Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work

Barry speaks with Jonathan Clements, Founder and Editor of the HumbleDollar and veteran personal finance columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He wrote over a thousand columns for the Journal and for the Wall Street Journal Sunday before spending six years as Citigroup's Director of Financial Education. He also held positions at Euromoney and Forbes. Jonathan is the author of 9 personal finance books including "My Money Journey" and "From Here to Financial Happiness." He received a Stage 4 Lung Cancer diagnosis last year, an experience he's used to expound on the relationship between money, well-being, and life satisfaction.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. This is Masters in
Business with Barry Ritholts on Bloomberg Radio.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
This week on the podcast boy, What an extra special
guest I Have? Jonathan Clements was the personal finance columnist
at The Wall Street Journal for nearly twenty five years.
He wrote over a thousand columns. He also worked as
director of financial education at City Group. Jonathan kind of
famously announced that he was diagnosed with terminal cancer on

(00:40):
his website as well as social media, and that started
this cascade of not just an outpouring of affection and
appreciation for his work, but just a dialogue about how
we all should be thinking about our lives, our money,
and our life satisfaction. I've been a reader of his

(01:02):
for forever, and it was really a privilege to have
him come into the studios and with no hesitancy, discuss
what many people find to be difficult subjects with just
tremendous grace and insight and dignity. And I found it
to be an absolutely fascinating conversation, and I think you

(01:24):
will also if you are at all curious about estate planning,
or investing or personal finance. This is not the usual discussion,
and I think it's very worthwhile for you to hear
this and share it with friends and family with no
further ado. My discussion with Jonathan Clements Barrio.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
It's great to see you again and it's great to
be on your podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
Well, well, thank you so much. I'm glad we have
the opportunity to do this. Before we start talking about
the serious, heavy stuff, let's get a little background for you.
You grow up in London, you graduate Cambridge and you
start at Eural money magazine in London. What were you
studying at Cambridge? What was your original career plan?

Speaker 3 (02:09):
So from a relatively early age, I actually thought about
being a financial journalist because my father had been a
financial journalist. He spent ten years in journalism in London.
He worked for the Daily Telegraph, he was city editor
for the Glasgow Herald. His first job out of college
was at the Financial Times. In fact, wow, and this
will blow your mind, Barry. My father graduated from Cambridge

(02:32):
in nineteen fifty six. He decided he was going to
take the highest paying job he was offered, and the
highest paying job he was offered the second highest paid
job he was offered at seven hundred pounds a year
was as a management trainee for Shell Oil. The highest
paying job he was offered at eight hundred pounds a
year was as a cub reporter for the Financial Times.

(02:53):
Can you imagine a world to where the highest paying
job you get offered out of college is a job
in journalism?

Speaker 2 (02:59):
That's amazing. Journalism today has, you know, technology has changed
it so much that's really hard to fathom. Although you
and I not far apart in age, grew up in
an era where media was very specific and thought of
as a genuine career. I don't think even at the
journalism schools people are approaching.

Speaker 4 (03:21):
It the same way.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
What's your thoughts on the state of journalism in the
modern world.

Speaker 3 (03:27):
Well, if you said to me, you know, what advice
would I give to somebody who wanted to go into journalism,
My aunts would be dope. I really feel like I
was the last generation that got into journalism and made
a career out of it and made a living wage.
But anyway, going back to your question, yeah, financial journalism
was always on my radar screen, and even before I
went to Cambridge, I actually spent eight months working for

(03:51):
a little suburban newspaper outside of Washington, DC, and in
many ways it was the most fun and then the
most educational experience I had in journalism. I worked for
this you know, rinking little paper that came out every
other week. The circulation was twenty five thousand, but as

(04:12):
a nineteen year old, I was able to not only
get involved in writing stories, but also I was involved
in the paste up of the paper. For people who
remember what paste up was. I even went on advertising
calls with the advertising director. It was so much fun
and I learned so much.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
So you're from the UK, but you've spent a lot
of time in the US. Where did you grow up?

Speaker 3 (04:34):
Both places? I was born in London, and when I
was three and a half, my father got a job
for the World Bank in Washington, d C. So we
all moved to Washington, d C. Then, just before my
tenth birthday, my father was posted to Bangladesh for four years.
So my mother and father and my sister went to
live full time in Bangladesh, and my two brothers and
I got packed off to boarding school in England, which

(04:56):
explains everything you know. We'd go out there during vacations.
Four years later, my parents moved back to DC, but
with my parents' encouragement, I stayed on a boarding school
in England, went to Cambridge, worked there for a year,
and then after a year as a journalist in London,
I realized the standard living for reporters in England seriously socked.

(05:19):
And that's when I decided to move to New York
City and I joined Forbes magazine as a glorified fact
checker and immediately doubled my salary moving from London.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Well didn't you also double your cost? New York back
then was still in the nineties, New York was really
an expensive place to live.

Speaker 3 (05:36):
London is also a really expensive place to live. And
in any case, at the time, I was actually living
out in Princeton with my graduate student wife.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
You go from Forbes pretty much during the golden era
of mutual funds and star managers, like the eighties and nineties,
that was peak mutual funds. What was that like looking
at it as the data was begun coming clearer that hey,
this may not be the best deal for investors.

Speaker 3 (06:05):
When I was at Forbes, after this initial spell as
a fact checker, I was given the mutual funds beat
and the core article as the mutual funds reported for
Forbes magazine and subsequently when I covered mutual funds for
the journal, was the star manager profile, and it was
very formulaic. You went and you interviewed some star manager,
usually a man, and you would have a couple of

(06:28):
paragraphs about their investment philosophy and strategy. You would offer
three of their stock picks where they were probably touting
stocks they wanted download from their portfolio, and the managers
you selected were all based on past performance. And one
of the things I started to realize in those years
was the star managers, well, their stars started to flame
out pretty quickly. And this, of course was the experience

(06:50):
of many investors across the US, and that was in
many ways, you know, the seeds of the index fund revolution.
That people bought these star managers, you know, one after another,
the managers started to flame out, they bought new star managers.
They ended up with these portfolios that were just a
hodgepodge of x star fund managers and that really set

(07:14):
us up for the boom and index scene in the
late nineteen nineties and into the two thousands.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
Yeah. The funny thing is the behavioral aspect of mutual
funds seems to have been when people finally learn about
a manager who's put up great numbers. By the time
it makes it to Forbes, hey, most of that run
is probably over in a little mean reversion is about
to kick in. That experience led you to becoming the

(07:41):
index guy. Tell us a little bit what it was
like being an index guy at a time when it
wasn't as popular or well thought of as it is today.

Speaker 3 (07:52):
So in nineteen ninety four, at the lofty age of
thirty one, the journal gave me my own column, which,
in retrospector is obsurd. I have a thirty one.

Speaker 2 (08:01):
Year old their own It seems to have worked out
well for them, though, to be fair.

