Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work
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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.

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 25 years. He wrote over a thousand columns. He also worked as director of financial education at Citigroup. Jonathan kind of famously announced that he was diagnosed with terminal cancer on his website as well as social media. And that started this movement.

a 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 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 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.

Barry, it's great to see you again, and it's great to be on your podcast. 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 Euromoney magazine in London. What were you studying at Cambridge? What was your original career plan?

So from a relatively early age, I actually thought about being a financial journalist because my father had been a financial journalist. He spent 10 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, and this will blow your mind, Barry, my father graduated from Cambridge in 1956.

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 700 pounds a year was as a management trainee for Shell Oil.

The highest paying job he was offered at 800 pounds a year was as a cub reporter for the Financial Times. Can you imagine a world where the highest paying job you get offered out of college is a job in journalism? 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

and thought of as a genuine career. I don't think even at the journalism schools people are approaching it the same way. What's your thoughts on the state of journalism in the modern world? Well, if you said to me, you know, what advice would I give to somebody who wanted to go into journalism? My answer would be, don't. 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 a little suburban newspaper outside of Washington, D.C. And in many ways, it was the most fun and the most educational experience I had in journalism. I worked for this rinky-dink little paper that came out every other week.

The circulation was 25,000. But as a 19-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. So you're from the UK, but you've spent a lot of time in the US. Where did you grow up?

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 10th 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 explains everything. You know, we'd go out there during vacations. Four years later, my parents moved back to D.C., 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

A year as a journalist in London, I realized the standard of living for reporters in England seriously sucked. 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.

Well, didn't you also double your costs? New York back then was still in the 90s. New York was really an expensive place to live. 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. You go from Forbes pretty much during the golden era of mutual funds and star managers, like the 80s and 90s.

That was peak mutual funds. What was that like looking at it as the data was becoming...

clearer that, hey, this may not be the best deal for investors. 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 reporter 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

and you would have a couple of paragraphs about their investment philosophy and strategy. You would offer three of their stock picks where they're probably touting stocks they wanted to unload 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 these star managers, well, their stars started to flame out pretty quickly. And this, of course, was the experience of many investors across the U.S. And that was, in many ways, the seeds of the index fund revolution. The people bought these star managers, one after another. Managers

Started to flame out. They bought new star managers. They ended up with these portfolios that were just a hodgepodge of ex-star fund managers. And that really set us up for the boom in indexing in the late 1990s and into the 2000s. 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 and a little mean reversion is about to kick in. That experience led you to becoming the 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.

So in 1994, at the lofty age of 31, the journal gave me my own column, which in retrospect is absurd. Think of a 31-year-old, their own personal column. It seemed to have worked out well for them, though, to be fair. Yeah. Right? But...

I'm not sure I would give a 31-year-old that chance. Okay. But yes, I was given my own column. And by that point, having seen all these star managers come and go, I had become an index fund devotee. And in column after column, I banged the drum for index funds to the point where my editors were asking me, hey, could you write about something else? But yeah.

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 market return less whatever they're paying. If you can just match the 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 2000s, that message didn't resonate as widely in part because

Index funds were the preserve of Vang, got into a couple of other fund 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 surpasses the amount of money in actively managed funds. 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 90s. What was it about the 2000s specifically? Was it just the variety of choice?

Why do you think ETFs kicked off so much attraction to indexing, especially considering the bulk of those monies that flow to BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street? Well, so you're right. You know, SPY came out, I believe, in 1993, but it was just the S&P 500, and it was just that single fund. The exchange-traded index funds really did take off fast.

thanks to what was then Barclays, now part of BlackRock, with the iShares series. And suddenly you could buy index funds that cover all of the 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 Merrill Lynch or Schwab could sell those funds.

And indexing was 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. 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 investing

or indexing, whereas the RIA side of the street, the independent advisor 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 shift? I've watched that over decades. You were in the thick of it. I'm curious as to what you witnessed.

