A Letter from the Founder
I started Finance Foundry because I believe most people have a broken relationship with money. And almost everything in our culture is designed to keep it that way.
We’re surrounded by noise. Influencers selling get-rich-quick fantasies. Apps that gamify spending. A financial industry that profits from your confusion. Social media feeds engineered to make you feel like you’re behind, no matter how well you’re actually doing.
The result? Most people either ignore their finances entirely (flying blind and hoping it works out) or they obsess over every dollar in a way that’s exhausting and unsustainable. Neither path leads anywhere good.
I’ve seen both extremes up close. I spent two years as an equity research analyst on Wall Street, where I watched people earning seven figures live paycheck to paycheck because their lifestyle always expanded to match their income. Then I spent nearly a decade in corporate strategy, where I watched smart, high-earning professionals avoid looking at their finances because the whole topic felt overwhelming and vaguely shameful.
Same problem from two different angles: nobody had a system. Everybody was winging it. And the financial industry was happy to keep it that way, because confused people pay more fees, buy more products, and click more ads.
I think there’s a better way. And it starts with a few beliefs that guide everything I write here.
Money matters most when you don’t have enough of it. Once you do, you realize how little it actually matters.
The sooner you internalize this, the less time you’ll waste chasing a number that was never going to make you happy. Money is a tool. A powerful one. But it’s not a purpose, and confusing the two will cost you years.
Comparison is the most expensive habit you’ll never see on a bank statement.
It starts small. A glance at someone else’s house, car, vacation, promotion. Then it grows. Social media pours fuel on it daily. The people I’ve known who are most trapped by money are not the ones who have the least. They’re the ones who can never stop measuring themselves against others. The antidote isn’t discipline. It’s defining what “enough” looks like for you, writing it down, and building toward that number instead of someone else’s.
Most people are financially trapped, and they don’t realize it’s a choice.
Trapped looks like this: total dependence on a paycheck from a job you’d leave tomorrow if you could. No flexibility over your time. No margin for things to go wrong. If the cost of living rises faster than your income (and for most people, it does), you become a little more constrained every year. This is the default path. It doesn’t have to be yours.
Freedom is built on systems, not willpower.
Budgeting is like dieting. If you’re obsessing over every meal, every transaction, every dollar, something is fundamentally broken. I believe in setting the big picture once a year, checking the instruments once a month, and ignoring the noise in between. Simple systems, consistently followed, will outperform complicated strategies every time.
The real path to wealth is narrow, boring, and unpopular.
Live below your means. Invest the difference automatically. Don’t get distracted by shortcuts. Don’t let your lifestyle expand every time your income does. Most of what I write here comes back to this idea in one form or another, because it’s the one thing that actually works across every income level, every market condition, and every stage of life.
That’s what Finance Foundry is about.
Not hype. Not tricks. Not another voice telling you to manifest abundance or time the market.
Just a clear-eyed, systems-driven approach to making money a solved problem in your life, so you can move on to the things that actually matter.
If that resonates with you, stick around. There’s a lot more to come.
— The Founder