Ric Edelman

Ric Edelman (legal name Fredric Mark Edelman, per his FINRA BrokerCheck record) is an American personal finance author, radio and podcast host and former financial advisor. According to Wikipedia, he was born on May 28, 1958, in Philadelphia, grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, studied communications at Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) and worked as a reporter before entering financial services in the mid-1980s.

With his wife Jean, he co-founded Edelman Financial Services in Fairfax, Virginia. The firm sold a majority stake to Sanders Morris Harris Group in 2005 and merged with Financial Engines in 2018 to form Edelman Financial Engines. The company announced in June 2021 that he would step down as chairman of financial education and client experience at the end of that year and move to an advisory role. His current venture is the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals (DACFP), which he founded and which trains financial advisors and investors on bitcoin, blockchain and other digital assets. DACFP also runs events for advisors, such as Crypto Convergence 2026 (June 8-10, 2026), where he moderated most sessions.

He hosts the podcast The Truth About Your Future with Ric Edelman, distributed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube, and previously hosted The Ric Edelman Show on radio and The Truth About Money on public television. His YouTube channel (@RicEdelman, linked from thetruthayf.com) showed 11.6K subscribers and 1.6K videos when read on September 14, 2026. His books include Ordinary People, Extraordinary Wealth (2001), The Truth About Your Future (2017) and The Truth About Crypto (Simon & Schuster, 2022). His own materials describe him as a #1 New York Times bestselling author; that is his description, not independently checked here.

What he sells today is DACFP's Certified in Blockchain and Digital Assets program. The pricing table on dacfp.com lists two tracks: the Financial Professional Track, which leads to the FINRA-listed CBDA designation, at $699 with 18 CE credits and 14 self-paced online modules, and the Investor Track, a certificate covering eight of those modules, at $299. DACFP says it offers tuition discounts for groups of 10 or more and for members of select organizations, and full scholarships for qualified advisors. It also sells shorter online CE courses (for example on spot bitcoin ETFs or the GENIUS Act), several taught by Edelman, with prices shown only on its learning platform. DACFP discloses on its website that its sponsors pay a $35,000 fee to be interviewed on The Truth About Your Future radio show and podcast.

On reputation, the public record is mixed in kind rather than in tone. Barron's ranked him the #1 independent financial advisor (2012) and added him to its Financial Advisors Hall of Fame (2019), according to Wikipedia. His FINRA BrokerCheck record (CRD 1537980), checked on September 14, 2026, shows him as no longer registered as a broker or investment adviser, with his last registration at EF Legacy Securities ending in October 2018. It lists two disclosures: a 1998 customer arbitration over surrender fees, demand $25,200, settled for $18,200; and a 2011 stipulation with the New York Insurance Department with a $1,500 penalty for not disclosing an earlier Illinois fine on New York paperwork. No other regulatory action appears in that record. No independent figure was found for how many people have completed the CBDA program beyond DACFP's own statements.