Folks Out Here Are Not Bad With Money.
We're Just Not Well Equipped For Oil
Patch Money.
Not one of us has ever been handed a system built for the amounts we make and the way this money actually arrives.
Not in school. Not at orientation. Not by an employer, and not by any money book or program any of us has picked up or signed up for. Every one of them assumed a life that looks nothing like ours.
Book + audiobook · In your inbox in about a minute
100 copies at $49 · then $69 · launch closes 10 November 2026
From the Firebag Aerodrome
Last day of the hitch — Calgary bound.
Dear fellow oil patch worker,
The cheque is real. So where does it go?
The money is not fake. You do the days. You do the hours. Every dollar of it gets earned somewhere cold, or loud, or a long way from home.
Not into an account. Not most of it. Most of us could not point at it if somebody asked us to.
Walk the row of trucks in that lot and you will find the same three things behind most of them.
A truck worth less than what is owed on it.
Something under a tarp that has been used three times since it was bought.
A storage bill that comes out every month for things nobody is using and nobody can sell.
And behind all of it, a number — everything earned since the first hitch — that almost none of us has ever sat down and added up.
It is worth adding up. It is always bigger than we think.
That is the part nobody wants to sit with.
Now the part that actually costs you
There is somebody on your crew twenty-five years deep. Everybody has one.
Two marriages gone. Knees are done. One shoulder does not go overhead anymore.
The truck is paid off. It is a 2011.
Do the arithmetic on what a career like that pays. It is a very large number, and every dollar of it was real too.
What is left is a truck and a storage unit.
Not a stupid person. One of the sharpest workers on that site. Could find a problem three others had walked past. Knew things about that plant that are not written down anywhere.
Nobody ever showed them a system for the money. So they ran it the way everybody runs it. Hitch after hitch, cheque after cheque, for a very long time.
Nobody handed any of us one either.
And the arithmetic does not care how sharp anybody is. It did not care that they were sharper than the one before them.
And the exit has been quietly pricing itself shut
Every one of us has looked at a job closer to home.
Most of us run the numbers for about four minutes and stop, because the number at home is a fraction of the number out here.
And we all tell ourselves the same thing afterwards. It is the money.
It is not the money. It is what goes out every month whether anybody works or not — and almost none of us has ever put that number next to what a job at home would pay.
The handcuffs are not made of money. They are made of payments.
Here is the part that stings
None of this is news on that site.
Nobody out there is confused about what is happening to them. This crew is not short of information. We have all been given the same advice our whole careers.
Save your money. Do not do what I did.
Handed to us, most of the time, by somebody who meant it and had not managed it themselves.
We got the speech. Nobody handed us the practice.
15 chapters · 5 parts · Book and audiobook together
The post-mortem
Seven things this crew has already tried. Every one of them died.
Nobody out here is sceptical because they are difficult. We are sceptical because we have paid for this before and watched it not hold.
So before anything else, here is every alternative on the table, what it actually is, why it fails on this schedule specifically, and what is different here.
Some of these I would still do. I will say so.
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1 · The budgeting app
What it is: you link the account, it sorts your spending into categories and shows you a pie chart at the end of the month.
Why it dies: it wants a month, and this life does not come in months. It flags an overspend on groceries in a week nobody was even in the province, and by the third hitch it stops getting opened.
Different here: the unit is the hitch. Every step is tagged for which half of your life you run it in, and nothing is measured against a calendar month.
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2 · Save ten percent of every cheque
What it is: the most repeated piece of money advice in this industry.
Why it dies: ten percent of what, and in which week. If the hours move, there is no denominator — one month is a shutdown, the next is breakup. If the cheque never moves, the denominator is fine and there is still no moment where the decision actually gets made.
Different here: the cheque gets sorted the day it lands, in fixed order, before the deciding starts that evening. It never asks anybody to be disciplined at the moment discipline is hardest.
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3 · Cutting the small stuff
What it is: pack a lunch. Skip the coffee. Cancel the subscriptions.
Why it dies: half our meals are already covered or already bought. It saves a rounding error, costs four days of feeling worse about a life that was fine, and the four figures a month in payments never move.
Different here: this book does not touch what you buy. Not once. It goes straight at what gets financed, which is where the money actually is.
