The Frugality Encyclopedia and Pareto's Principle

This book seems to be the staple for frugal people.  It is a 959 page book, yes nearly 1000 pages (1200 articles on different topics for frugality)!  Some of it is said to be outdated, but damn, 1000 pages of shit…unreal.  Blogs take material from this and adapt it to their style of frugality.  From everything that I have read about frugality, especially with children and others that depend on you (businesses, employees, etc), there is an art to really knowing when cutting costs will deliver more money saved than an “investment” into a product, service, etc.  My take away from this is that there comes a point when you have to assess the value of your time, as Tim Ferriss explains in the FHWW.  If you are spending your time “making your own salad dressing” to save $.50 one every several months, or spending several hours sorting through newspapers clipping coupons, you need to stop and ask yourself, how much is my time worth (i.e. can I generate more money by working at my trade or on another project instead of looking for ways to save small amounts of money).  I can see frugality becoming a time waster if not done efficiently, and this may need to be addressed in the book.  I think we should consider making this concept a core value of the book — an efficient and effective approach to frugality, especially for busy people that don’t have excessive time to dedicate to saving money.  In FHWW terminology, we need to take a look at all available material for frugality and 80/20 it.

This is he book, The Complete Tightwad Gazette:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375752250?tag=onejourney-20

Here is a review of the book from The Simple Dollar:
http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2007/07/27/review-the-complete-tightwad-gazette/

Read Full Post »

Conference Call with Mike Piper

Great call with Mike, it gave me a much better understanding of the process we will need to go through in order to make this venture successful.  Wow, that was a lot of info to digest.  Even going through the notes below is pretty cumbersome.  I am first giving my overall reaction to the call, then below that I have detailed notes of our Q&A.  Take a deep breath and get ready…

Summary of my analysis after the call:

Advantages of our Frugal Book idea:

• We have a straight-forward topic that potentially appeals to many people
• We can easily search and find ideas for generating creative content for the book
• We both have a good working (and successful) understanding of the material we are covering

Challenges with our idea:

• Will need to create a successful blog in our topic area
• Will need to convince readers (as well as other bloggers) that our material is worth buying and contains significant value over what readers can find on other blogs or through internet searches

My quick analysis of book topics in general:

• Evaluating the viability of a topic (I am doing my best below to break down each model here)
  • Mike’s Tax Topics:
    • Complex topics, niche target (people that want to do their own taxes) with objective answer/solutions –> Mike is compiling answers and simplifying it in a short resource book
  • Mike’s Investing Topics:
    • Complex topics, broad subject with subjective answers/solutions –> Mike is compiling data and proposing a viewpoint for a solution
  • Our Frugality Topic:
    • Simple to moderate complexity of topics, broad subject with subjective answers/solutions –> We are attempting to compile proven ideas/solutions to saving money and presenting as a quick resource guide that guarantees results
  • Our Job Interview Topic:
    • Moderate to Complex Topics, niche subject (sales jobs) with subjective/objective answers/solutions –> We are compiling the most common questions and presenting researched answers/solutions to them
• Of the topics above, the tax topic lends itself best to this business model and surprisingly, the job interview muse (and possibly a book?) actually looks pretty good on paper…

Action Steps for us to make a book successful:

1. Create a website to market the book
2. Write book
3. Format book
4. Send it out to proofreaders (7-8 people)
5. Revise Changes
6. Design Cover (outsource this)
7. Convert to PDF and send to Lightning Source
8. Approve the proof (will eventually show up on Amazon)
   1. Amazon publishing can take from 2 days to 2 months
9. Find people to review the book on Amazon

Notes: Steps 3-8 may take a couple months

————————————————————

Q&A Notes

The rest of the info below are notes from the conversation with Mike:

Read Full Post »