Nussbaumer, James

Jim Nussbaumer composed his first novel – a football saga – at age eleven on the shiny turquoise typewriter he found under the Christmas tree. The book was entitled Reaching for the Goal. While his life has taken many turns since then, his focus on the Quest has never wavered.

Following tours of duty at Kent State University and in the U.S. Air Force, he spent the next twenty-five years in the financial services industry, excelling in a field he loathed – though not immune to its perks. By his thirties, running his own independent agency, he became an experienced public speaker and wrote a monthly column on financial security for Senior Forum, a regional Ohio newsletter. He then launched his own monthly client newsletter, Retirement Insights, which became hugely popular and evolved into a self-help publication with a nontraditional, nonreligious, spiritual slant.

Despite a long, successful career, in 2007 – faced with the pressures of an economy in freefall; the loss of one wife to cancer and two to divorce; the needs of his children and demands of an upscale lifestyle; and responsibilities to panicking clients – he illegally withdrew $100,000 of client’s funds to try to recoup the value of their investments and rescue his floundering business. The strategy failed and landed him a sentence of ten years.

His time in prison had been hell, and had also been unexpectedly fruitful, resulting in his return to his first love, writing, and the series that begins with The Master of Everything. The manuscripts were painstakingly handwritten in lined notebooks (he didn’t have a computer available in prison) and the material just keeps on coming.

I’ve got many, many blog posts , and many videos. I had some requests from FB and Twitter followers to describe some things, so I made this short video.