As a personal finance blogger and Money Coach myself, I try to always be in the process of learning something new every day. One, to be a better person. Two, to be able to share more and help more people better. Three, because I just love to read and learn new things.

This is why I jumped at the opportunity to interview Carl Richards. Mr. Richards is promoting his new book, “The One-Page Financial Plan“.

Richards is a New York Times columnist and financial advisor. Like me, he tries to focus on what’s important about money: not the money itself, but the relationship people have with money. As soon as I started reading his book, I started thinking that Carl could be a very good Money Coach if he wanted to.

It happens that he is! He just does not call himself that. During the first chapter, Carl describes how he starts the conversation about money with his clients: he asks them “why is money important to you”? And is based on this single, simple and powerful question that the entire book is built around.

“The One-Page Financial Plan” is a personal finance book, no doubt about that. It talks about mortgages, insurance, investing. But it goes deeper than that. Deeper in the sense of “soul-level deeper”, not “complicated deeper”. Carl makes you think about your main goal with money (why is money important?), asks you to write it down and then guides you thru the personal finance decisions you should make one time or another. The catch here is that, as I always say, there is no right answer because people are not the same.

My goals in life are not the same as yours. Why should we both buy a book saying that we should save 10% of our income and invest it this and this way? This will never work! So Carl makes you think about what’s important for you and your family, and then he guides you to take some important steps based on that.

During my quick chat with Carl, we talked about financial mistakes, promoting books, relationship with money, accountability and a fair amount of lame jokes from both sides. I hope you enjoy it!

I’d like to thank Carl Richards a lot. First for being so accessible and giving me the opportunity to interview him. And of course I’d like to thank Cara, his assistant, who run all the details to make this possible.

If you like my review and interview, you can buy the book at Amazon with my affiliate link: The One-Page Financial Plan: A Simple Way to Be Smart About Your Money

Download the audio or listen below by clicking the PLAY button.

 ** Hey, look! This is my first ever audio posted online! What did you think? What was good? What was bad? How can I make it better? Please hit the comments, I love them!

** The nice song I use in the intro and ending is called Young Republicans, by Steve Comb. Young Republicans by Steve Combs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. You can check it out here.