So you're right. I mean, these are traditional brokers who are much slower to adopt ETFs than fee-only financial advisors. But today, a lot of brokers, whether they're with the big full-service brokerage firms, now have advisory accounts that they flog to clients where they can buy ETFs. And as long as they're getting their fee, whatever it's 1%, 1.5%, whatever it is,

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, right? That's right. You get the market's return. Surprise, surprise. Well, if you tilt it all towards international or emerging markets or value,

There are occasional apologies along the way. Hey, but what's the old joke? The cost of diversification is frequently having to apologize for something that's not keeping up with the S&P. If nothing in your portfolio is performing badly, you're not diversified. That's right. That's exactly right. So you said something interesting that jogged something in my mind, that you were constantly flogging passive indexing and ETFs.

much to the chagrin of your editors, kind of makes me think of something Jason Zweig has said, which is his job is to write the same column over and over again, but in a 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? So Jason was the next employee hired by Forbes after me. That's hilarious. And when I left Forbes,

Forbes. Jason ended up with the Mutual Funds Beat. Then he went on to Money Magazine. And then when I left the journal for the first time in 2008, they said, well, who should we hire to replace you? I said, Jason Zweig. So Jason and I have known each other for over 30 years. I consider him to be one of my best friends. And in fact, 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 20 postal finance stories, which means that by the time I left the journal...

and writing a thousand columns, I've written each of those stories 50 times each. If you are going to serve your readers well, there are only a limited number of stories to be written. If you're a reporter who spends their career writing the stock of the day, the fund of the month, 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, you start casting around for other things to write about. So when I go back to the late 1980s, and I started as a financial journalist writing,

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. So today, if you are a good financial journalist, you should be writing not just 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. It's expanded enormously over the past three plus decades. And that's good news for somebody like me, because if I'd still writing only about index funds, I would have been out of a job a long time ago. Really, really interesting. So the 20 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 2000, September 11th, the great financial crisis. What era of finance did you find the most intriguing as a journalist? 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.

I totally agree with you. I have been warned repeatedly, hey, people are getting 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, which is,

right into the teeth of the financial crisis, you went 95% 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. Coming into sort of late 2008, I think, if I recall correctly, I was somewhere between 70% and 80% stocks.

By that point, I'd left the journal and I was working at Citigroup as director of financial education for the wealth management business.

And a number of things happened. One was I was working on Wall Street, so I was earning a whole lot more money. Two, I 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 of what's going on in the market and whether you're pulling out money from your portfolio, putting it in, worked like magic. And said to people numerous times, when we have a period like 2008, 2009, when everybody thinks the world is going to hell in a handbasket, well, if it really does go to hell, it doesn't matter what you own. Right. That's right. More than likely, you know, we humans being humans will 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. So that's kind of interesting that you're making an active decision in the face of market turmoil and increased 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 pricey, now they're cheap. I'm just a value investor.

Well, guilty as 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 can't win through stock selection. You can't win by buying actively managed funds. What you need to do is indexing, but one way you can tilt the field in your favor is

is in periods when people are panicking is to, as I like to put it, over-rebalance, to move even more into stocks. It's a temporary move, but I've done it repeatedly. I did it in 2000, 2002. I did it in 2008 and 2009. I did it

during the coronavirus collapse in 2020, and I did it again in 2022. 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 20%, 30%, things are a whole lot cheaper than they were before.

prior to the decline, and what you should do is buy. 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 30% market when everybody else is panicking and running the other way.

Well, we know how investors behave, which is they extrapolate recent returns. So if the market's going up, they think it's going to keep going up. If 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 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 at just the wrong time. 89% of business leaders say AI is a top priority, according to research by Boston Consulting Group. But with AI tools popping up everywhere, how do you separate the helpful from the hype?

