COPY OF Financial Literacy: Literally

I am not a banker. I am not a lawyer. I am not a college professor with three degrees on the wall and a

corner office overlooking a city skyline. I am a man who was never given a formal or traditional public

school education, and that single fact has shaped every corner of my life, every thought I have about

money, and every reason I am sitting here writing these words to you now, before I leave this earth,

for the young and not yet born who will come after me.

That lack of formal schooling did not make me stupid, but it did make me invisible in rooms where

decisions are made, and it did make me vulnerable to people who understood contracts, interest rates,

and legal language that sounded like a foreign tongue. I learned early that the world does not wait for

you to catch up, and it certainly does not stop to explain itself. So I started teaching myself, quietly,

stubbornly, one word at a time, and I want to write a book for the young and not yet born because I do

not want them to spend decades learning what nobody bothered to teach me when my mind was still

soft and open.

I specifically want to educate my people, the ones who were never handed a savings account at birth,

the ones whose parents worked three jobs and still could not explain what a stock was, the ones who

heard the word trust and thought only of a person and never of a legal instrument holding wealth for

generations. My people have been kept from this knowledge on purpose, and they have been told in a

thousand quiet ways that money is not for them, that ~finance is for other folks, that poverty is just

what happens to people like us.

This is not a book about blaming the rich, though I will be honest with you about how they see us and

how many of them have no desire to understand the weight we carry. This is not a book about tearing

anyone down. This is a book about building something up, specifically about building up you, the

reader, with information that has been carefully kept from the poor and poorly educated of all races in

America. And it is a book about leaving a legacy for those after me, because I do not know how much

time I have left on this side of the grass, and I refuse to leave without putting this knowledge

somewhere it can outlive me.