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4 · The spreadsheet built on a good day off
What it is: a coffee, two hours, and honest work.
Why it dies: it gets built at home and never opened on hitch. Anything that needs a person to be organised at hour eighteen is a good intention, not a system.
Different here: every step is short enough to run in a dry room waiting on a ride, and the book tells you which ones to skip entirely.
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5 · The automatic transfer on payday
What it is: money moves itself the morning the deposit lands.
Why it dies: this is the closest thing on the list to right, and I would still do it. It leaks because one transfer covers one of the four places the money has to go, and the other three get decided in the moment, in a room, at nine at night.
Different here: Chapter 11 names all four, in order, including the one nobody ever funds and the one that is the reason the whole thing survives.
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6 · Earning your way out of it
What it is: take the shutdown. Take the extra hitch. Out-earn the problem.
Why it dies: more hours raise what the life costs, and the overhead stays up when the hours go back down. The gap between what comes in and what stays does not move an inch. It never does.
Different here: the household gets set against the part of the pay that does not move, so a big month builds something instead of quietly resetting the standard of living.
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7 · The advisor appointment
What it is: an hour in an office with somebody in a decent shirt.
Why it dies: people go in with a schedule problem and come out with a product. Nothing wrong with the person across the desk. They have never planned around a hitch and have no reason to know what one does to a calendar.
Different here: this book does not sell you an instrument and does not recommend one. Where a real decision is involved it names the profession, and hands you the questions to take with you.
The thing underneath all seven
Good tool. Wrong job.
Every one of them was built for somebody who gets paid twelve times a year on the calendar, works five days and has two off, and gets a free Tuesday evening to sit down and sort it out.
Nobody on a hitch has any of the three. Hand that reality a monthly budget and it is like handing somebody a torque wrench and asking them to weld with it.
And when it does not work, the person holding it concludes they are useless at welding.
Seven tools, seven failures, one reason. None of them was ever built for a life that runs in two halves.
The first seven were built for a calendar. This one is built for a hitch
The straight answer
So how is this different, in one page
- The unit is a hitch, not a month. Every step is tagged On Mode, Off Mode or The Switch, so you always know which half of your life you run it in.
- It is built on where the deciding happens, not where the spending happens. Every other money system quietly assumes a second signature — somebody across the table, a friend who says how much, a day between wanting it and signing for it. Half the year there is none of that, and that is the whole mechanism.
- Two chapters no American money book can write. Living out allowance, and what happens to your tax year when the work comes from more than one place. Both are specific to this province and this industry.
- It never tells anybody to stop buying anything. Not the truck, not the boat, not the round on day two. It goes at financing, not spending, and Chapter 12 explains why every plan that did the opposite failed us.
- Both pay shapes are written side by side. Cheques that move, and cheques that have never once gone down. Same book, both doors, said out loud in Chapter 1.
- It ends with a figure, not a feeling. 15 numbers you work out yourself, one per chapter, that assemble on the last page into the amount where a quiet phone is an inconvenience instead of a catastrophe.
- Nothing in it is held back. One price, one book, no upgrade, no tier.
Before you spend anything
This part is free. Read it and go and use it.
Here is a piece of the book, worked out, for free
The fastest number in the whole system is Chapter 4, and it takes about ten minutes. It is here in full. Run it tonight whether you buy anything or not.
Your real pay rate
- Take your last hitch. Not your rate — the number that actually landed in the account.
- Now count every hour it cost you. Paid hours, yes. Then the bus or the drive, both directions. The travel day. The day you lose to the flip coming off nights. The day on the other end getting yourself back.
- Divide the first by the second.
Most of us have never done that division, and the number is not the one we quote at a barbecue.
Now do the same arithmetic on a job at home. Same hours, same honesty. The gap is usually far smaller than the annual numbers make it look, and sometimes it more or less closes.
That is not a reason to leave. Most of us are not leaving, and this book is not trying to talk anybody into it. It is the number that turns staying into something you chose.
And one thirty-second job almost none of us has done
There is a public, regional table of subsistence rates for this province. It is set every year by a joint committee, and where they cannot agree an umpire rules on whether the allowance is actually enough to cover a room and three meals in that town.
Almost nobody in this workforce can name the figure for the town they are working in. Nobody told us it existed.