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I'm Shinali Basik, and I hope you'll join me and many of the most important institutional investors and money managers for the year's preeminent finance event, Bloomberg Invest, returning to New York on March 4th and 5th. Come face to face with leading voices in markets. Identify the next big investments. Forge meaningful connections and swap strategies. Register now at BloombergLive.com slash invest.

That's BloombergLive.com slash invest. I just have to ask you a little bit about what you did after the journal, and that includes both Citigroup and Humble Dollar. You were at Citigroup 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 Citi investors rather than journal readers, and I'm sure there's a bit of an overlap there.

So in the couple of years running up to early 2008, 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 Citigroup about being director of financial education for this startup called MyFi. 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 innovating in that way. It was just ridiculous.

a struggle from day one, particularly in the regulatory environment that is the securities business. Between lawyers and compliance people, everything was a headache. And then on top of that, of course, we ran straight into the 2008-2009 Great Recession. So the business was pretty much dead before it began.

And by the summer of 2009, they'd pulled the plug on this venture. And suddenly, you know, I threw away my journalism career to join Citigroup. You know, what would happen next? Well, this group of people that were part of this startup called MiFi 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 they were going to try to turn these bank-based brokers into feelingly financial advisors.

Which, by the way, was the underlying trend outside of the brokerage firm. They were watching what was a small part of the business really begin to blossom post-crisis. So I became part of this new business and I did a lot of writing and a lot of public speaking over the next decade.

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 my time. And I've,

never really done anything in my career solely for money and it suddenly dawned 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 51. So I spent 10 or 11 months preparing to leave. I contacted the journal about writing for them again. I also started working on a book and

And after I got my last year-end bonus in early 2014, I walked in and handed in my notice. 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 pushback. 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?

I think that in this case, I probably did not express it to people that way. I'm not saying that I don't like getting paid, but... Well, we all like getting paid, but the 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. And it's really the latter. And I think it partly depends on the economic comfort in which you grew up. I mean, I grew up in a very comfortable middle class or middle class household. So money was never my priority going into the workforce.

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 up in journalism. That's interesting. And you have said, especially post-diagnosis, you've very publicly said, gee, had I known—

when the clock was gonna 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 that a little bit. How did you think about spending money and how did the diagnosis change your perspectives on this?

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 1888, he was listed in the newspapers as one of the richest men in England. Really? I had no idea. That's fascinating. 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, and she lived the Downton Abbey lifestyle. She had an estate in the Cotswolds on which there were five mansions. She lived in 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. Classic three generations, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves. So I grew up with that great family story about how you shouldn't

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 25, supporting a graduate student wife and living in New York City. Tight. Money's a little tight. Yeah. Ordering a pizza on a Friday night was a questionable decision. And

And I learned to be super careful with money, and that continued for probably 30 years. It's really only the last five years that I've become –

happier about spending money uh eating out more often traveling more and of course since my diagnosis you know 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'm i don't need to stay for the future anymore because there isn't much future left for me um so we've been traveling more um

But to come back to the question that you're going to ask me, which is do I regret my earlier frugality? Not really because what I would say to you, Barry, is one –

Sure way that money buys happiness is by allowing you not to worry about money. And I have not worried about money for years. And to be fair, you know, I don't want to engage in what Andy 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, 20 years ago, had you known, what would you have 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 a function of specifics. But how has your perspective changed, if at all, when you're giving that sort of advice to people? So first of all, I would say to you, Barry, one of the things that's the greatest source of happiness to me

It's just the day-to-day. Just getting up in the morning, having a cup of coffee, sitting at my laptop, writing and editing, 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, we are doing more traveling now, and 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 only does it not cost very much, but it actually earns me some money. So 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 class regularly in my twenties, it would not be special to me today. Having a gradually rising standard of living throughout your life is a wonderful thing. You know,

If you stayed at Motel 6 in your 20s, staying at Hyatt in your 60s seems pretty special. That's right. That's really interesting. So let's talk a little bit about Humble Dollar. When did you set that up? And you're still running that and publishing yourself with a group of other people. Tell us a little bit about the Humble Dollar. So Humble Dollar was launched right at the end of 2016.