Speaker 3 (08:05):
Yeah, but I'm not sure I would give a thirty
one year old that that chance. Okay, but yes, I
was given my own column. And by that point, having
seen all these star managers come and go, you know,
I had become an index fund devotee. And in column
after column I banged the drum for index funds to

(08:25):
the point where my editors were asking me, hey, could
you write about something else? But the numbers you can't
argue with. I mean, we all know that the brutal
math of investing before costs, investors collectively will earn the
market's return after costs. They will earn that mark return
less whatever they're paying. If you can just match the

(08:46):
market's return minus some tiny amount for an index fund's expenses,
you're going to outperform the vast majority of investors, and
that annual advantage snowballs over time. Until probably the early
two two thousands, that message didn't resonate as widely in
pot because index funds were the preserve of bank gotten

(09:07):
a couple other, you know, fun companies. But then these
ETFs came along, these exchange traded index funds, and at
that point any financial advisor, any broker, could sell index
funds to their clients. And it was really the ETF
revolution that took indexing and turned it into a national
phenomenon that now supposters the amount of money and actively

(09:30):
managed funds.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
So that's an interesting thesis. I know ETFs are really
significant to the adoption of indexing, But spy has been
around for seems like forever. It certainly was around in
the nineties. What was it about the two thousands, specifically?

Speaker 4 (09:49):
Was it just the variety of choice?

Speaker 2 (09:52):
Why do you think ETFs kicked off so much attraction
to indexing, especially considering the bulk of those moneys, the
flow of black Rock, Vanguard, and State Street.

Speaker 3 (10:05):
Well, so you're right, you know, spiders Spy came out,
I believe in nineteen ninety three, but it was just
the S and P five hundred and it was just
that single fund. The exchange traded index funds really did
take off thanks to what was then Barclay's now part
of black Rock with the I Shares series, and suddenly
you could buy index funds that cover all of the

(10:26):
major asset classes, and you because they were stocks that
traded on the market, you didn't have to have an
agreement with Vanguard or with Fidelity in order to sell
those funds. You just needed a brokerage account. And suddenly
every broker, every financial advisor where they were operating through Mery,
Lynch or Schwab, could sell those funds and indexing was

(10:49):
available to all. Prior to that, there were a lot
of brokers who would never have sold an index fund
because they didn't have access to Vanguard's platform.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
So let me push back a little bit on that.
My experience has been that the brokerage side, at least
up until recently was much more interested in the value
add And I'm making air quotes for listeners of stock selection,
fund selection, manager selection, and they seem to have been
less keen on passive or indexing, whereas the RIA side

(11:23):
of the street, the independent advisor that or the certified planner,
they seem to be more focused on let's get a plan,
let's figure out what your objectives are, and the market
will take care of itself. How do you see that
that shift? I've watched that over decades. You you were
in the thick of it. I'm curious as to what
you witnessed.

Speaker 3 (11:44):
So you're right. I mean, these are traditional brokers were
much slower to adopt ETFs than you know, the only
financial advisors. But today you know a lot of brokers,
you know, whether they're with the big full service brokerage
firms now have advisory accounts. They flog to clients where
they can buy ETFs and as long as they're getting

(12:05):
their fee, whatever it's you know, one one and a
half percent, whatever amount it is, you know, they now
have an incentive to sell those ETFs. And remember, if
you're an advisor and you're selling ETFs, I mean there's
no reason to ever say sorry.

Speaker 4 (12:20):
Right, that's right.

Speaker 3 (12:22):
You get the market's a ton surprise, surprise.

Speaker 2 (12:24):
Well, if you tilt it all towards international or emerging
markets or value, there are occasional apologies along the way. Hey,
but that's what's the old joke. The cost of diversification
is frequently having to apologize for something that's not keeping
up with the SMP.

Speaker 3 (12:41):
If nothing in your portfolio is performing badly, you're not diversified.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
That's right, that's exactly right. So so you said something
interesting that jog something in my mind. That you are
constantly flogging passive indexing and ETFs, much to the sugarn
of your editors, kind of makes me think of something
Jason has said, which is his job is to write
the same column over and over again, but in a

(13:05):
way that neither his editors nor the readers know. What
are your thoughts on repeating yourself over and over again,
but in new and interesting ways.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
So Jason was the next employee hired by Forbes after me.
That's hilarious. And when I left Forbes, Jason ended up
with the Mutual Funds be Then he went onto Money Magazine,
And then when I left the journal for the first
time in two thousand and eight, they said, well, who
should we hire to replace you? I said, Jason's why. So,
Jason and I have known each other for over thirty years.

(13:38):
I consider him to be one of my best friends,
and in fact, you know, through my recent diagnosis, he's
been a super supportive You know, we remain great friends
after all these years, and I'm a huge admirer of
his work for the Journal and elsewhere. So, yes, Jason
has the same joke that I do, which is, you know,
there are only twenty postal finance stories, which means by

(14:00):
the time I left the Journal and writing a thousand columns,
I've written each of those stories fifty times each. If
you are going to serve your readers, well, you know
there are only a limited number of stories to be written.
You know, if you're a reporter who spends their career
writing the stock of the day, the fund of the month,

(14:20):
just flogging one thing after another trying to predict the
market's direction, you'll be plenty busy, but your readership will
be a whole lot poorer. So if you want to
do the right thing, you're basically going to have to
have a set of sound principles and focus on them
again and again, and one of the things you discover
is that you start to sound like a repetitive, blathering idiot.
And that's when, for me, and I think also for Jason,

(14:42):
you start costing around for other things to write about.
So when I go back to the late nineteen eighties
and I started as a financial journalist, the sole topic
was investing. It was all about which fund to buy,
which stock to buy. Fortunately, over time, the field that
is personal finance has expanded to today, if you are
a good financial journalist, you should be writing not just

(15:04):
about investing, but about topics like you know when to
claim Social Security, what should you have in your estate plan,
you know what sort of house should you be buying,
and then beyond that, writing about things like behavioral finance,
thinking about things like money and happiness. The topic that
we call financial journalism has expanded enormously over the past
three plus decades. And that's good news for somebody like me,

(15:27):
because if I'm still writing only about index funds, I
would have been out of a job a long time ago.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
Really really interesting, So the twenty years you spent at
the journal really is a fascinating couple of decades. You
wrote at the Journal, through the dot com implosion, as
well as the whole run up to two thousand, September eleventh,
the Great Financial Crisis. What era of finance did you

(15:54):
find the most intriguing as a journalist.

Speaker 3 (15:58):
I know this probably sounds like I'm an ambulance chaser,
but you know what, the periods that I enjoyed the
most was when the stock market was going down.

Speaker 4 (16:07):
I'm I totally agree with you.

Speaker 2 (16:09):
I have been warned repeatedly, hey, people are getting, you know,
really hurt out there. Can you stop whistling into the
office like that? But that's when the most amount of
fascinating things happen and the most amount of opportunities present themselves,
Which leads me to my next question. Right into the

(16:29):
teeth of the financial crisis, you went ninety five percent
into stocks. Tell us a little bit about why you
did that, which turned out to be the right call,
and how you shared that information with your readers.

