⛓️‍💥 The Business of Being Free — Post 4: They Made It Sound Complicated on Purpose

This is Post 4 of The Business of Being Free — a series about running a real company as a digital nomad. If you're just finding this, start with Post 1.

Cafe on the Northwest Coast of Phu Quoc Vietnam

I was sitting in a café in Phu Quoc Vietnam scrolling through a job post — because this is how I stay on top of important changes in my industry and others.

The client wanted someone fluent in "Record-to-Report." R2R, they called it. They listed sub-ledger close, exception investigation, intercompany reconciliations, consolidation adjustments. Dense, specific, impressive-sounding language stacked on top of itself like a wall.

I've been doing every single item on that list for over twenty years.

I just never called it that.

And that is the point. That is always the point.

They Have Been Doing This Forever

The corporate world — and before it, every institution of power that needed to maintain control over who gets access to what — has always used language as a gate.

"Reconciliation" sounds like a legal process requiring specialized training. It means balancing. Comparing two numbers and making sure they match. That is the whole thing. The word exists to make you feel like an outsider so you will pay someone to translate it for you.

The IRS has been doing this since its inception. The tax code is deliberately written in language that requires a specialist to interpret — not because taxes are inherently complex, but because complexity creates dependency. Every time the public starts to understand how it works, something gets restructured. The W-4 was redesigned a few years ago, making it significantly harder for people to calculate their own withholding and choose to keep more of their money throughout the year. The knowledge was getting too accessible. The gate needed reinforcing.

This is the pattern. Every generation, we catch on. Every generation, the system tightens.

New journal purchased at this cute coffee shop / library

Finance Is One of the Most Guarded Gates

I became a financial architect without a college degree. One certification. Two decades of doing the actual work across real businesses — agencies, retailers, construction firms, multi-entity structures — and learning everything the institutions teach, but faster and with real consequences attached.

I obtained a few more certifications later in my career. Not because I needed them to do the work. Because some people will not believe you can do the work without the paper. The paper is not the knowledge. The paper is the permission slip the gatekeepers decided to recognize.

Certifications are something a person with a college degree might look down on. Do you know what I believe certifications are? Straight and to-the-point mini Masters Degrees. They teach you a skill and certify it. Just like with anything else, it’s up to you how much you learn from it and what you do with it. Take me as an example. A extremely intelligent person- above average that’s for sure (yep, you have to be your own cheerleader)- took something that others don’t see as having any value and coupled with the right work experience, I created a fantastic business out of it. I self-educated in other things business, of course. My secret weapon is curiosity and the endless desire to learn. I don’t stop at learning either. I APPLY what I learn. I put it into practice.

It also helps when you flat out refuse to not succeed in your craft. After working for 13 years since the age of 15- yes, in an office doing accounting tasks- I started my own bookkeeping agency at the age of 28 and have never looked back. My bookkeeping agency became accounting and then business setup & systems, and now I like to call what I do financial architecture. I completed a certification with Harvard Business Online School in 2023. That was my last certification so far out of several I’ve taken over the years.

The Big 4 accounting firms — Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, EY — packaged the accounting cycle into branded methodology frameworks with acronyms and sold them back to Fortune 500 companies as "transformation projects" worth millions. The work inside those projects is the same work a competent controller has been doing since before those firms existed. They just built a language around it that only credentialed insiders could speak fluently, which made the credential itself worth something, which justified the billing rate, which justified the credential. A perfect circle of gatekeeping.

And the business owner who just needs clean books and a financial partner who can tell them the truth about their margins — they end up lost in that language, convinced that what they need is so specialized it must require the most expensive version of it.

They Are Working Overtime Right Now

The information is more accessible than it has ever been. Financial literacy content exists everywhere. The tools that used to require an accountant to operate can now be navigated by an owner with a few hours of learning. AI is translating complexity into plain language faster than the gatekeepers can restructure it.

So watch what is happening. The response is not to open the gate. The response is to build new walls. New certifications. New frameworks with new acronyms. New regulatory language that requires new specialists to interpret. Younger generations are being handed student debt, economic instability, and an information environment so saturated and contradictory that exhaustion becomes the default setting — and an exhausted person does not investigate. They outsource. They comply. They pay whoever seems to know more than they do.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a business model. It is capitalism doing what it has always done: manufacturing the problem and selling the solution.

Heaundae Busan South Korea. Loved this cute studio AirBnB across from the Dongbaek Island Coastal Walkway

What I Know After 21 Years

The work is not as complicated as they made it sound. Not the accounting. Not the financial architecture. Not the systems design. Not even the tax strategy that most people hand entirely to a CPA because the language makes them feel like they cannot understand it.

What is actually complex is knowing which question to ask, which number to look at first, and where the money is quietly leaving before anyone has named the problem. That judgment comes from experience. Real experience. Not from a framework named with an acronym.

I built a business that runs from wherever I am in the world because I understood early that the language being used around me was designed to keep me dependent, not informed. The moment I stopped asking permission from systems built to exclude people who look like me — women, non-degreed, non-institutional, non-linear — and started treating my accumulated knowledge as the credential it actually is, everything changed.

The gate is made of words. That is all it is.

Learn the words. Walk through.

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