Unautomate Your Finances – The Guide

On Queen Street, in Auckland, near the Auckland Tower, there’s a small coffee shop (in fact, it’s more than that, it’s a Starbucks). That was the first coffee shop I sat in during my trip to New Zealand, and that was also the coffee shop in which I met Adam Baker, the man behind ManVsDebt.com, back in October 2009.

We spent around 4 hours talking and sharing ideas, projects or life experiences. It was a very productive meeting and also quite an important one, because it led to my first mastermind group, involving Adam and Glenn Allsopp from ViperChill.com . Anyway, I’m not going to talk about Adam Baker or Glenn Allsopp in this article, although you should do yourself a favor and check out their blogs, I’m going to talk about something really, really important: Adam Baker’s first commercial product: Unautomate Your Finances.

Financial Freedom

I’m telling your from the start, this ain’t gonna be a re-hashing of what I read in Adam’s guide, that would be far too easy. And it will also spoil your surprise when you’re going to buy it . Instead, I’m going to address several problems that this guide will help you understand (and solve) in a simple and passionate way. Yes, you get that right: it’s time to bring the “simple and passionate” back to our finances.

First of all, by reading this guide you’ll start to have a better understanding of what financial freedom means. This is the cornerstone of every effective financial strategy and the guide does a pretty good job at it.

Second, you’ll start to understand why and how you’re giving away control over your finances. And instead of controlling the flow, you become being controlled by it. Which is not good.

And third, you’ll get a practical set of tools for improving your current financial situation.

If you ever wanted to live a normal life, you bumped into one of those roadblocks. You either traded your time for financial freedom, by building a consuming career, either sunk in debt, by giving away control of your finances, either struggled to improve your finances after some financial crash. Yes, we’ve all been there. Hence, we all can use some advice. And this solid 84 pages guide (and 9 chapters, no fluff) will give you exactly that: simple and effective advice on how to improve your financial situation.

The Deeper Meaning

What I really loved about this guide is not the technical stuff. For anybody trying to learn about how to acquire financial freedom there are tons of free or paid materials on the Internet. Technically, you can learn everything you want about budgeting, emergency funds and stuff like that. But Unautomate Your Finances will goo deeper. It will try to shape a big part of your life in a positive way.

You will find (more often than you think) ideas or concepts from personal development currents like minimalism or digital nomading. Adam was a digital nomad for two years, so he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to pressuring financial contexts (and I can’t imagine something more pressuring than being a digital nomad, living in a foreign country as a family of three with an infant).

Getting rid of what’s in excess and pushing up what brings in a bigger return, that’s the main traction of this guide and I admit I had a few “a-ha” moments myself. As an online entrepreneur, I did budgeting and financial projections almost on auto-pilot, for more than 10 years. But the world is changing and so does the world of personal finances. You need some fresh air every now and then, and Unautomate Your Finances does exactly that: refreshes the air of your personal finances with valuable information and supportive tools.

Leo Babauta Foreword and Interview as a Bonus

Yes, you got the right, the man who practically started what we know today under the name of “minimalism”, Leo Babauta from zenhabits.net, is part of this guide. He wrote a simple yet powerful foreword, which is a very interesting piece in itself, and he’s also featured in a 30 minutes exclusive interview. To be honest, I didn’t know the details behind Leo’s journey towards becoming debt free and the details he shares about he finally conquered his financial freedom were enlightening. And this was coming from a man who created and currently maintains one of the top 25 blogs in the world in 2009, according to Times magazine. Now, how does buying this guide sounds to you?

I thought I heard a “yes” (or at least I spotted an affirmative nodding, which is equally cool) and that’s great. Because this huge bonus is only the visible part of the iceberg. You’ll also have a 30 minutes interview with J.D. Roth from GetRichSlowly.org in which he shares his financial recovery story, and a few specially crafted templates to do your homework.

Oh, the price. It’s 17 USD. Yes, 17 USD, not 170 USD. I won’t detail more on this one because I’m 100% convinced it should have been WAY more than 17 bucks. But hey, that’s Adam’s guide, not mine. He is the one putting up insanely low prices on such a valuable content. Blame it on him.

My Final Thoughts

Are extremely positive, so to speak. I know Adam in flesh and bones and I know how determined he can be when it comes to making his dreams real. And this guide is one of those dreams. I’m happy for Adam. And I’m also happy for you, because you’re going to read an awesome piece of financial self-help.

Go for it.

How To Write An Ebook Using MacJournal

Writing an ebook could be a lot of fun. Not to mention the fact that by writing something you’re spreading value directly and you can receive a lot of direct compensation. If you chose to sell your ebook chances are that you will make some money. Sometimes a lot of money. And if you chose to give it away for free, it’s a sure bet that you’ll make a lot of new friends. Either way, it’s a win.

