Building Wealth Together: A Simple Guide for Couples to Start Investing for the Long Run

Helen Patrick is a personal finance writer and educator who has spent the past fifteen years helping people build practical, sustainable relationships with their money. Her work focuses on the intersection of financial psychology and long term investing, with a particular emphasis on how couples can navigate money decisions together. She is the author of three previous books, including The Mindful Budget and Investing Without Anxiety, and her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Kiplinger's Personal Finance, and Morningstar.

Patrick began her career as a financial advisor at a large brokerage firm, where she observed firsthand how often couples sabotaged their long term returns through emotional decision-making and poor communication. That experience led her to leave the advisory world and pursue a master's degree in behavioral finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Her research on how married couples make joint financial decisions has been cited in academic journals and industry white papers.

She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two children, where she and her family practice the same principles she writes about: automated index fund investing, annual portfolio rebalancing, monthly money dates, and the occasional heated debate about whether a vacation home is a good investment. She believes that the best financial plan is not the one with the highest theoretical return, but the one that both partners can commit to and maintain through all of life's seasons.