I used it essentially to take a annually updated financial guide that I was producing and I decided just to throw it on the web and make it freely available and run some ads against it. And as part of that, I invited a few people to start writing for the site and that snowballed over time. And today I have probably 50 or 60 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 may not be financial experts, but you are experts on your own life. So I encourage them to write 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 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 becomes...

I like to think a safe place for people to talk about their own finances. 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 10 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 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 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. 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 as a

a relatively 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 great savers.

And the biggest issue for them is not saving more and delaying 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 and to save too little. But in terms of my audience, their inclination is to spend too little and save too much. So let's talk about that because we have about 30 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, can't pull the trigger. They want to take the family 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 50s, 60s, 70s to becoming spenders?

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 start 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's

doorway will become the doorway to start spending more on themselves. Certainly, I've changed over the last five years. Five years ago, sort of 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 go out and enjoy life more after that

Long periods stuck at home. And of course, my diagnosis has done that even more. And not only have I 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. 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 to,

out of the estate after the person passed away, they would leave their money to their family. It seems like it's a little more modern concept is why not give them the money when you can watch them enjoy it, buy a house, travel, whatever. Is that a skewed perspective or do you see something similar? 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

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 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 $19,000 this year under the gift tax exclusion, which is the sum you can give without filing a gift tax return, that money to them in their 30s is so much more valuable than it is to me in my 60s. 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 mean, financial stress. It's motivating.

but you also get a lot of pleasure from getting a $19,000 check from your father. 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?

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, the playing field has widened. So we are talking about things more.

in what I consider personal finance, homeownership, social security, tax management, estate 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 focus within personal finance is trying to bring this down to the individual level, not just making broad generalizations about

You know, investors have this behavioral bias or that behavioral bias, not talking in generalities about how you can use money to boost happiness. But you as an individual, you know, what sort of individual are you? 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.

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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.

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 who saw me at the urgent care clinic must have said,

I realized something that was going on that, you know, was obviously I was missing. So I got dispatched to the emergency room. And the next thing you know, I was stuck in the stroke victim room.

ward at a hospital in Philadelphia. So it was 16 beds up there, 15 guys who were intubated, plus me sitting on the edge of my bed like, what am 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 10 lesions on my brain and a golf ball-sized growth on my lungs. And after some

some genetic testing and so on, they discovered that I had a relatively rare form of cancer that tends to afflict people of Asian origin and women called EGFR exon 20. And it's a relatively aggressive cancer. The median life expectancy for people who have EGFR exon 20 is 16 months. So by the time I got in to see the oncologist, she suggested I might have a year to live.

And that was in June of 2024. Since then, I've had a couple more lesions on my brain and the cancer has also spread to my spine. In both cases, the...

The cancer in my spine was dealt with radiation, similarly to the new lesions on my brain. I've also recently had a two-hour procedure to shore up my spine because of the damage done by the cancer. Otherwise, there was a risk I was going to fracture my spine. So as of today...

I'm feeling okay, but the cancer is in my blood. It's likely to crop up somewhere else. I think I'm going to beat the one-year mark that I was given. I'm hoping I'll make it through 2025, but realistically, it's unlikely that I'm going to make it much beyond then, though, of course, I would love it. I have to say this, Barry. I love every day, and I want...

every moment I can get, but you have to be realistic, you know, and, 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, you know, I have the good fortune that I came into this in reasonably good physical shape. So I've coped with the treatment fairly well. You know, I'm having chemo and immunotherapy every three weeks. I'm

taking countless medications. You know, I've had these radiation treatments. As I said, I just had my operated on in order to shore it up. But, you know, at some point, you know, cancer is going to 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 put out the word on social media. And the response to me was quite surprising. I mean, not only did I get an outpouring of love, heard from people I hadn't heard from in years, readers have shown a lot of love, but people also said, "You're so brave for sharing your diagnosis."

