I am Shaun Bisson. I have spent 30 years in the trades working as a carpenter, and I help trades families with the money basics and planning, the way trades life actually works. Not the way a steady salary works. The way your work works.
Busy season and slow season are real. So are overtime weeks, weather days, jobs that run long, and invoices that take their time when you are working for yourself. Most money advice quietly assumes the paycheque is the same every two weeks, and it falls apart in the first slow month.
We start where trades pay starts. We look at what comes in across a whole year, good months and bad ones together, so every decision after that is built on your real numbers and not on a hopeful month.
From that real year, we build the household plan on the honest average. What has to go out to keep the household running, what is actually left to work with, and what gets handled first. A plan built on your best month is not a plan. A plan built on your average month can survive your worst one.
Saving fits the same rhythm. More in the strong months, less in the lean ones, without the whole thing collapsing the first time work slows down.
Physical work pays well, and it asks a lot of the person doing it. If you get hurt, or you have to step back for a stretch, the bills at home do not step back with you. The mortgage keeps its schedule. So do the groceries, the truck payment, and everything on the fridge.
Part of my job is teaching families to walk through that question early, in plain language. If your income stopped, what would still need to be paid, and for how long. Coverage through an employer or a union can be a real help, and it can also have limits, end dates, and gaps that nobody has ever explained. If you are self employed or incorporated, there may be no employer plan standing behind you at all. Either way, the honest first step is the same. Understand what you have, understand what you do not have, and learn the questions to ask before anyone talks about buying anything.
The tools go down for good one day. That day can be one you chose years in advance, with a plan you are proud of, or it can be a day your body chooses for you. Getting ready means knowing, in plain terms, what will be coming in every month, what it needs to cover, and whether a slower final stretch of work changes the picture.
Is your body already part of this conversation? Read the tool belt page.
Underneath all of it sits the same five steps I teach in the class.
In a one to one conversation, we work through those steps against your own numbers. In the class, you learn the framework with a group. Both are teaching, and neither one involves a pitch.
If you run the company as well as work in it, the business has money questions of its own. Keeping a good crew, the person a job cannot run without, and what happens to the jobs if you cannot work all sit on the business side of the table. They deserve the same plain language as the family side. See the page for business owners.