About

Keith Emory grew up in a house where money was always tight, and it was nobody's fault. When he was young his parents were like two ships in the night, both of them working, one or two jobs each, passing in the doorway as one came home and the other left. That was just what it took to make ends meet. It wasn't that they were careless with money. Nobody had ever taught them how it works, and you can't hand down what you were never given.

He was the first in his family, immediate or extended, to build the kind of life most people would call making it, and he worked for every piece of it. He also hit adulthood with no real sense of how to handle a paycheck, and he carried heavy debt for years because of it. He got through it, though, and learned some of life's hardest lessons the long way around.

What finally turned things around wasn't luck or a windfall. It was a person. A mentor came along and taught him the things no one else had: saving, investing, fixing a credit score, clawing out of debt one honest step at a time. Ordinary stuff that ought to be common knowledge and somehow isn't.

What Life Taught Us is his way of handing those lessons back. It's the book he wishes someone had handed him. He writes plainly, without shame or jargon, for anyone trying to build a better life, whether they're just starting out or starting over.