But writing an ebook can be sometimes overwhelming. I’m not talking about the actual writing process, choosing the topics, putting the chapters together or the main ebook subject. I’m talking about the invisible scaffold, the physical setup for managing, maintaining and organizing your work. Sometimes you don’t remember what you wrote yesterday, or your ideas are coming too fast and you don’t have the time or the habit to write them down, or you don’t have a place with the last version of ebook and have to compile it every time you distribute it.

In today’s post I’ll share with you my setup for writing an ebook. It’s a system based on my favorite journaling application, and that would be MacJournal, of course. I’ve already wrote some articles about enhancing MacJournal, like power blogging with MacJournal, GTD style, or how to create a habit in 15 days, feel free to check them out before starting to read this one.

Writing An Ebook

I’m not going to talk about how you can chose you ebook subjects, because the options here are endless. You can write an ebook about gardening, an ebook about dating, an ebook about cooking, about programming, about business, about self-improvement (that would be my case, by the way) the sky really is the limit. I am going to talk about what your physical steps are in creating an ebook, what exactly are you going to do, step by step.

For start, your ebook will contain sections, or chapters. The main creation process involve writing those chapters which are forming the main product. Yeap, I know you know that, just saying. You usually have a plan for that, either in form of a list, either as a mind map. You also establish a writing speed and a certain volume of writing each day. This is the main work.

But if you’re writing an ebook, you must already have a blog in which you can talk about that. If you’re writing an ebook and don’t have a blog yet, I highly encourage you to create one ASAP. It’s not very difficult, and it’s good for your writing habits. So, besides from writing your actual ebook, you’ll have also to write some blog posts about it. To announce your ebook to your potential audience, to share progress or to call for opinions.

Apart from that, you will promote your ebook and you’ll do that by writing various pieces of text, most often landing pages for all your promotion channels.

And in the process, you may have some ideas about the ebook, about the blog, about promoting or about anything else. I often found out that committing myself to a medium term project like an ebook opened the door to a bunch of new ideas.

And of course you will do a lot of research also, usually grouped into notes.

So, to keep a long story short, your ebook will consist on:

• chapters
• blog posts (including landing pages)
• ideas
• notes

Introducing MacJournal

MacJournal is a great application for journaling and blogging. With a little bit of hacking it can be a killer application for blogging, as I already wrote. But in its default setup is a little bit too simple for writing an ebook.

When I decided to write some ebooks (and that would be several weeks ago) I turned to another fantastic piece of software from Mariner, StoryMill . StoryMill is a tool for writing fiction material, very close to writing movies scripts, including characters and scenes. It’s not a surprise that Mariner launched something so close to script writing since they are also owning Contour, one of the best tools for writing actual movie scripts. But it was too complicated for an ebook. Great for a novel, but an ebook is usually less than a novel.

So, I decided to make some tweaks to my MacJournal setup and come up with something a little bit more complex than a MacJournal vanilla setup but less complicated than a full blown StoryMill installation. I made use of MacJournal tagging capabilities, entry attributes like status and label, and of course, smart journals. At the end of the post you’ll also be able to download a template containing all the modifications described here.

Writing An Ebook The Smart Way

Well, enough with talking, let’s do some work. Here’s how you can create a setup for writing an ebook similar to the one I use right now.

The Main Journal

First and foremost, I created a new journal in MacJournal and named it after my future ebook. In this post, I’ll use a MacJournal template for an ebook called “7 Things”. It’s an example ebook which contains all that I’ve learned from my daughter, each year. She’s 3 now, so I will have 3 chapters. This journal will hold all the necessary information for my ebook, acting like a main repository.

After that, I established a little routine for writing stuff in this journal. Nothing complicated: each time I add an entry in this journal I tag it using the Inspector window. And this is where the power of this setup actually is, in the tagging area. If the entry is a chapter of my ebook I add a tag “book chapter”. If the entry is an idea, I add to that entry the tag “ideas”. If the entry is just a research note, I tag it “notes”. I think you got the idea. Exactly, when I write some blog post, I tag it “blog”. Tagging your posts is a great habit anyway, regardless of the fact that you’re writing an ebook or not.

Another important habit is to keep a close reference of your entry status. Using the Inspector make sure you assess each time after you finished writing something the status of it. Mac Journal offers 5 statuses for your entries: Unknown, Not Started, Underway, Needs Review and Completed. Most of the time I’m in the “Needs Review” status. When I finished a chapter I assign it the status: “Completed”. You’ll see later why this is important. (more…)