About Brad

I learned this the expensive way. You don't have to.

At thirty-one, I woke up in a jail cell with about a decade of my life already gone. Lost to alcohol. Buried in roughly $20,000 of debt. Almost nothing built, and almost no one left to call. Multiple DUIs between twenty-one and thirty-one. A future I'd quietly set on fire, one "harmless" choice at a time. That was rock bottom.

Then, one small choice at a time, I climbed out. I've got eight-plus years sober now. I married the woman who refused to give up on me. A home. A career I'm proud of. The kind of life I honestly didn't think was possible for a man like me.

Here's what nobody told me back then. That life wasn't built on a lucky break. It was built on small, ordinary choices, made early and stacked on top of each other. That's the whole secret. And it's the thing I'd give anything to have understood at seventeen instead of thirty-one.

So I wrote down the playbook

First as a book, From the Bottom, Now I'm Here. Then as this: Thrifty Crew, the step-by-step version of how the climb actually happened.

It's not financial advice from a man with letters after his name. I don't have those. What I have is the view from the bottom, and the whole way back up. And a stubborn belief that a head start with money and life shouldn't be expensive or complicated.

Everything here runs on one idea: pay a little now instead of a lot later. Use it for your own life, or to teach a young person in yours. Faith was part of my comeback, and I won't pretend otherwise. But this is a story and a set of tools, never a sermon.

If you've ever felt behind, hear me on this: you're not behind. You're early.

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