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The One-Page Financial Plan
Carl Richards
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What is The One-Page Financial Plan about?
Carl Richards strips financial planning down to its essentials: a single page that captures what matters most to you and the few decisions that will get you there. Forget complex spreadsheets and confusing jargon. Define your why, set realistic goals, and use simple sketches to make smart money choices stick.
Key ideas of The One-Page Financial Plan
The One-Page Constraint
Limiting your financial plan to a single page forces you to choose only the three goals that truly matter, making it something you will actually read and use.
The Behavior Gap
The average investor earns far less than the funds they invest in because fear and greed drive them to buy high and sell low at exactly the wrong moments.
Automation as Commitment
Automating savings and contributions removes the recurring decision to save, so good financial behavior happens every month whether you feel like it or not.
Read an excerpt from the summary
The One-Page Financial Plan
Carl Richards (2015) *A Simple Way to Be Smart About Your Money*
The Sharpie moment that started a book
Carl Richards is a certified financial planner, a New York Times columnist, and the man behind the napkin sketches that have shown up in personal-finance pieces for over a decade. He has spent thousands of hours sitting across from couples who walked into his office wanting one thing. They wanted him to tell them what to do. They had already collected the books, the magazines, the spreadsheets. None of that helped. They were paralyzed, not because they were lazy or stupid, but because the financial-services industry had buried the simple truth under a mountain of options.
One evening Richards sat at his kitchen table with his wife. They were trying to settle a real decision about real money. They had savings accounts and an investment process and insurance policies, and yet every time something concrete came up, they would drown in detail. He grabbed a Sharpie and a piece of card stock from the printer, and he asked himself a single question. If he had to fit every important thing about their financial life on one page, what would survive?
He wrote four lines. The first was about why money mattered to them at all. The other three were specific things they intended to do that year: max the retirement accounts, fund each kid's education account, save the rest for a future house. That was it. He set the card aside.
A month later, another decision came up. Another long conversation began. Halfway through, he stopped. He went and found the card. The work had already been done. They followed what they had written and moved on with their day. That moment of relief is what the book is built around. Most of what passes for financial planning is theater. Real planning is a short, honest answer to a few questions you can keep on a single sheet of paper and refer to when life puts a decision in front of you.
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Continue in the appWho is it for?
- Anyone who feels paralyzed by financial complexity and wants a simpler, actionable plan they will actually stick to.
- Anyone who has watched their investment returns trail what the market actually delivered and wants to understand why.
- Anyone who has never sat down with a partner to honestly discuss what money is really for in their life.
- Anyone who keeps putting off building a financial plan because every approach they have tried felt overwhelming or temporary.
About the author: Carl Richards
Carl Richards is a certified financial planner and longtime New York Times columnist known for his Sketch Guy series, where he distilled complex money concepts into simple hand-drawn diagrams. He spent two decades working directly with families on their finances before writing this book.
Richards writes from hard personal experience as well as professional practice. He lost his own home in 2010 after taking on a mortgage he could not sustain, and he draws on that failure throughout the book to explain how smart, well-intentioned people make the same behavioral mistakes he did.
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