It's Brian Preston, the Money Guy, restoring order to your financial chaos. Retirement, investing, taxes. You've got financial questions, he's got financial answers. It's Brian Preston, the Money Guy.

December 13, 2006. You guys probably been wondering where I've been for the last two weeks, I've got to tell you, as we get closer to the holidays, especially in the month of December, it gets tough to get you these podcasts out on a consistent basis, just because we get very busy here doing year-end planning as well as everybody starts traveling. And that's one of the reasons, I'm just going to go ahead and let you know, that this will be the last podcast for 2006. Heidi's going on vacation, she will be gone for about a week or so, and we're just not going to have time to get another podcast show out there for you guys before the new year. So I just wanted to go ahead and throw that out there so you'd know why in the world you're we're not hearing the Money Guy as much as you were hearing in the past. It's just because we're taking a little time, catching a little breather for the holidays, and then we'll kick it off in January, 2007 just as hard as we did at the beginning of 2006, and throughout 2006.

Today's topic, and then we'll get off on some sidebar items. But just to let you know today's financial chaos topic is planning well and avoiding the sharks. Remember the whole purpose of the Money Guy podcast is to help you restore order to your financial chaos. My name is Brian Preston, I am a certified public accountant, a certified financial planner, and a personal financial specialist, and I own a fee-only wealth management firm outside of Atlanta. And we're trying to do everything in our power to help you make good financial decisions. And I think there's not a better time to talk about this than December, which is Christmas, the month of Christmas, where we can talk about why we did this podcast. The main reason we did this podcast is I know that there's a void out there where there's, it's hard to find truly objective advice unless you've got a gazillion dollars in the bank. And I know that's a problem. I'm guilty of that with my firm because we have asset minimums before we can take on relationships. And hopefully we can help fill that void with this brand new technology of podcasting.

To give you guys a recap, when we first started doing these podcasts back in January of 2006, we were really considered pioneers. I know that sounds ridiculous to say that, since it's only been approximately a year, we're in the twelfth month now. But if you think about it in the terms in the fact that Youtube turned into a billion dollar company within less than two years, you can see how fast technology's moving these days. But when we started, there were just a lot of mom and pops like myself out there podcasting, and then as I think you've seen throughout the year, I think the big push came around March, April, May, you started seeing the big boys, like the Wall Street Journal, Kiplinger, Business Week and others jump right into the bandwagon, starting to push out the little guys like myself. We have somehow been able to sustain staying on the front page of iTunes, on the business section, and I truly think it's because of you guys, and I want to give you a big thank you for that. If you want to continue to contact the show, you can call our toll free number, that's 1-800-762-8502, once again, that's 1-800-762-8502. You can also send me an email at Brian, b-r-i-a-n @money-guy.com, or you can go to our MySpace page and that's just go to MySpace.com\moneyguypodcast, and you can...
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