W00t! Here we are at the first ever session of the MeaningfulMoney podcast! I'm so excited to finally get this off the ground; it represents a broadening of what I'm doing here at MeaningfulMoney, in a bid to get the message of simple financial planning out to the world. There is only one other UK-based Personal Finance Podcast running as I type this, so the market's wide open for me!

In this first episode, I tell my story, how I dealt (or didn't deal) with money as I was growing up. How I ended up failing my university degree and working for McDonald's. And then how I became a Chartered & Certified Financial Planner.

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I talk about how my wife Joanne and I have learned to handle our own money and the lessons I've learned from my clients over a 15 year financial career.

Then I talk about the inspiration for setting up MeaningfulMoney.tv, mentioning my hero Gary Vaynerchuk and his book Crush It (Affiliate link). After 260-odd video episodes I've learned a lot about how content works and what people want. Video is a great medium as it creates an awesome connection between creator and viewer, but it is very attention-intensive. You can't watch a video while doing something else – you have to focus!

I've been listening to lots of podcasts recently, especially from the likes of Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income, Michael Hyatt, Cliff Ravenscraft of Podcast Answer Man and Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner. I've found it a great way to consume information while doing something else, like driving to work or running. So that's why I decided to start a podcast myself; it'll give me chance to deal with certain subjects in greater depth than I can on video, where the attention span is usually about 5 minutes.

So here's the plan:

• Each episode will be about 20-30 minutes in length
• I'll deal with one broad subject per episode
• There will be two segments to the show initially, and maybe a third added soon:
  • Firstly, I'll give you everything you need to know about the subject
  • Secondly, I'll give you everything you need to do to take things forward in your own finances
  • In due course, I'll add in listener questions, either reading out questions received by email or voicemails left on the feedback page.

So thanks for checking out the podcast. Let me know if there's a subject you particularly want me to tackle, or leave any other feedback. when the iTunes feed is live (when I've got three or four sessions recorded), I'd be so grateful if you could leave me a rating and/or a review as this makes the podcast visible to more people.