Kiwi's Buffet book gets over the line

Lucas Remmerswaal and the team who helped create his e-book. Photo / Steven McNicholl

For the past few months a Whangarei investment adviser and father-of-six has beavered away on what he calls his labour of love.

Lucas Remmerswaal has been on a mission to produce and publish a children's book based on the "ideas and principles" of Warren Buffett before the investor and philanthropist turns 80 at the end of this month.

And he's accomplished his goal - having gained permission from Buffett to take ideas from the letters the billionaire pens to shareholders of his investment firm, Berkshire Hathaway, and use them in his story.

The Tale of Tortoise Buffett and Trader Hare, an e-book written by Remmerswaal and illustrated by Australian artist Annette Lodge, will be available this week as an iPad app in iTunes stores worldwide.

Remmerswaal, who says he spent $150,000 on the project, hopes his tale will change the way a generation approaches its finances.

This, he says, may in turn help avoid future financial crises.

In the story Tortoise Buffett represents his namesake, while Trader Hare is the embodiment of all the crooked financiers who helped bring about the fiscal chaos of recent years.

Trader Hare and Tortoise Buffett have an argument over who can grow wealth the fastest and decide to settle it by having a race to see who can become the richest.

The hare rushes off to the bank to borrow money to invest, while Tortoise Buffett takes a slower, more calculated approach - working hard to save money and investing his surplus capital.

The stock market crashes and the hare gets bankrupted by his bank because he has no capital to fall back on, leaving Tortoise Buffett the winner.

It's a tale inspired by the caustic financial practices that brought about the recession, as well as the pain felt by Mum-and-Dad investors who lost their life savings to unscrupulous finance firms.

Remmerswaal said he hoped the book would "create a change from that [Rod] Petricevic and [Mark] Bryers thinking to Buffett thinking".

Some might argue, however, that the Berkshire boss is part of the flawed financial system that helped bring about the recent crisis.

Buffett recently spoke out in support of Goldman Sachs - in which Berkshire Hathaway holds around $7 billion in preferred stock - as the investment bank fell beneath a cloud of fraud charges brought by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

"[Buffett's] basic character and habits are integrity," Remmerswaal says. "The difficulty is that when you become as big as Buffett you end up investing in places that perhaps go over the line a little bit."

But will things like Warren Buffett, surplus capital and bankruptcy strike a chord with the book's target audience of 6 to 12-year-olds?

National standards specialist Professor John Hattie, of the University of Auckland, said Remmerswaal was "on to a winner".

Remmerswaal says the interactive nature of an e-book helps engage children.

"It's so much fun this way," he says. "It's so much better than a [hardcopy] book because it talks to you."

The iPad app was developed by Newton firm Kiwa Media Group, which produces an e-book line called QBook. It will sell for US$6.99 ($9.80).