Speaker 3 (16:42):
Coming into sort of late two thousand and eight, I think,
if I recall correct, I have somewhere between seventy and
eighty percent stocks. By that point, I'd left the Journal
and I was working at City Group as director of
financial education for the wealth management business. And a number
of things happened. One was I was working on Wall streets.
I was earning a whole lot more money. Two, I

(17:03):
got my first Wall Street bonus. Three I sold another book,
which meant I got a big advance. And four tragically,
my father was killed during this period and I inherited
money from him, and I took every one of those
dollars and put them into the stock market. And it
was a time when the sequence of returns, that combination

(17:25):
of what's going on in the market and whether you're
pulling out money from your portfolio of putting it in
worked like magic. And said to people numerous times when
we have a period in like two thousand and eight,
two thousand and nine when everybody thinks the world is
going to hell in a hand basket, well, if it
really does go to hell, doesn't matter what you own, right,
More than likely, you know, we humans being humans, will

(17:45):
figure out a way to solve this problem and the
market will come roaring back, and what you want to
own at that point is stocks. So I just backed
up the cart and bought stocks like crazy.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
So that's kind of interesting that you're making an active
decision in the face of market turmoil and increase volatility.
Did at any point in that process did you feel like, hey,
you know, I'm kind of going against everything I've said
in the past. Or was it people said stocks were

(18:18):
pricing now they're cheap.

Speaker 4 (18:20):
I'm just a value investor.

Speaker 3 (18:22):
Well, guilty is charged, Barry. I mean, I can't entirely
justify it. But over my career as an investing the
things that I've learned is one that you know, you
can't win through stock selection. You can't win by buying
actively managed funds. You know what you need to do
is indexing. But one way you can tilt the field

(18:46):
in your favor is in periods when people are panicking.
Is too, as I like to put it, over rebounds
to move even more into stocks. It's it's a temporary move.
But you know I've done it repeatedly. I did it
in two thousand and two thousand and two, I did
it in two thousand and eight and nine, I did
it during the coronavirus collapse in twenty twenty, and I

(19:07):
did it again in twenty twenty two. You don't know
what the bottom of the market looks like, I think
it's very hard to say stocks are objectively cheap because
all of these valuation metrics have become unreliable over the
decades as the nature of the stock market has changed.
But the one thing I have learned is that if
the market is off twenty thirty percent, things are a

(19:30):
whole lot cheaper than they were prior to the decline,
and what you should do is buy.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
It's easier said than done. You mentioned covering behavioral finance
as a way to look beyond just indexing funds. Tell
us a little bit about the challenges that the average
investor faces trying to buy into a down thirty percent
market when everybody else is panicking and running the other way.

Speaker 3 (19:57):
Well, we know how investors behaved, which is they extrapolate
recent returns. So if the market's going up, they think
it's going to keep going up, it's going down, they
assume it's going to keep going down, and that, of
course is what everybody around them is doing. They're also
extrapolating returns. It's very hard to step aside from the
narrative of that time and think independently, but that's what
you need to do to be a successful investor. At

(20:19):
a bare minimum. At a bare minimum, if you can
just stand your ground, you'll probably do a whole lot
better than most investors who will tend to be buying
and selling it just the wrong time.

Speaker 2 (20:29):
I just have to ask you a little bit about
what you did after the Journal, and that includes both
City Group and Humble Dollars. You were at City Group
for about six years and you were director of education.
Tell us a little bit about what that role encompassed
and what it was like dealing with City investors rather
than journal readers. And I'm sure there's a bit of

(20:52):
an overlap there.

Speaker 3 (20:53):
So in a couple of years running up to early
two thousand and eight, I was getting increasingly burned out
on writing the column and I was thinking, like I
got to do something else in life, and I cast around.
I talked to various people about different jobs. Nothing quite
rang a bell for me. And then I was approached
by City Group about being director of financial education for

(21:15):
this startup called ma FI. And the idea was they
were going to help small investors with their entire financial
life in return for a fixed monthly fee. That was
the notion, lovely notion. But two things went wrong. One
is The idea of doing a startup within a large
corporation is absolutely absurd. Companies large companies are incapable of

(21:37):
innovating in that way. It was just a struggle from
day one, particularly in the rehdatory environment that is the
securities business between lawyers and compliance people. Everythink was a headache.
And then on top of that, of course, we ran
straight into the two thousand and eight two thousand and
nine Great Recession, So the business was pretty much dead
before it began. And by the summer of two thousand

(21:58):
and nine they'd pulled the plug on this venture and suddenly,
you know, I've thrown away my journalism career to join
the City Group. You know what would happen next, Well,
this group of people that were part of this startup,
well my FI, were rolled into the traditional bank based
brokerage business, if you can imagine two completely different group
of people. And then on top of that, they decided

(22:18):
they were going to try to turn these bank based
brokers into feelingly financial advisors.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
Which, by the way, was the underlying trends outside of
the broker's firm. They were watching what was a small
part of the business really begin to blossom post crisis.

Speaker 3 (22:37):
So I became part of this new business, and I
did a lot of writing and a lot of public
speaking over the next four plus years until I realized that,
you know, I really wasn't doing much good in the world.
I was collecting the nice paycheck, the biggest paycheck in
my life, but I really felt like I was wasting

(22:57):
my time, and I've I've never already done anything in
my career solely for money, and it's suddenly dawn on
me that really I was just living for my paycheck.
So I made a plan to get out of there.
I realized I had enough to retire if I wanted to.
I was in my I was fifty one, so I
spent ten or eleven months preparing to leave. I contacted

(23:21):
the journal about writing for them again. I also started
working on a book, and after I got my lost
year in Bonus in early twenty fourteen, I walked in
and handed in my notice.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
So you said something I have to follow up on.
I can't tell you how many people have said, you know,
I don't really do this for the money, and very
often they get pushedback. But I feel that way, and
I know you feel that way. What sort of response
do you get from people when you say, well, I'm
getting a nice paycheck, but that's not why I do this.

Speaker 3 (23:54):
I think that in this case, I probably did not
express it to people in that way. I'm not saying
that I don't like getting paid.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
But well, we all like getting paid. But my question
is why do we do what we do. Is it
for the money or is the money like a nice
aspect of being able to do what you really love?

Speaker 3 (24:13):
And it's really the latter, And I think it probably
depends on the economic comfort in which you grew up.
I mean, I grew up in a very comfortable middle
class or from middle class household, so money was never
my priority going into the workforce. You know, I wanted
to cover the costs obviously, I wanted to save for
the future, but I was never motivated by money. If
I was motivated by money, I would never have ended

(24:34):
up in journalism.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
That's interesting, and you have said, especially post diagnosis, you've
very publicly said, gee, had I known when when the
clock was going to run out, I would have spent
money more aggressively. It's kind of interesting that you were
saving despite having come from a fairly comfortable background. Clarify

(24:59):
that a little bit. How did you think about spending
money and how did the diagnosis change your perspectives on this.

Speaker 3 (25:06):
So there are two reasons why I became very focused
on saving money. First, what I call the great family story.
So when my great great grandfather died in eighteen eighty eight,
he was listening in the newspapers as one of the
richest men in England.

Speaker 2 (25:21):
Really, I had no idea.

Speaker 4 (25:23):
That's fascinating.

