It had long been his goal to write a book on cross-border financial planning. Given the responsibilities that come with a growing family, however, he decided to complete the second and third levels of his CFA designation first.
When the time was right to start work on the book, Wennersten promised himself he wouldn’t turn out another in a long line of technical, dry financial planning tomes.
“[Those books] are really long, really hard to get through. I wanted to try to provide something that was a lot easier — something that people who wanted to do it themselves would be able to understand and take action on,” he said.
“My expectation and hope is that people decide they don’t want to do it on their own, and so they call me, but at the end of the day, all the information is in there,” Wennersten said. “I tried to not make it salesy. … It’s really just giving you the information you need in a way that I think is understandable and readable. And I tried to make it fun.”
“Crossing the 49th Parallel: A Retirement Planning Guide for Moving Across the Canada-U.S. Border” is available on multiple platforms, including Amazon. Wennersten used the company’s self-publishing service.
Wennersten said he found the writing process surprisingly easy, probably because he was writing financial plans all day at work. The editing process was tougher.
It’s a quick read at 160 pages. But it was almost twice that after the first draft. “It was way too long,” he said. “Going back through and eliminating things was rather difficult.”
The book went through multiple drafts — Wennersten hired editors to bring fresh perspective to the project. “By the time I got done with this book, I’d read it hundreds of times,” he said. “I want to read it again.”
There isn’t time for that though. Wennersten is in marketing mode, building an audience for his book and growing his practice in the process.
“I started from zero. I had no online presence,” he said. Now he’s posting almost every day. All of it’s meant to be informational and helpful for people,” he said.
Wennersten estimates that he spends about 40% of his work week promoting the book and his practice.
“I don’t expect a large number of book sales. It’s about proving expertise. It’s raising brand awareness,” he said. “I can buy these for like, $2.50 from Amazon, and it costs me 70 cents for a business card. [The book is] way more helpful for the person that I hand it to, or the person that buys it.”