Go and look yours up. It is public, it is free, and it takes half a minute. Chapter 8 tells you where the table lives and how to read it. It is also careful to say that a non-union reader is not entitled to that number, because they are not. Anybody who tells you otherwise is going to get you embarrassed in front of a contractor.
The rates change and carry an effective date, so no page here prints one as current. What the book hands you is where to look, which survives every future adjustment.
That was Chapter 4 and a piece of Chapter 8, in full, at no charge
The mechanism
Two modes, because you live two lives
Built on the On/Off Method — two modes, because you live two lives.
One set of rules cannot cover both halves. So there are two, and a changeover.
On hitch. Where the money is made, and where it gets decided on — alone, tired, with nobody in the room to ask a question.
Days off. Where those decisions turn up: the delivery, the pickup, the first payment, the weekend that got booked three weeks ago from a room.
The changeover, both directions. The drive, the bus, the flight. Every other money system operates at month end. This one operates in transit — not because anybody is trapped there, but because it is the one reliably empty, reliably repeating slot in the whole thing. A routine needs a dependable slot more than it needs a locked door.
Why the calendar is the thing that is actually broken
Nobody out here is paid on a hitch. The law does not allow it. Pay periods in this province are daily, weekly, every two weeks, twice a month or monthly, and nothing else.
So your pay runs on a calendar and your life does not, and the two drift across each other all year.
A cheque can land on day three of a hitch. Or on Day 2 of your days off, when every dollar of it is in play.
Same cheque. Opposite outcome. Decided by nothing but which week it happened to be.
That is an accident, not a discipline failure. And an accident can be engineered out.
The week that eats the month
Here is the part worth being precise about, because it is the reason a monthly budget cannot hold on this schedule.
Say you and somebody on a regular job spend exactly the same amount over a year. Identical. Not a dollar between you.
They spread it across three hundred and sixty-five days. You spent most of yours across a fraction of them.
Same money. Completely different experience of it. Every day of your days off is doing the work of several of theirs, so what goes out on a given day at home is far higher than anything a normal life produces — and it only happens while you are there to watch it.
The changeover is where it is won or lost
On hitch, most of the decisions are made for you. The day is set. The room is set. What there is to do after the shift is set.
Off hitch, they all land at once, and they land on somebody who has just come off a stretch of twelve-hour days and has a few days to be a person in.
The Switch is the seam between those two, and it is the only part of the month that repeats without fail. The drive. The bus. The flight. Both directions, every time, whatever else moves.
A routine needs a dependable slot more than it needs willpower. That slot already exists in your life and nothing has ever been put in it.
Every step in the book is tagged On Mode, Off Mode or The Switch
Every objection you have, answered
Everything you are about to think, in the order you will think it
This is just budgeting with a hard hat on it.
Open any of them and look for three chapters: living out allowance, what happens to your tax year when the work comes from more than one place, and sorting the cheque while you are still on site. They are not in there, because whoever wrote it could not write them. The rest of this page is me proving I can.
You don’t know my numbers.
Correct, and the book never pretends to. It does not prescribe a percentage, a ratio or a target anywhere. It shows you your own numbers and stops — 15 of them, worked out by you, which is why the last chapter can hand you a figure that is actually yours.
I’ve bought stuff like this before and never opened it.
That is the most honest objection on the list and it is why the audiobook ships with every copy at both prices, and why the guarantee is measured in hitches you have run rather than days that have passed. Chapter 15 asks for exactly one thing on your first hitch, and that one thing is measuring, not changing.
I’m too wrecked after a twelve to do homework.
Correct, most days, and the book agrees with you before you get to Chapter 2. Nothing in On Mode takes longer than a few minutes and most of it happens in a dry room or a truck cab. The heavy thinking is deliberately parked on your days off, and the changeover between them is the part no other money book has.
My cheque is the same every time. This is for people whose work dries up.
It is not, and if the last four things you read gave you that impression, they were written by somebody who has never met you. Steady pay solves one thing and touches nothing else. The money is still bigger than the town it would be spent in. It still lands on a calendar your life does not run on. And on the payments the steady reader is frequently worse off, because nothing has ever gone wrong, so nothing has ever forced a look.
Who are you? There’s no name and no reviews on this page.