Speaker 3 (25:23):
He he was based out of Liverpool and he and
his brother had launched a cigarette company called Cope Cigarettes
and they made a ton of money. That fortune ended
up with my great grandmother, uh huh, and she lived
the Downton Abbey lifestyle. She had an estate in the
Cotswolds on which there were five mansions. She lived in

(25:45):
one and her various children lived in the other houses
on the estate. The estate was inherited by the kids
to a person. They blew the money in short order.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
Classic three generations shirtsleeves to shirts life.

Speaker 3 (26:00):
So I grew up with that great family story about
how you shouldn't you know, waste money, how you should
think about the future. And then added to that was
when I got out of college and I got into
the workforce. I ended up getting married and having kids
really quickly. I was a father at age twenty five,
supporting a graduate student wife and living in New York

(26:21):
City and tight.

Speaker 4 (26:22):
Money's a little tight.

Speaker 3 (26:23):
Yeah, you know, ordering a pizza on a Friday night
was a questionable decision. And you know, I learned to
be super careful with money, and that continued for probably
thirty years. It's really on the last five years that
I've become happier about spending money, eating out more often,
traveling more. And of course since my diagnosis, you know,

(26:45):
I've been doing even more of that. I mean, I
still want to make sure that my kids and my
wife inherit plenty of money, but I'm at the point where, Okay,
I don't need to stay for the future anymore because
there isn't much future left for me. So we've been
traveling more. But to come back to the question you're
going to ask me, which is do I regret my
earlier frugality. Not really, because what I would say to you, Barry,

(27:08):
is one sure way that money buys happiness is by
allowing you not to worry about money. And so I
have not worried about money for years.

Speaker 2 (27:20):
And to be fair, you know, I don't want to
engage in what anti Duke calls resulting when you you know,
all of us are born not knowing how long we
have and when you get an end date, when you
know when the game is going to end, well, now
you have that information, it's not fair to go back
and say, hey, twenty years ago, had you known, what

(27:41):
would you've done differently, Because at the time you don't know,
it's impossible to go back and revisit those decisions. The question, really,
the fairer question, is the advice you would offer people
who don't know what the end date is. How much
should they be saving, how much should they be occasionally
taking money out and enjoying it? And obviously it's all

(28:04):
a function of specifics, but how has your perspective changed,
if at all, when you're giving that sort of advice
to people.

Speaker 3 (28:12):
So, first of all, I'd say to you, Barry, one
of the things that's the greatest source of happiness to
me is just the day to day. Just getting up
in the morning, having a cup of coffee, sitting at
my laptop writing in edit, seeing you know, going out
for lunch, having a glass of wine in the evening
with Lane. These are not expensive things for me. A
happy life does not cost a whole lot of money. Yes,

(28:34):
you know, we all are doing more traveling now, and
you know we are traveling first class or business class,
which I wouldn't have done a couple of years ago.
So yeah, I'm spending more freely. But the real happiness
I get is basically doing what I've always done, which
is to do work that I think is important. That
is a big source of happiness for me, And not

(28:55):
only does it not cost very much, but it actually
owns me some money. So up. The other thing I
would say to people is you do not want to
do all of this too early on. You know, if
I had flown business cross regularly in my twenties, it
would not be special to be today. Having a gradually
rising standard living throughout your life is a wonderful thing.

(29:16):
You know. If you stayed at Motel six in your twenties,
staying at HIGHTT in your sixties seems pretty special, right.

Speaker 4 (29:24):
That's really interesting.

Speaker 2 (29:25):
So let's talk a little bit about Humble Dollar. When
did you set that up? And you're still you're still
running that and publishing yourself with a group of other
people tell us a little bit about the humble Dollar.

Speaker 3 (29:38):
So Humble Dollar was launched right at the end of
two thousand and sixteen. I used it essentially to take
a annually updated financial guide that I was producing, and
I decide just to throw it on the web and
make it freely available and run some mads against it.
And as part of that, I invited a few people
to start writing for the site. And that snowballed over time,

(29:59):
and I have, you know, probably fifty or sixty people
who write occasionally for the site. They all do it
for free. They're all amateur writers. And the thing I
say to these amateur writers is, you know, you know,
you may not be financial experts, but you are experts
on your own life. So I encourage them to write

(30:20):
about their own financial lives. And the result has been
that people engage in a level of financial disclosure about
what they've done with their own money that the readership
finds fascinating, they find liberating, and it's become to my surprise,
I mean, this is not what I set out to do.
It's become a place where people happily talk about their

(30:42):
own finances, and the readership tends to be very supportive.
I do carefully moderate comments. I mean, if I feel
like people are getting too rough on somebody, I'll delete comments.
I also steer people away from the endless political commentary
that's poisoned social media and it's becomes I like to

(31:03):
take a safe place for people to talk about their
own finances.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
I think that's the right approach. I mean, I had
a comment section on the blog on the Big Picture
for I don't know, close to ten years and literally
millions of comments, and at a certain point, really post
financial crisis, it kind of began going off the rails
and I did the same thing you did. It's like, hey,
this is not a political forum, and if you're gonna

(31:27):
just really be you know, it takes so much time
and effort for someone to write something, and it's so
easy to just dismiss it. It doesn't seem fair, and
I think your approach is the right way to go.
Is I don't know what sort of pushback you get
to it from the readers. But the other thing I
wanted to ask you about that, not just the other

(31:47):
writers on the Humble Dollar, but the comments is people
are kind of weird about money sometimes people are just
like it's perplexing how some people think about money or
use money. Tell us a little bit about your experiences
dealing with the public and trying to be sort of
calm and rational when consumerism and materialism very often isn't.

Speaker 3 (32:11):
So. I'm not sure I have a clear view on
how the typical American thinks about money these days. You know,
what I have is a realtively narrow audience, somewhat older,
more affluent. They tend to have been drawn to the
site because they followed me for a number of years.
A lot of them are indexers. Most of them are

(32:32):
great savers, and the biggest issue for them is not
saving more and delay and gratification even more, but learning
how to spend in retirement. I mean, that is the
biggest struggle. Obviously, not a struggle for most Americans. People
do have peculiarities about money. You know this as well
as I do. It varies enormously, so it's hard to generalize. Right.
Probably most people are naturally inclined to spend too much

(32:54):
and to save too little. But in terms of my audience,
their inclination is to spend too little and save too much.

Speaker 2 (33:00):
Let's talk about that because we have about thirty advisors
who are cfps that work in my shop, and one
of the common conversations is I have a client. He's
got millions of dollars invested. We can't get him to
spend money. He wants to buy a vacation property, he
can't pull the trigger. They want to take the family

(33:20):
on a European trip, and he thinks it's going to
cost too much. How do you help people who were
earners and savers pivot in their fifty sixties seventies to
becoming spenders.

Speaker 3 (33:33):
I think that pushing people to spend more is unlikely
to work. I think instead you should talk about other goals.
I mean, do you want to stop giving money to
your kids? Do you want to start giving money to charity?
Think of other ways to get them to let go
of some of their dollars, and maybe that doorway will
become the doorway to start spending more on themselves. Suddenly,

(33:57):
I've changed up the last five years. Five years ago,
pre pandemic, I was very careful about spending. I didn't
go out to eat a lot, didn't spend a lot
on travel, And I think one of the things that
for me coming out of the pandemic was a willingness
to spend more to God and enjoy life more after
that long period stuck at home. And of course my

(34:17):
diagnosis has done that even more. And not only I
have I've been spending more, I've also been giving more
to my kids, to charity and so on. So I
think if you could open the door a little bit
and people get comfortable with it, then they'll spend more.
And giving away money, whether to charity or to your children,
is a way of opening that door.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
So I don't know if this is my perspective or
if this is accurate or not. I kind of recall
prior generations the wealth was passed down out of the
estate after the person passed away.

