Ground Up Money is written and built by Dr KH Asadul — an engineer by training, a PhD by way of a self-funded stretch in Japan, and, more relevantly to this site, someone who arrived in Australia in March 2009 and could not make sense of his own payslip.
There was a gross figure and a net figure, a Medicare levy sitting apart from income tax, a pre-tax deductions line at zero for reasons nobody explained, and a word — superannuation — that everyone around him treated as too obvious to define. He had, by that point, a doctorate and fifteen years of financial history from another country. None of it transferred. He was, as far as any Australian bank, lender, or employer was concerned, financially invisible.
Ground Up Money exists because of what came after that: years of refusing to leave a confusing financial document alone until it actually made sense — payslips, tax returns, superannuation statements, insurance renewals, the property market, franking credits, all of it. What started as personal notes, kept mostly to check his own understanding, turned into spreadsheets, then calculators, then this site, because it became obvious a lot of other people were working through the exact same confusion with nobody willing to explain it plainly.
That same material is now also a book, From Scratch: A Friend's Guide to Getting Ahead in Australia, written for the same reader this site is built for: not a guru, not someone chasing wealth for its own sake, just someone who got tired of being quietly confused and started checking things properly instead of guessing.
Ground Up Money isn't written by a financial planner, and it doesn't pretend to be personal advice — every calculator and article here is general information, built to help you ask better questions of your own numbers, not a replacement for a licensed adviser who can see your actual circumstances. What it is built on is a habit: check the myth against the actual numbers, work out exactly what to do once you have real figures instead of a feeling, and stay honest about where you got it wrong along the way — because everyone does, more than once.
More about the author and his other work is at asadulislam.com.