I grew up working class. Nobody in my family owned a home. Nobody had savings. Three generations of paycheck-to-paycheck living, and the financial illiteracy was inherited like a name. The system in this book is not wisdom passed down. It's the system I needed and didn't have.
I left where I came from in my twenties. I made the decision early that the financial shape of my family was not going to be mine. I had no idea how. I got married young, started a family young, and did both before I had any of the structure that's in this book. My thirties were the cost of doing my twenties without a system.
Then a crisis hit. I'm not going to detail it. What I'll say is that it finished what the deficit had started — we were within weeks of losing everything we had not yet lost. That period rewrote me. I'm not writing the system from the perspective of a man who had it. I'm writing it from the perspective of a man who needed it, didn't have it, and built it from the wreckage of not having it. Every principle in Selfmade has a moment in my life I can point to where its absence nearly destroyed me. I am writing them in the order I needed them.
I write Selfmade for the man who's where I was — working hard, building something, and quietly aware that nothing structural is in place if anything actually goes wrong. The newsletter goes out every Friday. The eight principles are at indykarveli.com/the-system. The journal is at indykarveli.com/journal. The system is free. The only cost is doing the work.
Nobody is coming. We begin.
— Indy