No name, because I still work out there and I am on a crew with people who would read this page. No reviews, because it has not launched and I am not going to invent them. What I will do instead is print real pages from the book below, unedited, and let you judge the writing rather than the author photo.
Is this financial advice? Are you licensed?
No, and no — and that is a hard line rather than a disclaimer. The book describes structure and behaviour. It never names an instrument, never quotes a return, never takes a tax position and never tells you what to buy. Two chapters end by handing you a page of questions and sending you to an accountant, because the honest answer depends on your setup.
Forty-nine dollars for a file.
Two workers on the same site, doing comparable work, can be separated by roughly $2,100 in allowance over one fourteen-day hitch. Tax free. Invisible on any hourly comparison. Chapter 8 is about that gap, and it is the eighth chapter in a book that costs less than a tank of diesel.
My partner handles the money.
Then this is the book that finally gives you both the same numbers to look at, and every chapter ends in a figure rather than an opinion. Nothing in here assumes anybody is home, and nothing in here assumes anybody is not.
I’ll start after this hitch.
Your next cheque lands on a date the calendar already picked, and that happens whether you have anything in place or not. Hitch one is measuring — it changes nothing and asks for one number. Starting a hitch late costs you a hitch you do not get back.
Ten of them, in the order they arrive. Book and audiobook together
Is this you
Who this was written for. Twelve of these — you only need four.
- Your last cheque landed while you were on site, and by the time you got home it had been sitting in the account you spend from for days.
- You have configured something on your phone at nine at night in a room, and told yourself you were only looking.
- You know your rate. You do not know your real pay rate — the one with the drive, the travel day and the flip in it.
- There is a line on your stub for the allowance and you have never been completely sure what it is, what it is for, or how it is treated.
- Somebody on your crew doing the same job as you gets a noticeably different daily allowance, and neither of you knows who is right.
- April has surprised you at least once, and the surprise had a comma in it.
- Day 1 of your days off goes to sleep. Day 2 you are still catching up. Then it is weekdays, everybody else is at work, and you are awake at ten in the morning with money in the account.
- You have said “this is the last one,” meant it, and then taken the call anyway.
- There is something under a tarp that you have used three times since you bought it, and it has a payment.
- You have looked at a job closer to home, run the numbers for about four minutes, and stopped.
- You have been given the same advice your whole career — get in and save — by people who did not manage it themselves.
- You could not point at the money you have earned since you started. You have never added it up. You suspect it is bigger than you think.
Every trade, and everybody else on that site
Scaffolders. Pipefitters. Welders. Millwrights. Electricians. Insulators. Operators. Labourers. Safety. Camp staff. Engineers, planners, schedulers, coordinators, admin and site leadership.
The schedule is the qualifier, not the job title. A welder on a 14/7 and a scheduler on a 14/7 have the same money problem. A welder who goes home every night does not.
Who this is not for
Four kinds of people should close this page
- You go home every night and always have. Your problem is a real one. It is not this one, and every chapter in here is built on a schedule you do not work.
- You want to be told what to invest in. This book does not do that once. It is not licensed to, and two chapters end by sending you to an accountant instead.
- You want somebody to tell you the money out here was a mistake. It was not. There are people on your crew who work this schedule, own their place, owe nothing and would not swap it for anything. They have the same job you do.
- You want a plan you run seven days a week. Nobody on this schedule can. That is the whole argument of the book.
Still here? Good.
What you walk out with
Five parts. Each one ends with something in your hand.
Every chapter closes the same way: a picture of what it looks like when the thing is working, the steps split by mode, and one number for you to write down. Fifteen chapters, fifteen numbers, and on the last page they assemble into your figure.
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Part One
What Actually Happened To The Money
By the end of it You can name the figure nobody on your crew can answer, and you know what the money has actually been doing all this time.
- Ch 1The one figure nobody on your crew can answer, and why everything else in the book is in service of it
- Ch 2Why the most repeated advice in this industry fails the people repeating it
- Ch 3How three months of large deposits and one signature becomes ninety-six months of payments
- Ch 4Your real pay rate — then what the truck actually cost you, priced in hours of it
- Ch 5What the generation before ours did as a matter of course, and why nobody handed it to us
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Part Two
The Mechanism
By the end of it The book knows which version of itself you are reading, and every step from here is tagged to a mode.
