Carl Richards is a certified financial planner who built and later sold his own investment firm before turning his attention to writing and teaching about the psychology of money. He's best known for the Sketch Guy column, which ran weekly in the New York Times for a decade starting in 2010. Using nothing more than cardstock and a marker, he turned complicated financial ideas into simple hand drawn sketches that made the concepts click for readers who'd normally tune out at the first mention of asset allocation.
Beyond The One-Page Financial Plan, Richards wrote The Behavior Gap, a bestseller translated into more than ten languages, and more recently Your Money, a collection of sketches released in 2025. He founded Behavior Gap, a platform built around money, creativity, and health, where he also hosts a daily podcast with more than 1,300 episodes and a million downloads. He later started the Society of Advice, a community for financial planners built around monthly workshops and retreats, aimed at helping advisors get better at the actual craft of giving advice, not just managing money.
