Money. Health. Time.
One ledger.

A life worth living is a life worth measuring.

Why I spent a decade running my family on a 76-sheet workbook — and then built the tool I couldn’t buy.

I’ve staked my whole adult life on that sentence. This letter is the story of where it led — and why Ledger of Life exists.

There are no dress rehearsals. You get one life.

One life. One ledger.

And three accounts fund it: Money. Health. Time.

I wasn’t born to any of this. I grew up on welfare. My father went to prison when I was a kid. My grandparents raised me from the eighth grade. I tell you that not for sympathy, but because it’s the reason I believe what I believe: life doesn’t happen to you. It happens for you — if you choose to play it that way.

In 2014, I was 28 years old with a net worth of $181,364 and a goal I said out loud to anyone who would listen: $10 million in twenty years. People thought I was a crackpot. Even my wife thought I was nuts. I loved that — being called crazy meant I was playing a different game.

That year I did two things. I built a spreadsheet. And I started a blog — anonymous, but radically transparent — publishing my real numbers every month so I couldn’t quietly quit on myself. The workbook kept the score; the blog kept me honest.

“The workbook kept the score; the blog kept me honest.”

The spreadsheet grew into a 76-sheet financial operating system. An aggregator fed it — for a decade, Personal Capital (now Empower) pulled in my net worth and my transactions, and that’s genuinely all it did for me. Everything that mattered happened in the sheet: the tax planning, the savings-rate math, the private investments, the plans versus actuals.

I knew exactly what I was doing, because it was my day job. I spent my career turning Excel into enterprise-level finance and accounting applications for companies — the spreadsheet everyone knows and trusts on the front end, a real engine underneath. I used to daydream about white-labeling that for families. The economics never worked. Nobody pays $20,000 a year to manage their household.

So for ten years I ran the hybrid: apps for plumbing, Excel for thinking. And for ten years the apps never learned the things that actually move the needle. Tax planning, most of all — because it’s not how much you make, it’s how much you keep, and investment returns are probabilistic while tax savings are guaranteed. Planning with real rigor. A savings rate treated like the lever it is. Private investments tracked as seriously as public ones. The true cost of a position, net of every dividend and premium it ever paid you.

“It’s not how much you make. It’s how much you keep.”

The math worked. I hit $10 million by 35 — thirteen years ahead of schedule — and turned a $267.42 founding investment into a company worth more than $45 million. I published the journey the whole way. My money has always been where my mouth is.

At the end of last year, I finished selling that company and fully exited. And for the first time, I had all three: the tools, the time, and the talent.

I’ll be direct about the tools, because candor is the house style: AI was my co-builder. I could not have built this without it — and it could not have built this without me. The story goes that an admirer once asked Picasso for a quick sketch; he dashed it off in minutes and named a fortune for it. “But it took you minutes.” “No,” he said. “It took me a lifetime.” The story is probably legend. The math behind it is not: Ledger of Life took about eighty hours of my own time across two months, mostly between 5 and 7 a.m. — work we estimated would have taken a solo senior engineer a couple thousand hours. And it took a decade of keeping the books on my own life, and a career spent building these systems for companies. The eighty hours were fast. The lifetime wasn’t.

“The eighty hours were fast. The lifetime wasn’t.”

What came out is the tool I couldn’t buy at any price: everything my workbook did, everything the apps should have done, and the things neither of them ever imagined. Built by a spreadsheet person — and finally, honestly, beyond the spreadsheet. Bring your history with you; it will be the seed, not the casualty.

I’d be lying if I said my ledger stayed balanced. For years, Money got the attention and Health ebbed and flowed. I made that trade knowingly, while I was young enough to recover, and I don’t regret it — it bought my freedom by 35. But it was a loan, not a gift.

In early 2022, a few months after selling the first piece of my company, I called the loan. No more ebb and flow. Sleep. Strength. Steps. Nutrition. Meditation — the one I’m still worst at, which is exactly why it stays on the list. The best longevity drugs are free; those five are the cheapest prescription in the equation.

I’m in the best shape of my life at 39 — better than I was at 29 — and the plan is simple: make 49 embarrass 39. Because money without health isn’t wealth. Money is just a tool.

“Money without health isn’t wealth. Money is just a tool.”

Years ago I read about a Navy SEAL who kept a paper grid — fifty-two weeks across, eighty years down — and every Sunday marked a box and asked himself one question: did I spend that week the way I meant to?

I rebuilt his grid in Excel, except mine was a hundred years deep, because I intend to be here for the whole thing. Every Sunday, an X. Later I made it physical: 1,200 marbles on my desk — one for every month of a hundred years — moving, one each month, from a jar labeled Memento Vivere — remember to live — to a jar labeled Memento Mori — remember you’ll die.

That ritual is now alive inside Ledger of Life, next to a timeline for the memories, moments, and milestones as they happen — a highlight reel that isn’t performing for an audience. It’s for you, and someday, for the people you love.

Here is what the marbles taught me. Time is the only account you cannot deposit into. It’s the only asset we are all forced to spend to zero. You can always make more money. You can’t make more time. Which means the most important problem you will ever solve is not asset allocation.

It’s time allocation.

Read that again.

There’s an essay by Michael Josephson called What Will Matter hanging in my house as a standing gut-check. Its answer, and mine: what will matter is what you built, what you gave, and the memories that live on in the people you love. “Choose to live a life that matters.”

So that’s why this exists. One private, encrypted book for everything you have: your net worth to the dollar, your sleep to the night, your life to the second. A single source of truth for a life lived on purpose.

If you keep a spreadsheet you half-love and half-resent; if you suspect you’re paying more tax than you should and nobody in your app stack even tries to help; if your kids’ bedtimes have started to feel countable — you’re who I built this for. During the beta, I onboard every household personally. Bring your history; we’ll tie out your numbers together.

One more thing. For eleven years I published this journey anonymously — transparency without the bragging rights. When I finished selling the company, I decided the things I build should carry my name. This letter is me keeping that promise.

My goal in all of this is simple: live well and give well.

I wish you a truly prosperous life — with a lifetime of love to share, an abundance of health to spare, and friends and family who care.