- Ch 6The On/Off Method, and the week that eats the month
- Ch 7Four questions that sort out which chapters are worth real money to you and which you can move through fast
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Part Three
The Money That’s Already Yours
By the end of it You know what your allowance is actually worth across a hitch, and April stops being something that happens to you.
- Ch 8Sub, LOA, per diem — the published table, the spread nobody compares, and why your stub is not your T4
- Ch 9Why April is the worst month out here, and the reserve that turns it into an administrative afternoon
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Part Four
The Machine
By the end of it The cheque sorts itself the day it lands, and your days off stop costing anything to think about.
- Ch 10Running a household on the part of the pay that does not move, written twice — once for each pay shape
- Ch 11The four places money goes, in order, sorted the day it lands
- Ch 12The fence — why we buy things when we get home, and how to buy them without financing them
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Part Five
The Exit
By the end of it You have your figure, and the date of your third hitch from today.
- Ch 13Two workers, same crew, same rate, same bus. One of them free. What the handcuffs are actually made of
- Ch 14Your figure, assembled out of numbers you have been writing down for thirteen chapters without knowing what they were for
- Ch 15The running order — hitch one you measure, hitch two you start, hitch three it stops taking any thought
Then a closing chapter, a page of questions to take to an accountant, your 15 numbers collected in one place, and what comes next.
Every step in the book is tagged On Mode, Off Mode or The Switch
Not a table of contents
A fraction of what is actually in these pages
Every box below is a real section of a real chapter, and each one carries its chapter number on purpose — a claim you can hold the book to is worth more out here than a claim you cannot.
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Chapter 1
The one figure nobody on your crew can answer
Not what you earn and not what you owe. What it would take for a quiet phone to be an inconvenience instead of a catastrophe.
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Chapter 3
Ninety-six months against eighty-hour weeks
How three months of large deposits and one signature becomes a payment that outlasts the job. Nobody in that room was doing anything unusual.
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Chapter 4
Your real pay rate
The one with the drive, the flip and the day you lose getting back in it. Then the truck, priced in hours of it.
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Chapter 5
What the generation before ours did as a matter of course
No apps, no automatic transfers, far less information than we have — and one thing we do not.
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Chapter 6
The week that eats the month
You and somebody on a regular job spend the identical amount across a year. They spread it over 365 days. You spent most of yours across a fraction of them.
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Chapter 7
Four questions, answered once on the inside cover
They decide which chapters are worth real money to you and which you can move through fast.
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Chapter 8
There is a published table, and almost nobody out here can name it
Region by region, set once a year by a joint committee, in effect from the first Sunday in May, public, and findable in about thirty seconds.
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Chapter 8
Why that published rate is a benchmark and not your entitlement
The caveat is not buried, because getting this one wrong would cost you.
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Chapter 9
Same crew, same site, same allowance. Different bills in April
What decides it usually comes down to something personal, and neither of them did anything wrong.
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Chapter 9
There is a process almost nobody working out there knows exists
If an allowance was treated one way and you do not believe it should have been, decisions can be looked at again. Not exotic. Not a loophole.
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Chapter 10
Overtime is not income. It is a bonus that shows up most months
And the difference between those two things is the whole floor your life is built on.
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Chapter 11
Four places the money goes, in order, sorted the day it lands
On site, before you get home, while it is still an easy decision three hundred kilometres away.
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Chapter 12
The fence — one decision, made once, in advance
Then no decisions at all for the whole of your days off. It is the opposite of a budget, and you are meant to spend all of it.
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Chapter 13
Three ways down from the ceiling without selling anything you love
Including the one that costs nothing, requires no decisions, and for a lot of people is enough on its own.
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Chapter 14
Not a million dollars, and not retirement
Both of those have kept people in this industry from ever starting. What goes in their place is a number you can organise a Tuesday around.
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Chapter 15
Where this falls over first, and it is the same for everybody
The fence gets raided with every intention of putting it back. It never goes back, and the other three cuts are load-bearing.
Sixteen of them, and that is the short list. There are fifteen chapters, a closing chapter, a page of questions to take to an accountant, and your fifteen numbers collected at the back.
Every one of these has a chapter on it.
Book and audiobook · $49 for the first 100 · $69 after 10 November 2026
100 copies at $49 · then $69 · launch closes 10 November 2026
Fair enough
Never mind the pitch. Show me the actual pages.
