Sketching Wealth Strategy: Masters in Business with Carl Richards

**Barry Ritholtz** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. This week on the podcast, old friend Carl Richards joins me to talk about his new book, Your Money, Reimagining Wealth in 101 Simple Sketches. If the name sounds familiar, he created the sketch guy column in the New York Times. It ran there for a decade. He's probably done more than anyone to expand usage of the phrase, the behavior gap, the difference between people's portfolios and what the results are. I thought our conversation was charming and I think you will also. With no further ado, here's me and Carl Richards talking about money.
Carl, welcome to Bloomberg.

**Carl Richards** (0:58)
Barry, so fun. Been looking forward to this for years.

**Barry Ritholtz** (1:01)
Same, same, long overdue. We've had you on At the Money, but we haven't had you for the long sit down. Let's start out talking about your backgrounds.
University of Utah, School of Business, Bachelors of Science in Finance. That implies finance, investing, money. Was that the original career plan?

**Carl Richards** (1:22)
Yeah, no, not even close. Really? Right, yeah, so I was, I've told this story occasionally. I was an undeclared major, which means back then, it meant you had no idea what you wanted to do with your life, right? I was the newest hired a landscaping company, so I was literally digging ditches for living. I come home one day, my wife, we'd recently been married. This was 95, recently been married, and she has the help wanted ads open. She's got a job, degree in finance.
A job as the CFO of a small real estate company, got the help wanted ads open. I was like, hey, Cora, her name's Cora. Cora, what are you looking, what are you doing? She said, I'm looking for a job. I said, well, what are you finding? She said, no, I said, but you have one. And she said, I know I'm looking for you. I was like, what are you finding? And she found what we both thought was a security guard job.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:08)
At a little shop called Fidelity?

**Carl Richards** (2:10)
A security guard. I was like, you know, I could work as a mall cop at night. This would be great. And so I can still go to school full time. This would be great. I went to apply, nothing about Kung Fu, nothing about self-defense. You know, they were asking about things I didn't know what they were.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:25)
Securities.

**Carl Richards** (2:26)
Exactly. I didn't know the difference. And I got through-

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:28)
I was going to call BS on this because it sounds like, wait, how are you a finance major? But that happened afterwards.

**Carl Richards** (2:34)
Yeah, that's exactly right. So I get through the interview, which tells you a lot about the applicant pool, right? And they had narrowed it down to two of us. Yeah. They offered to the other guy and the other guy said, I don't want it, you take it. So that's how I ended up at Fidelity's National Call Center just before Netscape's IPO.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:51)
That's unbelievable. I started on a trading desk, and I was told, hey, rookie, no trading Netscape IPO. So when I started, just about around the same time.

**Carl Richards** (3:02)
You know what was crazy about that was like after I got clear that I wasn't a security guard, I was like, what's this job? And I was sort of looking around and everybody was using calculators, right? And math. I was like, okay, this must be, right? This must be a math job. And then, you know, a couple of weeks into training, they called us out onto the trading floor to answer phones. Because back then, you couldn't get a quote, you couldn't just place a trade unless you called. And it was the day of the Netscape IPO. And I remember thinking, this isn't math. You know what I mean? And that was like my first introduction to this idea of like, so I like to say that I got in by accident, but I've stayed because of that moment. Like this, like, what is this crazy thing that we call money? Because nobody was doing math in there. They were excited, mad, angry, upset, right? So it was, that was, because I always thought it was a mistake, getting into finance. I always thought I would go off and do, I was gonna do the Stephen Covey organizational behavior thing at BYU. That's what I always thought, because work is where people go to do things that matter.
And then some of these early experiences open the door to like money is the ultimate portal.