the author
Rachel McDonough
For over twenty years, she's been helping people bring their faith and their finances into the same room. Plus, she's been exploring the landscape of opportunities for wealthy investors who want their values to show up in their portfolios.
The River and the Garden invites readers into her unique way of seeing the world of stewardship and investing.
Rachel is a Certified Financial Planner™, Certified Kingdom Advisor®, and a pioneer in faith-driven investing. She loves advising and mentoring investors, training advisors, and making the case that a portfolio can pursue financial returns and human flourishing at the same time.
She calls it the Head + Heart approach. Gran, Roger, and Willow are the personifications of the method.
The Head & Heart approach — and where it came from.
Rachel McDonough has spent more than twenty years asking the question most financial conversations quietly avoid: what is your money actually for?
As a Certified Financial Planner™, Retirement Income Certified Professional®, and Certified Kingdom Advisor®, she has the technical credentials to sit in any boardroom. But what drew her to this work — and what has kept her in it — is the space between the spreadsheet and the soul. The gap between what a client's portfolio says and what their life is trying to say.
She calls her approach Head and Heart. Not either/or. Both. The discipline of rigorous financial planning held inside a larger question about meaning, legacy, and what God actually intends for the resources he's entrusted to us.
That philosophy is behind her two previous books — True Treasure and Investing & Faith — her regular contributions to the Faith Driven Advisor blog and the MoneyWise podcast, and her board work with Talanton and Eagle Venture, impact investment funds focused on job creation in East Africa and the fight against human trafficking.
It also shapes the firms she has built. Rachel is the founder of Wealth Squared and WealthInfluence — practices built on the belief that financial planning and kingdom impact belong in the same conversation.
In 2022, she received the Larry Burkett Award from Kingdom Advisors — the field's recognition that her voice in the faith-driven investing movement has mattered.
The River and the Garden is her most personal work yet. Not a manual. Not a framework document. A story — because after twenty years of sitting across from investors who had everything and still felt something was missing, she became convinced that the right story could go somewhere an argument never could.
She lives in Wisconsin with her husband and three children. On Sundays, she leads worship at church.
I love watching investors and their advisors catch vision for what their surplus is meant to cultivate. They don't have to choose between wisdom and doing good.
But if we are not intentional, someone else will choose where our capital flows and what it waters.
Bring the conversation to your community.
Rachel speaks to congregations, donor communities, financial advisors, and leadership retreats — anywhere people are wrestling with what to do with what they've been given. Her talks are grounded in twenty years of practice, not theory.