Two passages, printed the way they appear in the book. Unedited. If the writing is not for you, you will know inside a minute and you can close the tab.
From Chapter 2 · It Was Never Your Willpower
You are not undisciplined. You are unarmed.
I want to say this as plainly as I can, because I suspect you have been carrying the opposite around for a while.
Most of us folks on the oil patch are not bad with money.
None of us has ever once been given a system built for the way this money arrives.
Not once. Not in school, not at orientation, not from an employer, not from any book any of us has picked up.
Every piece of money advice we have ever encountered was built for somebody else. Somebody who gets paid twelve times a year, on the calendar. Works five days, has two off, and gets his or her evenings back at the end of each one. Has a free Tuesday night to sit down and sort things out.
That is not a description of our lives on or off the oil patch. It is not even close.
Handing that reality a monthly budget is like handing somebody a torque wrench and asking them to weld with it.
Good tool. Wrong job.
And when it does not work, the person holding it concludes they are useless at welding.
You are not undisciplined.
You are unarmed.
There is a difference, and everything in this book comes out of it.
An undisciplined worker needs to be lectured. An unarmed one needs equipment.
From Chapter 13 · The Ceiling
Two workers, same hitch, one of them free
Picture two people on the same crew.
Same schedule. Same trade. Same rate. Same site, same bus, same steam table. Financially, from the outside, identical.
One of them has almost nothing going out every month. Whatever they own is paid for.
The other has a stack of payments running for years.
Now the work goes quiet.
The first one has a slow stretch. Annoying. Less money coming in, and they will be glad when it picks up. That is the whole story.
The second one is in trouble inside two months.
Same job. Same money. Completely different lives.
And it gets sharper than that. Say a decent job comes up at home — one that, at your real hourly from Chapter 4, is not the cut it looks like.
The first one can consider it. Might say no. Might decide the patch is better money and better days off and they would rather stay. But they get to decide.
The second one cannot consider it at all. The arithmetic is closed before the conversation starts.
That is what the handcuffs are actually made of. Not the wage. The monthly obligations that outlast whatever job you are in.
Written at a reading level anybody on that bus can move through fast
The part everybody else fakes
There are no testimonials on this page
This book has not launched. Nobody has run it for three hitches, because nobody has had it for three hitches.
So there is nothing to put here, and I am not going to invent it. You have seen the other pages. Dave M., Pipefitter. Stock photo. Five stars.
Here is every piece of proof I actually have, and then the list stops.
- Twelve years working the oil patch. Camp and drive-in, both. Four of the six schedules on that ticker. Minus forty, both ways.
- 21 threads, 1,577 comments and 85,090 words of workers talking about money when nobody was selling them anything. That is where the arguments in this book came from.
- Figures from a national credit bureau, the federal statistics agency, provincial employment standards and a bank’s own research arm — all named on the page they appear on, so you can go and check them.
- Two chapters of technical content on allowances and the tax year that no American money book can write.
- Real pages from the book, printed above, unedited. And Chapter 4, given away in full further up this page.
- A guarantee measured in your own unit, with the reasoning printed.
This space stays empty until there are real ones. When workers have run it and want to say so, their words go here and nobody else’s.
And the name
It is off this page because I am on a crew right now with people who would read it. Some of them are in the exact hole this book is about. Putting my name on it turns every conversation in the dry room into a sales pitch, and makes a private thing public for people who did not ask for that.
If that costs me sales in the first month, it costs me sales in the first month.
Built for your schedule, whatever it is
Six of them, and then yours
- 4/3
- 6/6
- 7/7
- 14/7
- 14/14
- 21/7
- Other — your own days on and off
Pattern with no name? A board that changes every month, turnarounds, call-outs? You match your ratio of days on to days off and the book tells you which pattern to run it like. What your schedule really decides is how many sets of days off you get in a year.
And whichever room you sleep in while you are working
Camp with your food covered. A motel with a food allowance. A flat allowance that has to cover both and comes up short in an expensive town. A camper. Or driving in from Fort McMurray, Lac La Biche, Bonnyville, Grande Prairie or Whitecourt and carrying a full household 365 days a year.
Those are completely different money. Chapter 7 sorts out which one you are in the first twenty minutes, and then the whole book knows.