Speaker 4 (34:52):
They would leave their money to their family.

Speaker 2 (34:54):
It seems like it's a little more modern concept is
why not give them the money one you can watch
them enjoy it, buy a house, travel whatever. Is that
a skewed perspective or do you see something similar?

Speaker 3 (35:07):
No, absolutely, people definitely seem to be happier to give
away money now. And it's not simply that you get
the pleasure of seeing your kids enjoy the money. You
can also guide how they use it. I actually just
wrote checks at the beginning of the year to both
my kids, and you know, my kids asked, well, what
should I do with the money? So it's a chance
to say, yeah, you know, you want to put it

(35:29):
into your retirement account, you want to put it into
your emergency fund, you want to use it to pay
down the mortgage. The other thing, of course, is that
you get to see them enjoy it, right, And they
are at the point where, you know, if I give
my kids nineteen thousand dollars this year under the gift
tax exclusion, which is the sum you can give without

(35:49):
how finding a gift tax return, that money to them
in their thirties is so much more valuable than it
is to me in my sixties, right right. I mean,
they're at a point where they're still under a fair
amount of financial stress. And I'm not saying that's a
bad thing. I meanial stress, yeah exactly. That's how you
learn good spending habits. But you also get a lot

(36:11):
of pleasure from getting a nineteen thousand dollars check from
your father.

Speaker 2 (36:14):
So a theme that we seem to be talking about
is things that have changed. People are giving money away
sooner rather than as part of the estate. We've talked
about the shift from active mutual funds to passive ETFs.
What other significant shifts have you observed over the course
of your career.

Speaker 3 (36:33):
So we did touch on this as well, which is
what is considered financial journalism has changed. It used to
be that everybody was solely focused on investing and solely
focused on beating the market. I mean, that was the discussion,
you know, day in day out, and to some extent
it still is in the financial media, but you know,

(36:54):
the playing field is widened. So we are talking about
things in what I consider PUSS finance, home ownership, social security,
tax management, state planning, and so on. We're also talking
about how money meets life, things like behavioral finance, things
like money and happiness. And I think the next big

(37:16):
focus within personal finance is trying to bring this down
to the individual level, not just making you know, broad
generalizations about you know, investors have this behavioral bias or
that behavioral bias. Not talking in generality is about how
you can use money to boost happiness. But you, as
an individual, you know what sort of individual are you?

(37:38):
Are you a savior, are you a spender? You know
what is it from your past that is triggering you.
I think that in the years ahead, we will start
focusing more on that and that will lead to even
more interesting conversations about money as people get to know
themselves better and that works into how they manage their money.

Speaker 2 (37:58):
So let's talk a little bit about your announcement. Last year,
you received a stage four lung cancer diagnosis. You're a
non smoker, so this is the genetic variation of the disease.
Tell us a little bit about that diagnosis and what
motivated you to share it so publicly.

Speaker 3 (38:21):
So back in May of last year, Barry, I started
having balance issues and I thought I might have an
ear infection. I couldn't figure out quite what was going on,
so I on a Sunday decided to go to an
urgent care clinic and the doctor told me that the
urgent care clinic must have realized something that was going

(38:43):
on that you know, was obviously I was missing. So
I got dispatched the emergency room and the next thing
you know, I was stuck in the stroke victim really
ward at at a hospital in Philadelphia. So it was
sixteen beds up there, guys who are intbated, plus me
sitting on the edge of my bed, like what am

(39:03):
I doing here? So after some scans, some MRIs, they
realized that I had not had a minor stroke. Instead
I had cancer. They found ten lesions on my brain
and a gulf ball size growth on my lungs, and
after some some genetic testing and so on, they discovered

(39:27):
that I had a relatively rare form of cancer that
tends to flick people of Asian origin and women, called
eachfr exon twenty and it's a relatively aggressive cancer. The
median life expectancy for people who have each gfr x
on twenty is sixteen months. So by the time I
got into see the ecologist, she suggested I might have

(39:49):
a year to live, and that was in June of
twenty twenty four. Since then, I've had a couple more
lesions on my brain and the cancer has also spread
my spine. In both cases, the the cancer my spine
was dealt with with radiation, similarly to the new lesions
on my brain. I've also had recently had a to

(40:12):
hour procedure to shore up my spine because of the
damage done by the cancer. Otherwise there's a risk I
was going to fracture my spine. So as of today,
I'm feeling okay. But you know, the cancer is you know,
isn't my blood. It's likely to crop up somewhere else.
I think I'm gonna beat the one year mark that
I was given. I'm hoping I'll make it through twenty

(40:33):
twenty five, but you know, realistically, it's unlikely that I'm
gonna make it much beyond them, though of course I
would love it. I mean, I have to say this, Barry. Yeah,
I love every day and I want every moment I
can get, But you have to be a realistic and

(40:53):
you know, this is stage four cancer. There is no recovery.
You know, it's just a matter of trying to control
the cancer. And do I have the good fortune that
came into this in reasonably good physical shape. So I've
coped with the treatment fairly well. You know, I'm having
chemo immunotherapy every three weeks, taking countless medications. You know,

(41:16):
I've had these radiation treatments. As I said, I just
had my back operated on in order to shore it up.
But you know, at some point, you know, cancer is
gonna win. I just don't know when. So come back
to answer the question that you asked, So, Yeah, after
I got the diagnosis, I wrote about it on my
website and you know, put out the word on social media,

(41:40):
and the response to me was quite surprising. I mean,
not only did I get, you know, an outpouring of
love heard from people I hadn't heard from in years,
readers have shown a lot of love that People also said,
you know, you're so brave for sharing your diagnosis. I
was like, brave. I've spent my entire life writing about
my own fine answers. Why would I Why would I

(42:02):
stop now? And you know, is it that people don't
talk about this stuff because of denial? Is it because
you know, they're just they're embarrassed? Is it because fear
of death? I don't know, but it seems like the
most natural thing in the world to write about it,
And to my surprise, I seem to have done a
fair amount of good by doing so. People really appreciate

(42:24):
somebody talking openly about what it is, what it's like
to have a terminal diagnosis. I would also say to
you that a short life expectancy, this notion that your
life is finite. I mean, of course that's true for
all of us, right, but it really does make you
focus on the day to day. I mean, when I,

(42:47):
you know, get up in the morning, I really noticed
the taste of the coffee. When I take a walk,
I really notice how beautiful the trees are, how lovely
the sky is. It really does focus the mind. And
if anything, because I know the time is finite, I'm
joined the day to day even more. It's strange, but
it's true. And I would say to people, you know,

(43:07):
even if you don't have a terminal diagnosis, you know,
try to be sort of more purposeful and more mindful
about each day because you will get greater happiness out
of each day.

