Founder, Edelman Financial Engines
#1 New York Times Bestselling Author
Financial Educator & Innovator

Ric Edelman is one of the most influential figures in the financial services profession. Holder of seven professional designations, he has spent four decades helping ordinary Americans achieve financial security – as an advisor, author, educator and innovator.

In 1986, after recognizing that Wall Street was serving only the wealthy, Ric and his wife Jean founded Edelman Financial Services to serve everyday Americans – a mission it adheres to today. In 2018, the firm acquired Financial Engines (the robo-advisor serving company retirement plans that was founded by Nobel laureate William Sharpe) and rebranded the firm Edelman Financial Engines. Today, EFE is the nation’s largest independent financial planning and investment management firm, managing $350 billion for 1.4 million families, and the country’s largest provider of advice to 401(k) plans (including 150 of the Fortune 500). Ric left EFE in 2021 but remains a board member and its largest individual shareholder.

Over the years, Ric has become one of the most acclaimed writers in the personal finance field. His 13 books on money (including a bestselling children’s book) collectively have 1.2 million copies in print in eight languages; he’s won multiple “Book of the Year” awards and is a #1 New York Times, #1 Washington Post and #1 Amazon bestselling author.

Ric is also one of the nation’s most popular talk-show hosts and producers. For 32 years, he hosted radio’s The Ric Edelman Show, reaching one million listeners each week, and TALKERS magazine named him among the nation’s 100 Most Important Radio Talk Show Hosts four times (one of only two weekend-only hosts ever included). He also produced three television series and six specials for Public Television (#7 premieres in Dec 2026), and his daily podcast, The Truth About Your Future, ranked in the top 1% of all podcasts. Across more than 4,000 broadcasts and 200,000 hours on the air, Ric has delivered one billion spoken words on personal finance, appeared on The Oprah Winrey Show five times, was the personal finance resident expert for The Dr. Oz. Show, served as Mr. Money for AARP and gave thousands of interviews across all media, including appearances on all major television networks, and dozens of newspapers, magazines and talk shows. And once, Ric was the answer to 21 Across in a New York Times crossword puzzle (the clue was “financial guru Edelman”).

Ric has taught personal finance for decades. He has delivered more than 300 seminars to over 50,000 people around the world. At the university level, he was a faculty member of Georgetown University for nine years, has guest-lectured at Stanford, George Washington, Pepperdine, Roger Williams, Columbia, Brigham Young and the Smithsonian Institution, and in 2026 was named founding head of the School of Financial Planning at Rowan University’s Rohrer College of Business, where he also teaches. (Rowan previously had awarded Ric an honorary doctorate and named him the university’s Distinguished Lecturer.) Ric has also testified before Congress multiple times and was appointed a delegate to both National Summits on Retirement Savings by Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Ric is also a serial innovator whose ideas have reshaped mainstream financial planning. In the 1980s, he pioneered the then-controversial recommendation that homeowners carry a 30-year mortgage rather than rush to pay it off – an approach now widely adapted by the profession following validation from two decades of academic study. In the 1990s, he invented the Retirement Income for Everyone Trust^® (RIC-E Trust^®), for which he received two patents; more than 5,000 children will be future millionaires thanks to this invention, which helped inspire the federal Trump Accounts program. In 2005, he launched the Edelman Managed Asset Program^®, one of the industry’s first (and now among the largest) fee-based, ETF-driven Turnkey Asset Management Platforms. EMAP introduced daily rebalancing reviews, an industry first. In 2015, after persuading BlackRock and Morningstar to bring the concept to market, he launched the first exponential-technologies ETF (NYSE: XT), the second most successful ETF launch in history at the time and a finalist for two ETF innovation awards. He also founded Durin Life Sciences, a neurodegenerative-disease diagnostics company that he sold to NeuroVision in 2026.

Beyond EFE, Ric has founded several organizations that advance financial literacy and professional development: The Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals (2015) trains advisors on blockchain and digital assets, and awards its Certificate in Blockchain and Digital Assets professional designation (listed in the FINRA database) now held by thousands of professionals in 37 countries; the Funding Our Future Coalition (2012), a 75-member nonprofit coalition that worked with Congress for a decade to resolve the Social Security crisis; and the Personal Finance Institute (2025), which provides consumer financial literacy education, advisor professional development and, through its Museum of Personal Finance, chronicles the history of the wealth and asset management fields.

Ric’s contributions have been widely recognized. He was ranked the nation’s #1 Independent Financial Advisor by Barron’s three times and inducted into two Advisor Halls of Fame (Barron’s and Research magazine). He has received three lifetime achievement awards (IARFC in 2017; InvestmentNews and the Tiburon CEO Summit in 2025) and has been named among the five most influential figures in the profession by InvestmentNews, RIABiz and Wealth Management magazine.

Ric and Jean are active philanthropists focused on education, healthcare, science and the arts. They are benefactors of the Edelman Center for Nursing at Inova Hospital Foundation, the Jean Edelman Indoor Arena at the Northern Virginia Therapeutic Riding Program and, at Rowan University, the Edelman Planetarium, the Edelman Fossil Park & Museum (named by the Smithsonian as one of the five most anticipated museum openings in the world in 2025) the Ric Edelman College of Communication, Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Edelman Scholars. They have also been major supporters of the Foundation for Financial Planning, the U.S. Park Police Horse Stables and Education Center on the National Mall, Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, and Free All Minds Academy, among other organizations.

Ric serves on the corporate boards of Edelman Financial Engines and TaxStatus, the advisory boards of Colossal Biosciences, Contio and Wing Financial, and the nonprofit boards of the Davis Alzheimer’s Collaborative and the Museum of American Finance. Jean is Secretary on Rowan University’s Board of Trustees and host of her own podcast. The Edelmans spend most of their time in Northern Virginia, New York and Scottsdale with their Weimaraner, Satoshi, and Supermutt Nori.