Most of us are not in camp, and the number is falling every year. No chapter in this book opens in a camp room.
What lands in your inbox
One price, and there is no catch in it anywhere
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The Hitch Money System — the book
Five parts, 15 chapters, a closing chapter and three reference sections. Every step tagged On Mode, Off Mode or The Switch.
All six schedules. Camp, motel, camper and drive-in, every time. Both pay shapes, side by side, all the way through.
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The audiobook
The whole book, read start to finish. Not a summary. It ships to everybody at both prices and there is no audio-free version.
It is there because a lot of this crew will never open a file on a phone and will absolutely listen on the bus, in the truck cab, or in the dry room waiting on a ride.
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Your 15 numbers
One per chapter, worked out by you, collected in one place at the back. By Chapter 14 they assemble into your figure — and you will have been building it for thirteen chapters without knowing.
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Questions For An Accountant
A page of questions, written out, to take to a professional. Two chapters end by sending you there on purpose, because the honest answer depends on a setup nobody writing a book can see.
Split into what to ask about your allowance and what to ask about the bill that lands in April.
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Your Real Pay Rate — the two-page worksheet
Five lines and a pen. The page from Chapter 4 pulled out on its own, so the first number is worked out before you have read anything else.
It is free to anybody who wants it, and it is yours the moment you buy either way.
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Nothing is gated. Ever.
No second tier. No upgrade path. No chapter held back for a higher price. There is one product and you get all of it.
Book · audiobook · your fifteen numbers · the accountant page · the worksheet
The part you actually carry
Fifteen numbers, and every one of them is yours
The book does not prescribe a percentage, a ratio or a target anywhere. It asks you for one number per chapter and shows you what it means.
- 01Last hitch’s actual deposit
- 02Times you have promised yourself you would do it differently
- 03Total fixed payments, per month
- 04Your real pay rate
- 05Weeks a year your work goes quiet
- 06What one set of days off costs you
- 07What your accommodation costs per day on hitch
- 08Your daily allowance, and what it comes to over a hitch
- 09Your reserve share, and what it holds by year end
- 10Your annual base, and your monthly household cost
- 11Your four cuts — reserve, household, quiet weeks, fence
- 12Your fence, per set of days off
- 13Fixed payments against base — under the ceiling, or above
- 14Your figure, version one
- 15The date of your third hitch from today
Three of them get redone once a year, because they move. The rest hold.
What it is worth against
Never against another book
I am not going to tell you this costs less than a paperback. Here is what it is actually sitting next to.
| What is on the table | Over |
|---|---|
| The gap between two reported daily allowance rates for comparable work, across one fourteen-day hitch. Tax free, and invisible on any hourly comparison. | ~$2,100 |
| The same gap, carried across a year of hitches. | Four figures |
| A financed toy sitting in paid storage most of the year, at four figures a month across the payment schedule. | Years of it |
| A truck traded two years early and refinanced over a longer term than the last one. | Every month |
| One April bill that arrived with nothing set aside behind it. | Once a year |
| The allowance you have never once put next to the published number for your own town. | Unknown until you look |
| One quiet stretch nobody had anything set aside for. | Unpriceable |
| The Hitch Money System — book and audiobook | $49 launch |
The allowance range is what workers report, not a rate table and not a rate you are owed. Chapter 8 sends you to the published regional number for your own town.
The price
The only deadline on this page.
$49
Launch price · Once · Everything above
$49 for the first 100 buyers. After that it is $69. The launch closes 10 November 2026, or at 100 buyers, whichever comes first.
That is the whole of the urgency on this page. No countdown clock, no seat counter ticking down, no “closing soon” banner that is still there in March. The checkout stops the launch price at the cap and at the date, and that is tested before this page goes live.
The cap is there because it is the number of people one person can actually talk to in the first month.
The honest reason to have it before your next one
Your next cheque is going to land on a date the calendar already picked. That happens whether you have anything in place or not.
If the cheque gets sorted the day it lands, the deciding never starts. If it does not, it sits in the account you spend from and you find out afterwards where it went, same as every other time.
Waiting costs you a hitch you cannot get back. That is not a marketing device. It is a description of your own schedule.
$69 after the launch closes · Same guarantee at both prices
The guarantee
Three hitches. Not thirty days.