Speaker 2 (43:18):
Well, that that's really good advice. You wrote a Wall
Street Journal piece some final personal finance advice, and some
of the things you discussed were really, I don't want
to say funny, but just the way you phrase them,
we're so blunt and matter of fact, it was really intriguing.
Let me run through a few of these, and I'd

(43:40):
like to get your your thoughts on it. The first
one that leapt off the page was death is hard
work explain.

Speaker 3 (43:49):
So I've always had my finances pretty well organized, but
until you know that you're about to pop off, you
realize how much, sorry to use the phrase, how much
crap you've accumulated, and you realize how hard it will
be for your family to figure out your finances. So
in the weeks and months that followed, I've done all

(44:12):
kinds of things. I got a new will, powers of attorney.
I closed accounts so that there is there are fewer
accounts for my.

Speaker 2 (44:21):
Everything was consolidated in one place.

Speaker 3 (44:23):
They were already consolidated. But for instance, I had a
a wroth for one K, and it's like, I'm I'm
not gonna I'm not gonna fund this anymore, so I'm
going to close it and roll it into my regular IRA.
I had an inherited diarray from my father. It didn't
have very much in it, so I closed that out.
But also downe in the basement, I had a box
of papers, a couple of boxes of papers. Some of

(44:45):
them went back to when I was in college. It's like,
what I had every Christmas card from nineteen eighty six?
Why do I need every Christmas card from nineteen eighty six?
So I just started trashing all of this stuff. And
you carry around this stuff for decades, one day you're
gonna look at it. Well, this was my moment to
look at it, and you know what I didn't. I

(45:05):
just started sticking in the recycling bind. So there was
a lot of work to be done in order to
simplify things for my for my wife and for my kids.
And I still have more work to do. So I
all the utilities are currently in my name, and in
the weeks ahead, one of the final things I want
to do is to make sure that I move you know,

(45:25):
the internet, the cell phones, the gas, the water, the
electricity olint Elane's name, so that this one less thing
for her to do after I'm gone.

Speaker 4 (45:33):
Huh, really really very thoughtful.

Speaker 2 (45:35):
The other thing that really leapt off the page was
so much talking.

Speaker 3 (45:41):
So two days after my diagnosis, both my kids were
in town and was in town. I sat them down.
I explained my estate plan, and of course all this
was obvious to me. You know, while there's this traditional iray,
there are these roth iro rays, the regular taxable accounts,
there's you know this account that yeah, and they're looking

(46:02):
at me like like during the headlights, like what is
all this about? And it's when I realized that the
stuff that's second nature to me isn't second nature to
my kids. So had an hour discussion then and so
many discussions since then as I've tried to explain, you
know why you should not spend the roth ira until
the end of the ten year period, but you'll have

(46:22):
to draw down the traditional ira over time because there's
going to be taxable income on top of your income.
Lots of stuff like that. That second nature to me,
just wasn't clear to them.

Speaker 2 (46:32):
And the last thing was simply taxing matters. How I'm
assuming your state is not going to be in the
taxable size, So what do you discuss with your wife
and kids about taxes?

Speaker 3 (46:47):
So my kids will be subject to the Pennsylvania inheritance
tax four and a half percent, and so you know,
that's why I've started to distribute money to them now.
I had written a private mortgage for my daughter. It
was currently a little over three hundred thousand dollars, and

(47:08):
I forgave that loan and then adjusted how much she's
going to get versus how much my son is going
to get. And as long as I make it through
to July past the one year mark, then Hannah won't
have to pay the inheritance tax on that money.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
It becomes part of the estate and it's non taxable
at that point.

Speaker 3 (47:25):
Well, it's not part of the estate at all, so
she won't have you know, she won't have to pay
the inheritance tax on that three hundred thousand dollars. Okay,
So there are a variety of things like that that
you know, I've done in order to make things a
little less taxing. For my kids. It's also why as
soon as January one past this year, that's why I
made them a gift for twenty twenty five. Similarly, for

(47:46):
my grandchildren, you know, I funded their five twenty nine
plans early in the year so that I can get
that money, you know, out of my estate and hopefully
I'll make it past the one year mark, so it's
not subject to the inheritance tax.

Speaker 4 (47:59):
Really really intriguing.

Speaker 2 (48:02):
So given you your diagnosis, has your perspectives on money
and happiness at all changed? How have you thought about
some of your previous philosophies and views.

Speaker 3 (48:15):
I think one of the things that makes me happy
through this period is not even that I don't have
to worry about money. With everything else that's going on,
money is not a worry. So when I go back
to the twenties and thirties, and the sacrifices I made,
I'm glad I made them so that I have that
financial security today, so that amid everything else that's going on,
money is not something that's top of mind for me.

(48:38):
Truth is, I haven't really worried about money for years,
but you know, it would be terrible to be faced
with huge medical costs potentially and not have the finances
to cover it. I've also, however, you know, thought about
you know, this is my retirement, right. If I don't
enjoy my retirement now such as it is, I'm never

(48:58):
gonna enjoy. So yeah, I have been spending more freely.
You know. We went to London recently, we went to Ireland.
I took the family on a fairly luxurious long weekend.
This month, we're going to Paris. We've got other trips
planned in the months ahead. There's a limit how far
I can plan ahead because I never know where and

(49:20):
I'm going to get derailed by some bad diagnosis and
I hate the idea of the cancelation fees. But you know,
we do have trips planned, and we've booked the hotels,
but I haven't booked the flights because I don't have
to cancel them.

Speaker 4 (49:33):
Huh.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
So, So we talked earlier about money and happiness. I'm
curious as to how you think about the relationship between
life satisfaction, well being, and what money does.

Speaker 4 (49:48):
And does not help you obtain.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
So money, I believe can do three things for you. One,
it can allow you not to worry about money. We've
talked about this already in many ways. You know, money
doesn't buy happiness. It lets you avoid unhappines it's the
unhappiness of being broke. But two, money can buy you
the financial freedom spend your days doing what you love.
If you love your job, that's great, that's the greatest

(50:14):
combination get. But a lot of people clearly don't love
their jobs. So what they want is the financial freedom
to do whatever it is they wished to be able
to do. And you get that by saving diligently a
year after year, decade after decade. And then third, money
can allow you to have special times with friends and
family and you know, whether it's you know, the barbecue,
the special vacation, flying across the country to see the grandchildren,

(50:38):
whatever it is, money can allow you to do that.
So those three things, avoiding on the unhappiness of being broke.
Two doing whatever you think is fulfilling, and three is
spending special times with friends and family. That's what money
can do for you. That is the way that money
can buy happiness.

Speaker 2 (50:55):
Huh, very intriguing. So you've mentioned a lot of your
earlier in life financial decisions have set you up in
a good financial situation today. What what decisions do you
look back and say, oh, I'm really glad I did that.
What were the with hindsight, with the benefit of hindsight,

(51:18):
what were the choices you made that you most appreciate today.

Speaker 3 (51:23):
Probably like everybody you know, Barry who has you know,
mass and wealth on their own, The smartest thing I
ever did was to be a good saver. You know,
if you know, if you're a good saver, you know
everything else is, everything's going to turn out fine. Even
if you're not a great investor. As long as you're
a good saver, you know, good things will happen. If

(51:44):
you're a lousy saver, but a great investor, you know,
it's unlikely that you're going to succeed financially. So yeah,
saving with the number one thing, and then too, I
was very early as you might imagine on the indexing train,
and that has also rebounded to my benefit. But it's
it's been a saver that was not the list.

