Hello Friends, 

I started reading a book recently that has created a stirring in my soul. An ache for something more and in this time, a lot of questions have risen. One thing you will learn about FI (Financial Independence) is that once you have what you deem is “enough”, simply collecting more money and stockpiling on top just seems to lose it’s glimmer. 

This questioning has me reassessing and looking within to see if my purpose has changed. I’ve known for a while that I get the most juice out of teaching. I believe deeply in financial proficiency as a vehicle for freedom and times like we are in now, have driven this point home to me clearer than ever. It pains me to see people struggling to make ends meet after just a few weeks of less employment, it feels like our system has failed us. 

I think my “repurposing” will be a longer conversation and yet I feel confident that financial know-how is valuable, needs to be cultivated, passed down, and shared widely. I definitely don’t know it all and yet I am committed to keep learning, keep researching, keep asking questions and keep bringing what I know and discover here to share with you. 

Today, I want to share a book with you that I adore for two reasons: for its creative format of teaching through storytelling (my favorite) and that it is written in a young character’s voice, making it feel super accessible to the young people in your life. 

About a month pre-Corona, David Mason, reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in reading / reviewing his and his wife’s new book called: 

“The Cash Machine: A Tale of Passion, Persistence, and Financial Independence”

In his email he said, “To the best of my knowledge, it's the first book of its kind, a novel that gives its readers a solid grounding in financial literacy. The Cash Machine teaches hundreds of financial lessons, all taught through a love story.” How could I say no to that? I’m a finance geek and a hopeless romantic, bring it on!

I loved it so much that I wanted to share it all with you. I decided to ask David and Chana if they could share a bit more about the creation of this novel with us today. 

Thanks for joining us guys!

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ZM: I see that you both are authors individually & together multiple times over (congrats by the way, I have been trying to get just one written -- tell me your secrets!), what made you want to write a book on such a different topic than what you have previously written about?

D & CM: There’s an old adage in writing that it’s best to “write what you know.” This is why so many writers come out with multiple books that sound like they’re repeating the same ideas. We don’t subscribe to that adage so much. Rather, we like to write about the subjects we most want to learn about, for we find there’s no better way to master a subject than to research and write a novel on the topic. In our case, we came to a place where we realized we desperately needed to get ourselves a financial education. Despite making significant money in our lives, we found ourselves deep in debt, mostly because of stupid financial decisions. This realization persuaded us that it was time to write a money book and finally get ourselves that education we so desperately needed.

ZM:   Can you explain more about that process? I imagine all the research required would drag out the writing time considerably. Was that true for you?

D & CM: There’s no question that if our goal was to pump out books as quickly as possible, our writing model would be a very poor one indeed. The research that went into The Cash Machine was exhaustive and became Dave’s all-consuming passion for most of the first year of the writing process. 

ZM: On the book’s website: BuildMyCashMachine.com, you define your mission as “Learn, Grow, Teach” which is something I really resonate with and try to do on this blog. Can you tell us more about what that means for you? In what ways are you currently doing this and how are you aspiring to do this more in the future?

D & CM: Far from minding all the extra work required to research a book like The Cash Machine, we actually loved it, and not just for the sake of the book. The research we did for the book expanded our understanding of money and completely changed our financial path. By the time the book was published, we’d made huge shifts in our financial decisions and we’d already begun to see the fruits of those changes. We are spending, saving, investing, and tax-sheltering our money so much more intelligently than ever before. And the changes aren’t just showing up on our bottom line, but also in our decreased levels of anxiety, for we no longer feel like we’re in over our heads. Only once we’d applied the lessons to ourselves did we really feel prepared to put out a book teaching them to others.

In terms of the future, we’re currently working on three other books, all of which fit our model of Learn, Grow, Teach. One of them is the third book in Dave’s Biblical Fiction series The Age of Prophecy. Another is a novelized version of Chana’s non-fiction book Hold that Thought, which helps readers process and shift negative thoughts, and the third is a novel about personal responsibility and taking ownership over manifesting your dreams. 

At the same time, we’re also learning how to create online courses and summits around our current books so that we can help our readers put everything they’re learning into practice. 

To us, learning is a life-long process, and every time we learn one topic, it reveals other avenues for growth.

ZM: Do the characters in the book bear any resemblance to your lives? If so, which parts? 

D & CM: The characters themselves don’t resemble us much (though Chana, like Amber in the book, loves to cook), but the tension they experience over financial issues absolutely grew out of the tension we experienced around money in our own relationship. It’s a funny thing: had we learned about and discussed money together when we got married, we probably would have very quickly gotten on the same page about finances. However, since this was a taboo subject for us growing up, we lacked the education and vocabulary to even discuss it intelligently. So many of our poor money choices came from poor communication. This is a big reason the book is a love story. Money is a top cause of divorce and relationship tension, and lack of money is rarely the culprit. Rather, it’s poor money communication and choices. Making it a love story came out of our own relationship tension around money and allowed us to give couples exactly what we lacked, a structure for coming to one mind around financial decisions.

ZM: By the time I finished the book, I had a lot of questions, wondering if it was based on a true story and then in an interesting twist I read your author bio and learned that you live in Jerusalem! What made you write a book that feels US based (although I don’t know if you ever say where they live), teaching about US based retirement products and Real Estate / tax rules that likely don’t apply locally? 

