First-Time Investor: Grow and Protect Your Money: Paul Merriman's How To Invest Series
Paul Merriman is a nationally recognized authority on mutual funds, index investing, asset allocation and both buy-and-hold and active management strategies. He was the founder and president of an investment advisory firm that is now Merriman LLC. The Seattle-based firm manages more than $1.5 billion for more than 2,000 households throughout the United States. In his retirement, Paul remains passionately committed to educating and empowering investors. The How To Invest series distills his decades of expertise into concise investment books targeted to specific audiences. All profits from the sale of his books are donated to non-profit educational organizations. Paul is also the author of four previous books on personal investing, including Financial Fitness Forever (McGraw Hill, Oct. 2011) written for his Public Broadcasting System special, Financial Fitness After 50 and Live It Up Without Outliving Your Money! (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).  Over the years Paul has led more than 1,000 investor workshops, hosted a weekly radio program and has been a featured guest on regional and national television shows. He has written many articles for "Fund Advice", a service of Merriman LLC, 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 University’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.