Speaker 2 (52:01):
So so let me flip that question around. What do
you think most people get wrong? What are some of
the biggest myths in investing in finance that we often
have a hard time getting passed?

Speaker 3 (52:13):
Well, suddenly, you know, this focus on investing, this focusing
on beating the market is the wrong place to you know,
be spending your time. But let me let me broaden
it out, Barry, So something that I've been thinking about
a lot of late, which is most people, and this
was true of me in the early days, spend too
much time worrying in general and worrying about money specifically.

(52:38):
And I think this is hardwired into us. You know,
we are here because our hunter gather ancestors survived. And
why did they survive Because they were worriers, right, They
worried about everything, you know, they wanted to make sure
that they were going to be okay no matter what happened. Well,
guess what, you know, the sabretooth tiger is not going
to leap out of the bushes. We do not need

(52:59):
to worry the way our ancestors used to. And yet
people worry constantly. I mean, people are serial warriors. It's
like the hedonic treadmill. We talk about how, you know,
we strive towards goals, hoping that they're gonna make us
happy forever, and then boom, we achieve whatever it is,
and we immediately saw us driving off to something else.

(53:20):
We can't get off that treadmill. But there's also a
worry treadmill, and we worry about something blah blah bah
bah bah. Choose away from us. The worry goes away.
We're onto something else. People cannot escape their worries. And
what I would want for listeners and I want for
my reader is is please find some way to worry less.

(53:41):
Because if you do the right stuff financially, you live
bene your means, you're not crazy with your investments. Hopefully
you index, you know, hopefully you don't take on too
much debt. You know you're not gonna get it all right,
but good things will happen in the end. You don't
have to spend thirty forty years worrying about retirement. You

(54:03):
don't have to get to retirement and worry that you're
spending a crazy amount of money because you're going to
get derailed by the stock market or whatever it is.
Things are likely to walk out just fine. We are
not you know, back you know in you know, like
our hunter gather ancestors, you know, worried about every threat.
You know, it's it's time to like go of those worries.

(54:25):
That to me is the biggest mistake people make. And
I don't have a magic cure for getting away from
those worries, but I do believe that is the number
one thing we could do for our own happiness.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
Huh really really very interesting. Of all the things you've
learned over the course of being a personal finance columnist
first for Forbes and for the journal and everything you've
done at the Humble Dollar, aside from worry less, what
do you think is the most important piece of financial

(54:58):
wisdom that you want to pass along that you want
to have outlive you What what's the most significant thing
you wish people would embrace then it would make their
life better.

Speaker 3 (55:09):
I think what people need to do is know themselves
right much more than you know, what's the expensive issue
on their index funds or you know, which is the
best age of which claim social security. Know yourself, because
everybody has different financial needs and different financial worries and
so on. So if you customize your finances to your

(55:29):
own needs, not to somebody else's needs, not to what
your brother in law says, not to what you heard
on the TV. If you focus it to your own needs,
what you worry about the most, that is likely to
lead you to have a happier financial life. I think
one of the problems is that we live too much
under the influence of others. It's not just the influence

(55:51):
of people today. You know, our friends and family and
the people we see in the media, but also we
live under the influence of the past, what our parents
told us or what they modeled for us. People go
through their life buying what their parents bought because they
thought it made their parents happy, and so they think
it's gonna make them happy. Probably not gonna work out
that way. So try to think for yourself and try

(56:13):
to know yourself.

Speaker 2 (56:15):
Good good advice. Let me throw you a curveball. I
remember last summer, towards the end of July, you were
the focus of a New York Times piece headline a
money guru bit big on a very long life. Then
he got cancer. You're usually the author of pieces like that.

Speaker 3 (56:35):
How odd was it to.

Speaker 2 (56:37):
Be the subject of a piece I know you as
a humble person, not just because of the Humble Dollar website.
You're not seeking to be the center of attention. How
strange was that entire experience?

Speaker 3 (56:51):
Well, Barry, to be honest, sitting here getting quizzed by
you is not that difficult from different from getting quizzed
by Ron Lieber at the New York Times. But that's it. Yes, Yeah,
I personally do not want to be the center of attention.
I would like the focus to be on my writing
rather than me as a person. But you know, I
knew Ron was not gonna be unkind. I've known Ron

(57:12):
for decades. He's a friend of mine. Much more on
couple actually was the photo shoot where I have to
sit there and try to smile for now. But it
sort of goes back to what I was talked about
earlier about the amount of publicity that my diagnosis has generated.
I mean, since that came out, you know, I had

(57:34):
the Wall Street Journal article that I wrote, I had,
I wrote a piece for the Washington Post. I've got
a piece coming out in the ARP magazine. Ron Lieber
wrote that piece for The New York Times. I also
wrote a piece for my father's old paper in London,
the Telegraph, which was a lot of fun. Well maybe
not fun, but it was great to be in there.
So Yeah, the focus on my diagnosis is a little

(57:57):
bit odd and Cerddainly, it's uncomfortable for me to be
the folks of attention wrong on my writing. But I
feel in some way in a way that I didn't
really realize that it's it's it's doing some good and
being of service to others has always been really important
to me. I mean, I feel like if I'm not

(58:17):
doing some little good in the world, I'm I'm not
spending my days usefully. I never want to spend the
days focused solely on my own needs.

Speaker 2 (58:28):
But you were able to use the opportunity to amplify
the good message that you had for people, which was, hey,
here's just a fundamentally smart way to go about managing
not just your investing but your personal finance and your life.
That focus must have been gratifying to get that message out.

Speaker 3 (58:48):
No, absolutely it was, but it was also a little
bit uncomfortable.

Speaker 2 (58:53):
Yeah, I can, I can certainly see. Knowing you and
knowing your personality, I can see it was something like,
all right, let me uh, let me make this trade
off and and but it all seems to have accomplished
the goal of spreading what you wanted to share with
the public.

Speaker 3 (59:09):
And you know, for as long as I am able,
you know, I want to be able to continue writing.
I do have a whole bunch of articles that I
still hope to pen. But you know, I know this,
this ride is gonna it's going to come to an end,
probably sooner than I would like. But you know, for
now what I can still write, well, I can still
get my fingers on the keyboard. I hope to keep

(59:32):
punching out a few more articles.

Speaker 2 (59:33):
So normally at this point I shift to some of
the favorite questions I ask all of my guests.

Speaker 4 (59:40):
I'm not sure how relevant.

Speaker 2 (59:41):
These are, but but let's uh, let's run through them
for posterity stake. What's keeping you entertained these days? What
are you doing if you just want to kick back
and relax a little bit.

Speaker 3 (59:53):
Yeah, that's not a thing. I'm very good at kicking
back and relaxing. That said, as I mentioned, if I'm
gonna be retired, which I don't think I'll ever be
fully retired. This is the moment, right. If I don't
do it now, I'm never gonna get to do it.
And for the first time, probably twenty years, I actually
started watching sports again on TV HM and it sort

(01:00:18):
of takes me back to being a teenager and so on,
sitting on the couch. I'm not sure I could ever
sit through a whole football game, but maybe I could
watch the final quarter, and so I've been trying a
little bit of that.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
So, yeah, have you played with red zone at all?