I was like, "Brave, I've spent my entire life writing about my own finances. Why would I stop now?" And here, is it that people don't talk about this stuff because of denial?

Is it because they're embarrassed? Is it because of 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 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 story.

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 you know get up in the morning

I really notice 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 enjoying the day-to-day even more. It's strange, but it's true. And I would say to people, you know, 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. Well, 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 phrased them were so blunt and matter of fact, it was really intriguing. Let me run through a few of these and I'd like to get your thoughts on it. The first one that leapt off the page was death is hard work. Explain. 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 kinds of things. I got a new will, powers of attorney. I closed jobs.

accounts so that there are fewer accounts for my family. Everything's consolidated in one place? They were already consolidated but for instance I had a a Roth 401k and it's like I'm not gonna I'm not gonna fund this anymore so I'm gonna close it and roll it into my regular IRA. I had an inherited IRA from my father it didn't have very much in it so I closed that out. But also down in the basement I had a box of papers a couple boxes of papers some of them went back to when I was in college it was like

What? I had every Christmas card from 1986. Why do I need every Christmas card from 1986? So I just started trashing all of this stuff. And you carry around this stuff for decades thinking one day you're going to look at it. Well, this was my moment to look at it. And you know what?

I didn't. I just started sticking it in the recycling bin. So there was a lot of work to be done in order to simplify things for my wife and for my kids, and I still have more work to do. So all the utilities are currently in my name, and...

And in the weeks ahead, one of the final things I want to do is to make sure that I move the internet, the cell phones, the gas, the water, the electricity all into Elaine's name so that there's one less thing for her to do after I'm gone. Really, really very thoughtful. The other thing that really leapt off the page was so much talking.

So two days after my diagnosis, both my kids were in town, Elaine was in town. I sat them down and I explained my estate plan. And, of course, all this was obvious to me. You know, well, there's this traditional IRA. There are these Roth IRAs, the regular taxable accounts. There's, you know, this account, that account. And they're looking at me like,

Like deer in 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 I had an hour discussion then and so many discussions since then as I've tried to explain why you should not spend the Roth IRA until the end of the 10-year period, but you'll have to draw down the traditional IRA over time because it'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. And the last thing was simply taxing matters. I'm assuming your estate is not going to be in the taxable size. So what do you discuss with your wife and kids about taxes?

So my kids will be subject to the Pennsylvania inheritance tax, 4.5%. And so that's why I started to distribute money to them now. I had written a private mortgage for my daughter.

It was currently a little over $300,000, and 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. It becomes part of the estate, and it's non-taxable at that point.

Well, it's not part of the estate at all. So she won't have to pay the inheritance tax on that $300,000. Oh, okay. So there are a variety of things like that that I've done in order to make things a little less taxing for my kids. It's also why as soon as January 1 passed this year, that's why I made them a gift for 2025. Similarly for my grandchildren, I funded their 529 plans early in the year so that I can get that money back.

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. Really, really intriguing. So given your diagnosis, has your perspectives on money and happiness at all changed? How have you thought about some of your previous philosophies and views? I think one of the things that

makes me happy through this period is knowing 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 20s and 30s 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. Truth is, I haven't really worried about money for years, but...

it would be terrible to be faced with huge medical costs potentially and not have the finances to cover it. I've also, however, thought about this is my retirement, right? If I don't enjoy my retirement now such as it is, I'm never going to enjoy it. So yeah, I have been spending more freely. 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 when I'm going to get derailed by some bad diagnosis. And I hate the idea of the cancellation 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. Yeah.

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 and does not help you obtain.

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, money doesn't buy happiness. It lets you avoid unhappiness, the unhappiness of being broke. But two, money can buy you the financial freedom to spend your days doing what you love. If you love your job...

