About

About Chris Steelman

I’m not a financial advisor. I’m not a CPA. I don’t have an MBA and I’ve never worked on Wall Street.

I’m a husband, a father of three, and a guy who has stood in a grocery store doing math on his phone to figure out if he could afford both milk and gas this week. I’ve sat in a parking lot staring at my bank app, watching the numbers and wondering how we got here again. I’ve been the guy who skips lunch so the kids don’t have to skip anything.

I know what it feels like to be one payday away from everything falling apart.

Here’s what nobody tells you about that feeling: it doesn’t go away just because you make more money. I’ve watched people earn $40,000 and drown. I’ve watched people earn $120,000 and still live paycheck to paycheck. The number on the check isn’t the problem. The system is the problem. And nobody teaches you how to beat it, because the system was built to keep you running.

Why I Started Writing This

I got tired of financial advice written by people who’ve never been broke.

Every book on the shelf starts at Step 5. “Set up your investment portfolio.” “Max out your 401k.” “Build passive income streams.” Great advice if you’ve already got a cushion. Useless advice if you’re trying to survive until Friday.

Abraham Maslow figured this out decades ago. You can’t think about growth when you’re in survival mode. Your brain literally won’t let you. It’s too busy scanning for threats, counting down the hours until the next deposit, calculating which bill you can push one more week.

So I started where the experts refuse to start. At the bottom. At survival. At the place where most of us actually live.

What I’m Not

I’m not pretending to have all the answers. I’m not standing on a stage in a rented suit telling you to manifest abundance. I’m not selling a course for $997 that teaches you to sell courses for $997.

I’m a dad with a family to feed who got tired of being scared about money and decided to do something about it. Everything in these books is something I learned the hard way, tested in my own life, and distilled into the clearest, most actionable form I could manage.

If it didn’t work for a tired parent with a full-time job and no margin for error, it didn’t make the cut.

What This Is

One Payday Away is a book series built on one idea: meet people where they are, not where you wish they were.

If you’re in survival mode, Book 1 speaks your language. It doesn’t lecture you about compound interest. It helps you stop the bleeding in 30 days.

If you’ve already got some breathing room, the later books help you build from stability to real independence. Not overnight. Not with tricks. Just one level at a time, the way it actually works in real life.

Every book comes with free tools you can download and use today. Checklists, trackers, calculators, scripts. The stuff I wish someone had handed me when I was staring at my bank app in that parking lot.

The Bottom Line

I’m learning alongside you. I’m sharing what works and throwing out what doesn’t. I’ve got no interest in impressing anyone and zero patience for advice that sounds good on a podcast but falls apart on a Tuesday afternoon when the electric bill hits.

If you’re closer to the street than you’d like to admit, you’re in the right place. Let’s fix that.

— Chris Steelman