I quit a perfectly good job, sold most of what I owned, bought an RV, and started driving across the United States with my wife.

People thought we were having a midlife crisis. We were having a clarity crisis — and the answer wasn't staying put.

Here's what pushed me over the edge. Not one thing — a slow accumulation of numbers that kept me up at night.

The richest country on Earth. The most sophisticated financial system ever built. And more than half its citizens can't handle a car repair without going into debt.

That's not a personal failure. That's a system failure.

The failure starts in schools. Only five states require high school students to take a personal finance course. Those five — Alabama, Missouri, Tennessee, Virginia, Utah — consistently score highest on financial literacy tests. The other forty-five states? A quarter of them got an F. Including California. Including Massachusetts. States with some of the best universities in the world can't be bothered to teach their teenagers how a credit card works.

Kids graduate with calculus skills and zero understanding of compound interest. They can analyze a Shakespeare sonnet but can't read a 401(k) statement. Then they walk into a financial system designed to confuse them and wonder why they're drowning.

The failure continues with the industry. Most financial products are deliberately complex. Not because complexity is necessary — because complexity is profitable. The more confused you are, the easier it is to sell you something expensive that you don't need.

And the people selling it? The majority of so-called "financial advisors" in this country have no legal obligation to put your interests first. They can — legally — recommend products that pay them the highest commission while telling you it's "suitable" for your situation. And it's all perfectly legal.

That word — suitable — should make your skin crawl. Your doctor can't prescribe you a medicine that's merely "suitable" while getting paid by the drug company. But your financial advisor can. And does. Every day.

So we started driving.

My wife and I loaded up the RV and hit the road. Colleges. Churches. Goodwill centers. Professional associations. Community groups. Anyone who would let us set up a projector and talk for an hour about money.

Not about products. Not about markets. About money — how it works, how it compounds, how to protect it from the people who want to take it from you legally.

We talked to young people crushed by student debt — over $1.3 trillion nationally, averaging $37,000 per borrower. Kids who postponed buying homes, getting married, having children — not because they didn't want those things, but because the math didn't work and nobody ever taught them how to make it work.

We talked to families where money was the thing nobody discussed and everybody fought about. Where financial stress was leaking into health, into relationships, into every corner of their lives.

We talked to people who had been sold financial products they didn't understand by advisors who didn't have to care whether those products worked.

That's why I built StandUP Advisors.

The name isn't clever branding. It's a statement of intent. Stand up for the person who nobody in finance is standing up for. The household with less than $100,000 in net worth — that's 77.5 million households — who can't meet the minimums at the big wirehouses and aren't profitable enough for the brokerages to care about.

Stand up against the conflicts of interest baked into the traditional advisory model. Against the dual-registered broker-advisor who collects commissions on Monday and calls himself a fiduciary on Tuesday.

Stand up for the idea that financial advice should be simple, transparent, and legally required to be in your interest. Not suitable. Not appropriate. In your interest.

I brought everything with me — CFP®, CAIA, MBA in Finance, 15+ years of working with families across every income level. I just left behind the conflicts.

We're still driving. Still teaching. Still showing up in communities that the financial industry forgot about. Because I believe that doing what's right and following your conscience can be both morally correct and the path to building something that lasts.

If you're reading this and you feel like nobody in finance is looking out for you — you're probably right. Most of them aren't.

We are.