That's great. That's the greatest combination you can 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 wish to be able to do. And you get that by saving diligently year after year, decade after decade. And then third, money can allow you to have special times with friends and family. And whether it's the barbecue, the special vacation, flying across the country to see the grandchildren, whatever it is, money can allow you to do that. So those three things.

avoiding 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. 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 decisions do you look back and say, oh, I'm really glad I did that? With hindsight, with the benefit of hindsight, what were the choices you made that you most appreciate today? Probably like everybody you know, Barry, who has amassed some wealth on their own, the smartest thing I ever did was to be a good saver. If you're a good saver,

Everything else is going to turn out fine. Even if you're not a great investor, as long as you're a good saver, good things will happen. If you're a lousy saver but a great investor...

it's unlikely that you're going to succeed financially. So yeah, saving was the number one thing. And then two, I was very early, as you might imagine, on the indexing train, and that has also rebounded to my benefit. But it's been a saver that was top of the list. 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 past?

Well, certainly, 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 broaden it out, Barry, to 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. And I think this is hardwired into us. You know, we...

are here because our hunter-gatherer ancestors survived. And why did they survive? Because they were warriors, 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 saber-toothed tiger is not going to leap out of the bushes. You know, we do not need to worry the way we, 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 we strive towards goals, hoping that they're going to make us happy forever, and then

Boom, we achieve whatever it is, and we immediately start striving after something else. We can't get off that treadmill. Well, there's also a worry treadmill. We worry about something, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, chews away from us. The worry goes away. We're on to something else. People cannot escape their worries. And what I would want for listeners and I want for my readers is please understand

Find some way to worry less because if you do the right stuff financially, you live beneath your means, you're not crazy with your investments, hopefully you index, hopefully you don't take on too much debt, you're not going to get it all right, but

Good things will happen in the end. You don't have to spend 30, 40 years worrying about retirement. You 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 work out just fine. We are not, you know, back, you know, in, you know, like our hunter-gatherer ancestors, you know, worried about every threat. You know, it's time to let go of those worries. 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. Huh. Really, really very interesting. Um, of all the things you've learned over the course of being a personal finance columnist, uh, first for Forbes and, uh,

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 wisdom that you want to pass along that you want to have outlive you? What's the most significant thing you wish people would embrace and it would make their life better?

I think what people need to do is know themselves, right? Much more than, you know, what's the expense ratio on their index funds or, you know, which is the best age at which to 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 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, you know,

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 of people today, 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, so they think it's going to make them happy.

Probably not going to work out that way. So try to think for yourself and try to know yourself. 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 called

headline, A Money Guru Bet Big on a Very Long Life, Then He Got Cancer. You're usually the author of pieces like that. How odd was it to 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? Barry, to be honest, sitting here getting quizzed by you is not that difficult from getting different from getting quizzed by Ron Lieber of the New York times. But that said, yes, you know, 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. Uh,

But, you know, I knew Ron was not going to be unkind. I've known Ron for decades. He's a friend of mine. Much more uncomfortable, actually, was the photo shoot where I have to sit there and try to smile for an hour. Right.

But it sort of goes back to what I was talking about earlier about the amount of publicity that my diagnosis has generated. I mean, since that came out, you know, I had the Wall Street Journal article that I wrote. 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 bit odd, and certainly it's uncomfortable for me to be the focus of attention rather than my writing. But I feel in some way, in a way that I didn't really realize, that it's doing some good. Yeah.

Being of service to others has always been really important to me. I mean, I feel like if I'm not doing

some little good in the world. I'm not spending my days usefully. I never want to spend the days focused solely on my own needs. 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. No, absolutely. It was, but it was also a little bit uncomfortable. Yeah, I can certainly see, knowing you and knowing your personality, I can see it was something like, all right, let me make this trade off. But it all seems to have...

to accomplish the goal of spreading what you wanted to share with the public. 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 ride is going to come to an end soon.

