Carl Richards Tells His Story

My friend Carl Richards is one of the most down-to-earth guys you’ll ever meet, as I had the chance to in NYC earlier this year.  If you don’t know Carl, he is a financial advisor based out of Utah who writes the Behavior Gap blog and regularly contributes his fantastic sharpie sketches and insights to the New York Times.

This morning I awoke to a real treat when I saw that he had a long-form story in the Business Day section of the Times.  In it, Carl bares his soul and tells the true story of how he lost his family’s house during the financial crisis.

If you read nothing else today, please check this out:

There was this enormous window that looked right in on the kitchen table, and through it I could see my wife, Cori, and our four children eating dinner. It was dark outside, so they couldn’t see me, and I just stood there looking at them.

After a while, I pulled up a bucket and I sat on it, just watching my children eat. I found myself wishing that I could get back there, connected to the simple ordinary stuff of my family’s life. And as I sat and watched, filled with longing and guilt, two questions kept arising:

How did I get here?

And how am I going to get out of this?

Read the rest:

How a Financial Pro Lost His House (NYT)