked off at 9am, cut short our lunch break to 20 minutes and ploughed on through committing each chapter to the laptop.
At the start of each chapter we debated the content headings so that there was a consistent structure to the book. We then each contributed our thoughts, experiences, facts and figures and dictated them to Martin.
We even set up a web can and presented a web cast live to the world at large. Our office door remained open thus allowing anyone who came past the office to contribute their thoughts if they wished to.
Some of our Twitter followers responded to questions we posted and we have included their views in the book as well.
By 5pm we had completed the task and the book was written.
Over the following days we carried out the editing of the copy and corrected the mistakes that had been made (spellcheck doesn’t know that you mean “from”when you type “form”) and set up the design and layout for the finished item.
The first copy arrived in our office this morning.
All of the profits from the sale of the book will go to our charity of choice The Jigsaw Trust which aims to improve the lives of those affected by autism through the provision of high quality, accessible, educational, vocational and wellbeing services.
We hope that you will buy a copy it is available from www.icl-ifa.co.uk/book and costs just £5.99 (plus postage and packaging).
