JL Collins.
by JL Collins — The Simple Path to Wealth · VTSAX and chill index-fund investing
Author of The Simple Path to Wealth, the book that distilled a lifetime of index-fund investing into a single accessible argument: own VTSAX, avoid debt, ignore the noise.
About JL Collins
JL Collins is a retired investor and writer best known for The Simple Path to Wealth (2016), which originated as a series of letters written to his daughter and became one of the most widely recommended personal finance books in the financial independence community. Collins spent decades working in business before stepping back from full-time employment, and the book synthesizes what he learned over that period into an argument that is deliberately simple: a low-cost total market index fund, combined with an adequate savings rate and a long time horizon, is sufficient for most investors to build and maintain wealth.
The Simple Path to Wealth is notable for what it omits as much as what it includes. Collins argues against individual stock picking, complex portfolio constructions, market timing, and the finance industry's tendency to make investing feel like it requires professional intermediaries. His recommendation — own Vanguard's Total Stock Market Index Fund (VTSAX) or a similar low-cost equivalent — is blunt enough to be controversial among advisors who earn their living on more complex allocations.
Collins maintains a blog, jlcollinsnh.com, where he has published investment and travel writing for over a decade. The blog has a substantial following in the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) community, where his Stock Series posts are treated as foundational reading. He has been a guest on nearly every major personal finance podcast and has spoken at FinCon and other financial literacy conferences.
His second book, Pathfinders (2023), collects stories from readers whose financial lives were changed by The Simple Path to Wealth — a format that functions as both testimonial and practical reinforcement for the book's central argument. Collins's contribution to personal finance writing is specifically his willingness to make a simple recommendation and defend it without hedging.
