Personal Finance

Built Wealthy

The Skilled Tradesperson's Complete Guide to Financial Independence

Electricians • Plumbers • HVAC • Welders • Carpenters • Contractors

About the Book

The financial playbook that was never written for you.

The skilled trades produce some of the best-paid workers in America—and those workers retire broke at rates that would embarrass a much lower-income profession. Not because they didn't earn enough. Not because they didn't work hard. But because every piece of financial advice ever written was built for someone with a steady salary and an HR department.

You have spent your career solving hard problems with your hands. You deserve a financial guide that treats you with the same seriousness you bring to your work.

Built Wealthy is a practical, plain-language financial guide that covers everything the generic books skip: how to budget when your income isn't predictable, how to handle taxes when you're self-employed, which retirement accounts actually make sense, how to navigate insurance with no employer behind you, and how to build a financial life that accounts for the reality that physical work has a different relationship with time than desk work does.

This isn't a get-rich-quick book. It's a step-by-step financial system that works for the way you earn money and live your life.

What's Inside

11 chapters. One 90-day action plan.

Every chapter is built around the real financial decisions tradespeople face—not theory, not jargon, not advice designed for someone else's life.

Chapter 1

The Tradesperson's Money Problem

Chapter 2

Your Money System

Chapter 3

The Tax Game Nobody Taught You

Chapter 4

The Benefits Gap

Chapter 5

Retirement Accounts for the Self-Employed

Chapter 6

Going Independent

Chapter 7

When the Work Dries Up

Chapter 8

Good Years and How to Use Them

Chapter 9

The Body Problem

Chapter 10

Charge What You're Worth

Chapter 11

Your 90-Day Action Plan

Who This Book Is For

Whether you're 24 or 51, there's a path.

If any of these sound like you, this book was written for your situation.

✓

You're self-employed or thinking about going independent, and no one ever explained the financial side of working for yourself.
✓

You make good money but can't figure out where it goes—especially in the slow months.
✓

You've never set up a retirement account, or you started one and stopped contributing.
✓

You're paying too much in taxes because no one showed you the deductions that apply to your trade.
✓

Your body is telling you the clock is running, and you need a plan that accounts for that.
✓

You want to retire with dignity, on your own terms, before your body makes the decision for you.

About the Author

Dustin Rhodes

Dustin has been self-employed in the contracting trades for over two decades. He learned the financial side of working for himself the way most people do: by getting it wrong first and figuring it out later—losing years he can't recover to things he didn't know to ask about.

He didn't know he was paying both sides of Social Security until the tax bill arrived. He didn't know what health insurance actually cost until he saw his first monthly premium. He priced his work too low for longer than he should have. He ran everything through one checking account and convinced himself he understood where the money was going.

Built Wealthy is the book he wishes had existed when he started.

Built Wealthy

The financial playbook that was never written for you.

11 chapters. One 90-day action plan.

Whether you're 24 or 51, there's a path.

Dustin Rhodes

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