CARL RICHARDS

Carl Richards started as a traditional financial planner in the late 1990s. He was running a successful practice in Las Vegas when he started doodling financial concepts on napkins and index cards to explain ideas to clients.

The simple Sharpie sketches — circles, arrows, stick figures — communicated behavioral finance concepts more effectively than any spreadsheet. He started sharing them online, and they went viral in the financial planning community.

The New York Times noticed and hired him as the "Sketch Guy" columnist — a role he held for years, publishing weekly illustrations about money behavior. He wrote The Behavior Gap, a book about why smart people make dumb financial decisions.

Here's the thing that makes Carl uniquely credible: during the 2008 crisis, he lost his own home. He was a financial planner who fell into the same trap as his clients — he bought too much house in Las Vegas at the worst possible time.

He's written and spoken openly about this experience. It gave him an authenticity that most financial educators can't match.

He now focuses on writing, speaking, and coaching financial advisors on client communication.

The Behavior Gap — his concept, brand, and body of work around the gap between what investors should do and what they actually do. The Society of Real Financial Planning — a community he built for advisors focused on meaningful client relationships.

New York Times "Sketch Guy" column — his long-running visual column. He also consults with financial planning firms on communication and client experience.

Carl advocates for simple, boring, evidence-based investing. Low-cost index funds, diversified portfolios, automatic contributions, long time horizons, and — critically — not messing with it when markets get scary.

His entire thesis is that investor behavior destroys more wealth than bad investments do. The "behavior gap" he coined refers to the difference between investment returns and investor returns — the gap caused by buying high and selling low out of emotion.

He doesn't push complex strategies. He pushes emotional discipline and self-awareness.

Creating the "Behavior Gap" concept and brand. The simple idea that investor behavior is the biggest drag on returns is now widely accepted in financial planning, and Carl played a major role in popularizing it.

His napkin sketches became a visual language that thousands of financial advisors use with their own clients. The New York Times column gave him mainstream reach.

His work has genuinely changed how financial planners communicate with clients — less jargon, more empathy, more visual storytelling.

Losing his home in the 2008 crash. Carl was a financial planner in Las Vegas who bought a house at the peak of the bubble.

When the market collapsed, he was underwater and eventually lost the home. He's been brutally honest about this — it's the central story of his career in many ways.

He calls it the most painful and most important learning experience of his life. It proved his own thesis: even people who know the right thing to do can get caught up in the emotional momentum of a bubble.

The experience cost him financially and emotionally, but it gave his subsequent work an authenticity that pure academics can't match.

Carl believes the most important financial skill is self-awareness. Knowing your own biases, fears, and emotional triggers is more valuable than any investment strategy.

He thinks financial plans should be simple enough to follow during a crisis — if your plan requires heroic discipline during a market crash, it's a bad plan. He advocates for "good enough" plans executed consistently over "perfect" plans that fall apart under stress.

He also believes that money conversations should be about values and goals first, numbers second. His phrase "the behavior gap" has become shorthand in the industry for the cost of emotional decision-making.

Carl lives in Park City, Utah with his family. He's married and has children.

His family life is important to his brand — he talks about money conversations with his wife and kids as part of financial health. The move from Las Vegas (where he lost his home) to Park City represented a fresh start both financially and personally.

Carl has financial planning credentials and training from his early career as a CFP. He doesn't emphasize formal academic credentials — his education has been primarily experiential, through decades of practice and through his own financial crisis.

He's a voracious reader of behavioral psychology and economics.

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