Paul A. Merriman

Paul Merriman is nationally recognized as an authority on mutual funds, index investing, asset allocation and both buy-and-hold and active management strategies. He is the founder of Paul A. Merriman & Associates, an investment advisory firm that is now Merriman Inc. The Seattle-based firm manages more than $1.5 billion for more than 2,000 households throughout the United States.

Paul is the author of four previous books on personal investing, including Live It Up Without Outlving Your Money!, published in 2008 by John Wiley & Sons.

Over the years Paul has led more than 1,000 investor workshops, hosted a weekly radio program and has been a featured guest on local, regional and national television shows. Paul has written many articles for FundAdvice.com, a service of Merriman Inc. This Web site was identified by Forbes as one of the best online resources for investors.

Paul’s weekly podcast, “Sound Investing,” was named by Money magazine as the best money podcast. Paul has been widely quoted in national publications and has spoken to many local chapters of the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII). Twice he has been a featured guest speaker at Harvard University’s investor psychology conference.

Paul began his career in the 1960s, working briefly as a broker for a major Wall Street firm. He concluded that Wall Street was burdened with too many conflicts of interest and decided to help small companies raise venture capital. In 1979, he became president and chairman of a public manufacturing company in the Pacific Northwest. He retired in 1982 to create his independent investment management firm.

Paul is the recipient of a distinguished alumni award from Western Washington Univerity’s School of Economics and is a founding member of the board of directors of Global HELP, a Seattle-based non-profit organization that produces medical publications and distributes them free to doctors and other health care workers in developing nations.

Richard Buck

Richard Buck was a Seattle Times business reporter for 20 years, capping a 30-year journalism career that included eight years as a writer and editor for The Associated Press. He began working with Paul in 1993. He retired in the fall of 2011 as senior editor of Merriman Inc. In that position he helped Paul and other Merriman staff members write many articles at FundAdvice.com and was the ghostwriter for Paul’s previous book, Live It Up Without Outliving Your Money!

Since he first subscribed to a few investment newsletters in high school, Richard has never lost his fascination with all the ways that money can be put to work. He is a graduate of Willamette Universtiy as well as a former president of the university’s alumni association and former member of its board of trustees.

His writing has been published in travel magazines, outdoor magazines, online at Crosscut.com and in America, a publication of the U.S. State Department.