Author
JL Collins
The blogger who wrote his daughter a series of letters about index funds, and gave a generation its investing plan.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
JL Collins spent his career in business and publishing, and in 2011 started a blog, jlcollinsnh, with a series of posts on investing written for his daughter, who wanted nothing to do with the subject and needed to understand it anyway.
The posts, known as the Stock Series, argued for a single approach: avoid debt, spend less than you earn, and put the difference into broad, low-cost index funds every month for decades. They became The Simple Path to Wealth in 2016, one of the central texts of the financial independence movement.
He later wrote How I Lost Money in Real Estate Before It Was Fashionable, a short memoir of a bad investment, and Pathfinders in 2023, a collection of readers' accounts of following the path.
The signature
Collins writes as a father explaining something once, plainly, so that it need never be explained again. His signature is the refusal of complexity, the insistence that market crashes are normal weather, and the idea of F-you money: the sum that buys the freedom to say no long before it buys retirement.