What three hitches actually covers
Run it for three full hitches. Not read it — run it. If it hasn’t earned its place by the end of hitch three, email us. Full refund. You keep the book and the audio. You get 120 days to run those three hitches. That covers a 4/3 through a 21/7.
Why three hitches and not thirty days. Thirty days is barely two hitches on a long schedule, and the Ceiling chapter never gets run. Your unit is a hitch, so the guarantee is in hitches.
It is also the book’s own running order. Hitch one you measure. Hitch two you split and fence. Hitch three you set base and ceiling.
What this is, plainly. It is a refund guarantee on the method. It is not a promise about your money, your debt, your savings or any other number.
Nobody honest can promise you those, and anybody who puts one in writing is selling you something worse than this.
No hoops. No proof of work. No completed worksheets. No “show us you ran it.” Identical at the $49 launch price and at $69 once the launch closes.
21 threads · 1,577 comments · 85,090 wordsof workers talking about this money when nobody was selling them anything. That is where every argument in the book came from, and it is the only reason a guarantee this long is safe to offer. Market evidence, 2026
Refund and you keep the book and the audio
What happens after you click
Here is exactly what happens next. The whole thing takes about a minute.
- You pay once. $49 during the launch, $69 after it closes.
- The book and the audiobook land in your inbox. Download them on decent wifi and they are yours offline after that — which matters if you are flying out tomorrow.
- Chapter 7 sorts out which case you are in. Twenty minutes.
- Chapter 15 tells you what to run on hitch one. It is one thing, and it is measuring, not changing.
- If it has not earned its place by the end of hitch three, you email us and we refund you. You keep the book and the audio.
Phone, tablet, laptop, or print it. The audiobook downloads the same way — grab it before you fly out and it works with no signal at all.
Last thing
The cheque is coming either way. The only question is what it is for.
P.S. — There is a question underneath all of this that almost none of us can answer. How much would it take, in the bank, to say no to one call? Not to quit. Not to retire. Just to look at the number, look at your days off, and choose.
That figure exists. It is smaller than most of us would guess. By the last page you will know yours, and what it takes to hold onto it.
And then you can take the call anyway, because the work is good — which is a completely different thing from taking it because the payment is due Friday.
P.P.S. — If you are on the fence because the last four things you tried did not stick, that is the correct reason to be on the fence and it is exactly what the three hitches are for. You do not have to believe me. You have to run it three times and then decide.
P.P.P.S. — The one thing on this page with a limit is the launch price. $49 for the first 100 buyers, then $69, and the launch closes 10 November 2026. There is no cap on the book itself and there never will be.
Three full hitches to try it · Keep both either way
Straight answers
The rest of it
“I’m on a schedule that is not on your list.”
4/3, 6/6, 7/7, 14/7, 14/14 and 21/7 each get worked examples. Anything else, you match your ratio of days on to days off and the book tells you which pattern to run it like. That includes a board that changes every month.
“I’m in camp with everything covered. Half this will not apply.”
Some of it will not, and Chapter 7 tells you which parts in the first twenty minutes rather than letting you find out in Chapter 9. Nothing in this book is written as though camp is the normal case, because for most of us it is not.
“Is it for women too?”
Yes, and it is written that way throughout — not as a note at the front, but in the actual sentences. There is no version of this book that assumes the reader is a man, and roughly a third of this sector is not.
“What if things are already bad?”
Then this is a tool and not a rescue, and the book says so plainly and early. If payments are already past due, the right first call is a licensed insolvency trustee or a non-profit credit counselling service, and your employer very likely has an assistance program that covers it confidentially. That is not a weaker move than reading a book. It is the faster one.
“What device? Does it work on camp wifi?”
Phone, tablet, laptop, or print it. Download once on decent wifi and it is yours offline after that. The audiobook downloads the same way, so it works with no signal at all.
“Is this the same thing as the Hitch Fit System?”
Same series, same crew, different line. They share the On/Off Method because that is a claim about how this life is shaped, not about food or money. The last page of this book points at it, because the same clock that wrecks a budget wrecks a body. You do not need one to run the other, and this is not sold inside that one.
$69 once the launch closes on 10 November 2026
100 copies at $49 · then $69 · launch closes 10 November 2026
