How does the writing process work for you? Do you schedule a time every day, work madly when inspiration hits or?

At the beginning I found all sorts of time to write at any hour. Having been helping clients with The Smith Manoeuvre for twelve years, I knew it inside out in my head and just wanted to bang away at the keyboard as often as possible to get everything on the page as fast as possible, then go back and refine the content. So to start, it was a very enjoyable, exciting process.

But just like a lot of things, I guess, there comes a stretch where it starts to feel less like you’re writing for the enjoyment and more like you’re writing because you’ve started something and it absolutely must get completed. Not that it ever felt like work, but like if you buy an old car to restore – for a while, you’re up at 5 a.m. every day and banging away until your wife calls you in for dinner. Then later on you start working on it a bit later and coming in earlier – but you eventually get it on the road.  Again, it didn’t feel like work, but writing a book certainly does take a lot of work, if you will.

And on top of the experience of knowing I was creating something physical was the knowledge that the information I had, the expertise I had, needed to be shared with as many Canadian homeowners as possible. We Canadians do not have it easy, but there is help, and I knew that getting Master Your Mortgage for Financial Freedom into the hands of Canadians was the best way for me to do my part in making things financially easier for many, many people.

What did you find most difficult about the writing and publishing process? What was the easiest?

Most difficult, I think, was forcing myself to stop and say, “This is it. It’s done”; whether it was in regard to a paragraph, a chapter or the whole book. I love words – how they can be put together and manipulated – and always felt that I could say something more concisely or clearly.  But there comes a time when you have to tell yourself that any more changes are simply that – changes.

As for the easiest, that would probably be simply finding the time to sit down and hammer away when there was something I was excited to share. Maybe it was finally realizing how to best convey a concept or how to use an example or two to introduce an important idea.  I also enjoyed injecting a fair amount of humour into a topic that isn’t typically one of the funnest subjects.  Then again, maybe my readers will come to the conclusion that injecting humour turned out to be one of the most ‘difficult’ parts of the process for me. In my defence, I’m a finance guy; I don’t do stand-up.

What title have you released? Please include a short synopsis of what your book is (or books are) about.

Master Your Mortgage for Financial Freedom, is my first and it describes how a simple one-time restructuring of your finances can vastly improve Canadian homeowners’ well-being. This mortgage we have, this ‘thing’ that allowed us to buy our home and raise our families in peace and serenity, is also the very thing that threatens our peace and serenity.  The mortgage payments take a huge cut out of our paycheques each and every month and with the other costs of life, taxation, and inflation, the vast majority of us have little, if anything, left over at the end of the month to invest for our future.

And so we tend to wait for that mortgage to be paid out until we start saving for our retirement, but by then it is way too late. We’ve missed out on 25 years or more of compound growth and risk actually having to be financially reliant on our children, forced to downsize, forced sign up for a reverse mortgage or actually having to work in our ‘retirement’ – we’ve all seen the seniors working at the big box stores or behind the counter at a fast food restaurant asking,“Is that for here or to go?”

The Smith Manoeuvre accomplishes three very beneficial things simultaneously and starting now – the homeowner will receive tax refunds where tax refunds did onot exist before, they will be able to eliminate that expensive mortgage in record time, and they will start saving for their future each and every month with funds that weren’t available to them before. It’s legal, and in fact, endorsed, by the Canada Revenue Agency. It is simple and it doesn’t cost the homeowner any more money out of their pockets each month. It’s all in the way we approach money – approach it like the wealthy do, and you’re on your way to becoming wealthy.

Do you have any new books in the planning or writing stage?

I do. Although I am not spending a lot of time on it at the moment considering the launch of this first book, I have started to plan and write my second book which will focus on the psychology of money.

The idea for this book came during my time as an investment advisor. After taking on over 500 families as clients, you start to see many varied approaches to money.  Quite honestly, some of these approaches are as fascinating as they are scary. So I have done a little digging based around my observations and am starting to realize how the ideas about money that we form when we’re young are carried intact through adulthood and affect not only how poor or wealthy we are, but how we are succeeding or failing in our relationships as well.

The personal relationship side of this is particularly interesting because while we know couples argue about money all the time, when you really look into it, you are able to start putting identifiers and labels to specific behaviours and you can follow the trail as to how two people can see the same thing so differently. Sex and money – the two biggest causes of divorce. If we are having a tough time with one of them, we’re probably having a tough time with the other.

What would you like readers to know about you?

Well, I guess you would have to say that over the past year and a half I have come to realize how important it is to actively care for others. This may have come a bit late in life, I’m afraid. Since I sold my practice, instead of having my head down taking care of the daily business, I have had my head up, you could say.

For the twelve years I was an advisor, taking care of my clients was very emotionally involving and time consuming. I had little time to look around, to connect with others outside of work parameters. I have become more involved socially, in the business community and in education in general. I try to live my life in the spirit of giving without asking; offering without expectation. The rewards that come with that mindset have been evident all my life, but I haven’t really felt it until recently.  It’s a great way to live and it builds connection in a way that living in a quid pro quo mindset cannot.

So here I am, putting myself out there writing, speaking and educating, trying to offer people what I have, in the hopes that it can help some be a bit better off financially, and therefore emotionally. Wouldn’t it be just great if Canadians were able to live a life of deep security rather than a life of concern?