License and Copying
The short version
This book is free. Copy it. Share it. Teach with it. Translate it. Print it and hand it out.
You may do all of that, commercially or not, as long as you: 1. Give credit to the original 2. Share your version under the same license
That's it.
The formal version
How to Be an Adult: The Comprehensive Guide to Everything You Were Supposed to Learn But Nobody Taught You is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0)
You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material
for any purpose, including commercially.
Under the following terms:
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
- ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
- No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Suggested attribution
How to Be an Adult by The DataField Project, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
For adaptations:
Adapted from How to Be an Adult by The DataField Project, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made.
Specifically permitted, and encouraged
Teachers and instructors — assign it, print it, excerpt it into slides, build a course around it, modify the exercises for your students. The Instructor's Guide exists for this. No permission needed, no cost, ever.
Nonprofits and community organizations — print chapters as handouts, include it in orientation materials, build workshops from it. If you serve people leaving foster care, leaving incarceration, arriving as immigrants or refugees, or leaving abusive relationships, this book was written with you in mind.
Libraries — host it, print it, run programs from it.
Translators — please. The material is US-centric in its specifics, and a version adapted to another country's systems would be more valuable than a literal translation. Appendix D maps what changes.
Anyone — send it to a friend, print a chapter for someone who needs it, quote it, argue with it, improve it.
What you cannot do
- Remove the license. Derivative works must carry CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Claim you wrote it.
- Add restrictions — you can't take this free book, modify it, and make your version proprietary.
A note about accuracy
This book is education, not personalized legal, medical, tax, or financial advice.
It does not know your situation, your state's law, or your circumstances. Dollar figures, tax brackets, contribution limits, program rules, and legal standards change — often annually, sometimes abruptly. Every specific number in this book should be treated as an illustration of how a mechanism works, not as a current fact. Where a number matters, the book tells you where to look it up.
Laws vary enormously by state and by country. Where a state law is decisive, the book says so and tells you how to find yours.
If you adapt or redistribute this book, please: - Note the date of your version - Update or flag figures you know to be stale - Keep the pointers to primary sources (irs.gov, healthcare.gov, your state's handbook) rather than replacing them with your own summaries — the pointers stay accurate longer than the summaries do
If you find an error, correct it in your version and tell others. That's what the license is for.
Why it's free
Because charging for this would defeat the point.
The premise of the book is that a body of essential knowledge is transmitted informally to people who happen to grow up around it, and withheld by accident from everyone else — and that this is one of the larger and less-discussed engines of inequality.
You do not fix an access problem by putting it behind a paywall.
The people who most need this book are, disproportionately, people who cannot spend $30 on a book, or who would not know to look for it, or who would be handed it by a caseworker, a teacher, a shelter, a library, or a friend.
So: free, forever, and licensed so that nobody can make it otherwise.
If it was useful
Give it to someone.
Somewhere near you is a person who needed the chapter you needed — who is about to sign a lease they haven't read, or take a first offer, or pay a medical bill without looking at it, or reuse the same password one more time.
Tell them. That's the whole mechanism.