Speaker 4 (01:00:32):
No? My nephews are just crazy about it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:35):
It's just the highlights of every big game kind of
all at once. It's just it's an amazing If you're
a football fan, you might want to explore that. It's
pretty bonkers.

Speaker 3 (01:00:46):
So I live down in Philadelphia, So the Eagles are
an obsession. Yeah, and you can't help but catch a
little bit of the fever. On a Sunday afternoon, half
the people and this is not actuation, half the people
you see walking on the street are wearing Eagles gear.

Speaker 4 (01:01:04):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:01:04):
I mean, that's how much of an obsession it is
in the city. And it's fun. You know. I've been
taught by my son in law that when you go
into a store in Philadelphia, you know, to buy something
on a Sunday, what you have to say when you
leave is go birds.

Speaker 4 (01:01:21):
That's very funny.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
Tell us about your mentors who helped shape your career.

Speaker 3 (01:01:26):
So I would call out one person, which was the
editor of this little newspaper that I worked for when
I was nineteen. Her name was Leslie Levin, and she
had just got out of the American University Journalism school,
and she had all of this knowledge about journalism that
she was anxious to pass on, and literally she taught

(01:01:48):
me how to write, she taught me how to report.
It was a great experience. I was so fortunate. And
in fact, this was all before I went to college,
and I took the advice that she gave me about,
you know, how to run a small newspaper, and then
I took it and I used it when I edited
the student newspaper at Cambridge, and I've used it ever since.

(01:02:10):
So if I ever, for instance, see a piece of
copy with an exclamation mark on it, immediately here Leslie's
voice in my back my head, saying, you only ever
used the exclamation mark if it's World War III, otherwise
no exclamation marks.

Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
That's really interesting. Tell us about some of your favorite books.

Speaker 4 (01:02:28):
What have you been reading recently.

Speaker 3 (01:02:30):
Lately? I've been doing a lot of reading about Philadelphia
and about the neighborhood where I live. I live very
close to the School River, across from the Pence the
Penn U Penn campus and where I live now used
to be full of Irish immigrants who worked on the
wolves along the schookel and next to me is a

(01:02:55):
very an elderly lady. I think she's probably in her nineties,
and her son lives with her, and he's in his
mid sixties. And Charlie tells me that when he was
growing up in the neighborhood there were two Italian families
and everybody else was Irish. And the fact that he
was aware that there were only two families in the
neighborhood who were Italian and everybody else was Irish tells

(01:03:16):
you something about that neighborhood at the time. So I
enjoyed reading about Philadelphia. But in terms of favorite books,
the best time in terms of learning about finance was
when I was at Forbes in the late nineteen eighties.
Back then, the workplace was less pressured. There's less drive

(01:03:37):
to produce, and there was more time to sort of sit,
kick back and relax and read. And Forbes had a
great library. So back in those days, you know, I
read Burton Malkiel's ran Walk Down Wall Street. I read
all the books of Wall Street history by John Brooks,
and I picked to remember.

Speaker 2 (01:03:55):
Once upon a Time in Galanda's that the Go Go
years right.

Speaker 3 (01:04:00):
And then there was this little book that I discovered
in the Forbes library called Investment Policy by Charles Ellis.
And Investment Policy, I believe, came out in nineteen eighty six,
and I think the original edition was ninety four pages,
and it just seemed like Charlie went through and picked
out every word in that book with enormous care. Since then,

(01:04:23):
the book has ballooned a little bit. It's over two
hundred pages. But that and it's now of course called
Winning the Losers Game. That's right.

Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
That in fact, that began life as a research paper.
I don't remember if it was the CFA Institute, but
it was published.

Speaker 3 (01:04:38):
Somewhere I think with the General of Portfolio manage.

Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
I think that's exactly right. But it was a short
twenty thirty page thing which has persisted.

Speaker 4 (01:04:47):
Winning the Losers.

Speaker 2 (01:04:48):
Game is one of my favorite finance books. And you
know he Charlie has a new book coming out this year.

Speaker 3 (01:04:53):
Yep, Charlie's Unstoppable. Yes, if you can find Charlie's original book,
Investment Policy, which is the one that I believe came
out in eighty six, you know, it's ninety four pages,
it's a great read, and that I think was probably
the most influential book on investing that I've ever read.

Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
Wow, that's a that's a big deal. I'm gonna have
to hunt that down. I may have to reactivate my
eBay account to get that. Our final two questions, what
sort of advice would you give to a recent college
grad interest in the career in financial journalism or investment?

Speaker 3 (01:05:30):
Well, so, I think I already obnsered the financial journalism one,
which is don't do it. I'm not a tilly serious.
I mean, journalism is the most fun you can have
while keeping your clothes on. I mean it's you know,
newsrooms are great places to be. You know, you will
never meet a group of people who are more fun
to be with and more cynical. I mean it's just

(01:05:52):
so much fun to be in a newsroom. So yeah,
go and be a journalist for a couple of years,
learn how to write, learn about the world, and then
go and make do something will make you some money.
But spending a couple of years in journalism in your
twenties when you don't really need to worry about making
a lot of money is a great thing to do.
So yeah, I would encourage people to do it, but
don't imagine you're gonna make a career out of it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:12):
And our final question, what do you know about the
world of investing today? You wish you knew thirty years
or so ago.

Speaker 3 (01:06:19):
That's an interesting question. Why do I wish I knew?
I guess what I wish I knew was to was
that if I did the right things for long enough,
everything was going to work out just fine. If you know,
as long as I say, as long as I didn't
fiddle around too much on my portfolio, if I just
let it ride, you know, I could just go off

(01:06:40):
and worry about other stuff, not worry about it at all.
You know, things generally do work out today. You know,
there are not many people you know who go into
the world, out into the world, and you know are
reasonably prudent and managing money and soon who don't successfully
get to retirement. You don't need to fret about it
every step of the way. You don't need to analyze

(01:07:01):
every month spending in quicka and you don't need to
find tune your portfolio every month. Just you know, set
up a sensible acid allocation, buy some index funds saved regularly,
and good things will happen.

Speaker 2 (01:07:14):
Jonathan, thank you so much for being so generous with
your time and your incredibly insightful advice. We have been
speaking with Jonathan Clements. He is the author of numerous
finance books that you can find at your favorite bookseller,
as well as the Humble Dollar blog. If you enjoy
this conversation, well, check out any of the five hundred

(01:07:37):
or so we've had over the past ten years. You
can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you find
your favorite podcast, and check out my new book, How
Not to Invest The bad ideas, numbers, and behavior that
destroys wealth and how to avoid them. I would be
remiss if I did not thank the Cracked team that

(01:07:58):
helps me put these conversations together each week. My audio
engineer is John Wasserman. Anna Luke is my producer. Sean
Russo is my researcher. Sage Bauman is the head of
podcasts at Bloomberg. I'm Barry Ritolts. You've been listening to
Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.