Probably sooner than I would like, but for now, while I can still write, while I can still get my fingers on the keyboard, I hope to keep punching out a few more articles. So normally at this point, I shift to some of the favorite questions I ask all of my guests. I'm not sure how relevant these are, but let's run through them for posterity's sake.

What's keeping you entertained these days? What are you doing if you just want to kick back and relax a little bit? Yeah, that's not a...

That's the thing I'm very good at, kicking back and relaxing. That said, as I mentioned, if I'm going to be retired, which I don't think I'll ever be fully retired, this is the moment. If I don't do it now, I'm never going to get to do it. And for the first time in probably 20 years, I actually started watching sports again on TV. And it sort 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. So yeah. Have you played with Red Zone at all? No. My nephews are just crazy about it. 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. 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 an exaggeration, half the people you see walking on the street are wearing Eagles gear. I mean, that's how much of an obsession it is in the city. And it's fun. I've been taught by my son-in-law that when you go into a store in Philadelphia to buy something on a Sunday, what you have to say when you leave is, go birds. That's very funny. Tell us about your mentors who helped shape your career.

So I would call out one person, which was the editor of this little newspaper that I worked for when I was 19. 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 me how to write. She taught me how to report. It was amazing.

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 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. So if I ever, for instance, see a piece of copy with an exclamation mark on it, I immediately hear Leslie's voice in my head saying, you only ever use the exclamation mark if it's World War III. Otherwise, no exclamation marks. That's really interesting. Tell us about some of your favorite books. What have you been reading recently?

Lately, I've been doing a lot of reading about Philadelphia and about the neighborhood where I live. I live very close to the Schuylkill River across from the UPenn campus. And where I live now used to be full of Irish immigrants who worked on the walls along the Schuylkill. And next to me is...

an elderly lady, I think she's probably in her 90s, and her son lives with her, and he's in his mid-60s. 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 you something about that neighborhood at the time. So I enjoy 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 1980s. Back then, the workplace was less pressured. There's less drive 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 Random Walk Down Wall Street. I read all the books of Wall Street history by John Brooke.

And I particularly remember— Once Upon a Time in Galanda, is that John Brooks? Yeah, The Go-Go Years. That's right. 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 1986. And I think the original edition was 94 pages. And it just seemed like Charlie went through and picked out every word in that book with enormous care. Since then, the book has ballooned a little bit. It's over 200 pages. But that, and it's now, of course, called Winning the Losers Game. That's right. In fact, that began life as a...

research paper i don't i don't remember if it was the cfa institute but it was published somewhere i think it was the journal of portfolio management i think you're that's exactly right but it was a short 20 30 page thing which uh has persisted winning the losers game is one of my favorite finance books but and you know he charlie has a new book coming out this year 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 86, it's 94 pages. It's a great read. And that, I think, was probably the most influential book on investing that I've ever read. Wow. That's a big deal. I'm going to 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 interested in a career in financial journalism or investing? Well, I think I already answered the financial journalism one, which is don't do it. I'm not entirely serious. I mean, journalism –

is the most fun you can have while keeping your clothes on. I mean, newsrooms are great places to be. You will never meet a group of people who are more fun to be with and more cynical. I mean, it's just so much fun to be in a newsroom. So yeah, go off and be a journalist for a couple of years, learn how to write, learn about the world, and then go off and do something that will make you some money. But spending a couple of years...

In journalism in your 20s 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 going to make a career out of it. And our final question, what do you know about the world of investing today you wish you knew 30 years or so ago? That's an interesting question. What do I wish I knew? I guess what I wish I knew 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 saved as long as I didn't fiddle around too much in my portfolio, if I just let it ride, you know, I could just go off 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 in managing money and so on 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 every month's spending and quicken. You don't need to fine tune your portfolio every month. Just, you know, set up a sensible asset allocation, buy some index funds, save regularly and good things will happen.

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 500 or so we've had over the past 10 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 crack team that 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 Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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