D & CM: Both of us moved to Israel from the US in our twenties (though Chana lived in Colombia until she was five). While our physical and spiritual lives are in Israel, our financial lives are still very much based in the US. Dave runs a US business. Chana has a coaching practice that works primarily with English and Spanish speakers, in the US and elsewhere. Our investments are US-based. And most importantly, our largest readership is in the US. While many of the principles taught in the book are universal, it made the most sense to use the US as a setting.  

ZM: Who was the book written for? How do you hope it is used? What impact are you hoping it has? 

D & CM: When we write books, we like to write them for one specific reader rather than a group (a concept called an Ideal Customer Avatar or ICA). In this case, our ICA was a woman of 30 who is just making the transition to starting a family. While she was single and working full-time, money was never an issue, so she never thought much about it. Now that she’s looking to have a family, she’s starting to think longer-term and realizes that the time has come to get herself an education and start thinking, together with her partner, about the type of life they want to build and the financial foundations they’ll need to construct to enable it. 

But of course, there are so many groups we’d love to access the book. We’d love to get it in the hands of teenagers before they start taking on debt so they don’t wake up ten years later and find themselves in a huge hole. We’d love to get it in the hands of couples so they can get on the same page about money and not have finances drive them apart. 

In terms of impact, one goal we’ve set is that by January 1, 2021, at least 10,000 people should be in a better financial position because of the book. That’s not 10,000 downloads or 10,000 readers. It’s 10,000 people who’ve read the book and improved their financial position by implementing the book’s teachings.

ZM: There are a ton of Finance books out there, why did you think this one needed to be birthed? 

D & CM: The trouble with most finance books is that they’re only read by people who already know they want to work on their finances. Also, they usually only advocate one position. They say, “you need to take the path that I discovered and so you should do X.” But another finance book says, “no, you need to take my path, you should do Y.” 

We believe that people learn best through story. By making it a novel, not only could we teach the lessons more effectively, but we hope to get the book into the hands of readers who would never pick up a non-fiction finance book. Within a novel, different characters can represent different points of view. Our goal is not to have all of our readers come out on the same financial path. Rather, it’s to educate and open the readers up to ideas they may have never considered. So, if a couple reads the book together, one of them might resonate with Dylan’s position and another with Vinny’s. But now they’ve got the ability to discuss and debate the different perspectives and come to one mind about the choices they’re going to take together. The novel format is ideally suited to that kind of discussion.

ZM: Do you have a favorite chapter, character or lesson? Why?

D & CM: We love Vinny. We loved the idea of teaching tax concepts through a trash-talking tough guy with a vendetta against the IRS rather than through an accountant or attorney in a suit. 

ZM: You’ve got to tell me, was the Luther character and the whole story about how the guys met him, based on the popular Early Retirement story of the fisherman & the businessman (you can read the short parable on the link)? I thought it was a clever tie in. 

D & CM: It was not. In fact, only later when we heard the parable of the Mexican fisherman did we laugh about the accidental parallel. 

ZM: How have your financial lives been impacted by writing this book. Do you have some before and after examples for us? 

D & CM: Early on in our marriage, we did fine with money until we made enough to meet our needs. Trouble started when we began making significantly more than our cost of living. We literally had no idea what to do with the excess. And the financial decisions we did wind up making were so disastrous that rather than building a solid financial foundation we could rely upon in the future, we got ourselves into overwhelming debt and had to sell our house to dig ourselves out. 

After writing the book, we know exactly what our financial goal is (Financial Independence), we know the steps to take to build it (creating sources of passive income), and we know the techniques to keep more of our money in our pocket and spend less on living costs and taxes. It still blows our minds how easy it is for investors who take the right steps to avoid virtually all US taxes. We never realized taxes were optional before.

ZM: Anything else you would like to share with the community? 

D & CM: The number one thing we can leave you with is this: Take the time to learn. Without ever having to earn a dollar more, learning about money can allow you to reduce tension in your relationships, allow you to live where you want, how you want, allow you to choose a career you love, give you options you’d never have otherwise. Start learning as young as you can, before you make colossal mistakes and need to take work you hate to dig yourself out of a hole. There is no “right path” when it comes to money, but uneducated choices are the reason we have so much financial stress, so much money-related divorce, and so much bad debt.

ZM: If readers would like to reach out to see more books by you, where can they find you? 

D & CM: We really believe in our books and the power they can have to impact lives, so we’re happy to give most of them out for free. Starting with The Cash Machine, you can download your free copy at https://buildmycashmachine.com/. 

Our previous novel, The Size of Your Dreams, teaches tools to accomplish your goals and be more impactful in your life. You can download a free copy at https://thesizeofyourdreams.com/.

Chana wrote a non-fiction book called Hold That Thought: Build Clarity, Peace and Joy by Gaining Mastery over your Thinking. In this book, she shares 22 tools that she’s developed, largely through her work with clients, for identifying and changing disempowering thoughts. You can download a free copy at https://chanamason.com/.

Dave has written two books so far in his Biblical Fiction series The Age of Prophecy. Called a Biblical Harry Potter, the series attempts to bring the Biblical world to life for the modern reader, and it draws extensively on archeology and ancient textual, oral, and mystical traditions to recreate the ancient world. Download a free copy of Book 1, The Lamp of Darkness, at https://theageofprophecy.com/

Thanks again for taking the time to share with all of us!

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