Jonathan Clements is a former Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist who is battling a rare form of terminal cancer, Jason Zweig is a current Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist, and Christine Benz is the director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar, as well as the president of the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy.
In this podcast, we discuss the Jonathan Clements Getting Going on Savings Initiative, a non-profit research project set up on Jonathan’s behalf, and his new book, The Best of Jonathan Clements: Timeless Advice for a Financial Life Well Lived. Tax-deductible donations for the initiative can be made at BogleCenter.net, and profits from the sale of his book also go to the initiative.
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This podcast is hosted by Rick Ferri, CFA, a long-time Boglehead and investment adviser. The Bogleheads are a group of like-minded individual investors who follow the general investment and business beliefs of John C. Bogle, founder and former CEO of the Vanguard Group. It is a conflict-free community where individual investors reach out and provide education, assistance, and relevant information to other investors of all experience levels at no cost. The organization supports a free forum at Bogleheads.org, and the wiki site is Bogleheads® wiki.
Since 2000, the Bogleheads’ have held national conferences in major cities nationwide. There are also many Local Chapters in the US and even a few Foreign Chapters that meet regularly. New Chapters are being added regularly. All Bogleheads activities are coordinated by volunteers who contribute their time and talent.
This podcast is supported by the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, a non-profit organization approved by the IRS as a 501(c)(3) public charity on February 6, 2012. Your tax-deductible donation to the Bogle Center is appreciated.
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Transcript
00:00:12 Rick Ferri: Welcome everyone to the 82nd edition of Bogleheads® on Investing. And today we have a very special podcast. We have three guests, Jonathan Clements, Jason Zweig, and Christine Benz, and we’ll be discussing the Jonathan Clements Getting Going on Savings Initiative and his new book, “The Best of Jonathan Clements: Classic Columns on Money and Life.”
Hi everyone, my name is Rick Ferri, and I am the host of Bogleheads® on Investing. This episode, as with all episodes, is brought to you by the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, a nonprofit organization that is building a world of well informed, capable and empowered investors. Visit the Bogle Center at boglecenter.net where you will find a treasure trove of information, including transcripts of these podcasts.
Before we begin, I have one special announcement. Tickets for the 2025 Bogleheads® Conference are now on sale at boglecenter.net. There is special early bird pricing, so you want to get your ticket soon. This year’s conference will begin at noontime on Friday, October 17, and run through noontime on Sunday, October 19. It will be at the Hyatt Regency San Antonio Riverwalk Hotel, a beautiful location directly across from the Alamo with lots to see and lots to do in the city of San Antonio. You’ll find a list of speakers at the boglecenter.net website and a full agenda will be up soon. I hope to see many of you there.
In today’s podcast, we have three special guests, Jonathan Clements, former personal finance columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Jason Zweig, current columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar.
As most of you know, a year ago Jonathan was diagnosed with a rare terminal cancer and has been battling to stay with us one day at a time. But that has not stopped him from his life’s goal of continuing to educate people on good financial principles through his Humble Dollar website and a new program called the Jonathan Clements Getting Going on Savings Initiative and our new book, “The Best of Jonathan Clements: Classic Columns on Money and Life.”
We’re going to be talking about all of this with Jonathan, Jason and Christine and discuss how you can help. So with no further ado, let’s welcome Jonathan Clements, Jason Zweig, and Christine Benz. Welcome back to Bogleheads® on Investing.
00:03:13 Jonathan Clements: Rick, thanks for having us all on. It’s great to be talking to you about the initiative.
00:03:17 Rick Ferri: Well, that’s a great start to get going with the podcast. Jonathan, why don’t you tell us how did this initiative get started?
00:03:24 Jonathan Clements: Well, I really am not the right person to be talking about it. I was approached about would I like a journalism award set up in my memory? And my response was, absolutely not. The world has way too many journalism awards. Yeah, I’m not sure that it needs another one.
And so I said, well, if we’re going to do something, let’s do something to help young people get started as investors. And my initial idea, which seems simple to me, but didn’t prove to be quite so simple, was that it would be great to take kids from disadvantaged families and get them started as investors by funding Roth IRAs with $1,000 on their behalf. And I threw this out there and thought, well, seems like a good idea, should work.
00:04:16 Rick Ferri: Sorry, you said you threw that out there, but who did you throw it out there to?
00:04:20 Jonathan Clements: I think my initial conversations were probably with Bill Bernstein, who’s been involved with this as has Mike Piper and Karen d’ Amato. I mentioned this, that Bill had one or two further conversations with me about it and said that there seemed to be some problems, but essentially I was cut out of the loop, which is a nice place to be. One of my goals in life is never to sit on a committee again.
And so all this work was going on in the background and I had absolutely nothing to do with it. So perhaps Jason or Christine could talk a little bit more about what’s been going on.
00:04:55 Rick Ferri: Okay, so Christine or Jason, what happened after that?
00:04:58 Jason Zweig: Let’s go in alphabetical order, Christine.
00:05:02 Christine Benz: Well, that’s fine. I remember Jason and I kind of at the Morningstar Conference talking about next steps here. So we at the Bogle Center, the John C. Bogle center for Financial Literacy, it includes some of the people that Jonathan just mentioned on its board. So Mike Piper, Karen d’ Amato, Bill Bernstein, Allen Roth, ex- of our board, we have this 501(c)(3) that’s dedicated to help improving financial literacy and wellness in the community.
And we thought that perhaps we were well situated to help facilitate this because standing up a separate 501(c)(3) seemed like a pretty big project. And we felt that our mission at the Bogle Center is enough aligned with Jonathan’s vision that we were in a position to help, that we could serve as the repository for donations.
And then the next step from there was really figuring out, well, who is our partner organization to help operationalize this, because the Bogle Center is a fairly small operation, as you know, Rick, having been my predecessor as president. And so we were kind of casting about looking for different entities that do some version of what we wanted to do here. And really that’s where Jason picks up, because he came to us with an idea of a group that he had been familiar with, that he had written about. So, Jason, maybe you want to talk about how J-PAL entered the picture.
00:06:36 Jason Zweig: Yeah, thanks, Christine. I’ll echo some of what Jonathan said with a couple more details. I mean, he and I have been friends since early 1987, and one of my goals was to spare him all the nitty gritty, all the agonizing back and forth, the this won’t work and the that won’t work, and oh crap, we forgot about this.
And a large part of the process of overcoming obstacles was dealing with things like what paperwork is going to be required, how do we make sure we comply with IRS rules, how do we make sure there’s an appropriate place for the donations to go, how do we eliminate conflicts of interest? I mean, am I exaggerating, Christine? It was hundreds, hundreds of hundreds of emails and numerous phone calls. And quite early on, I realized that we needed reinforcements.
This was not a project that we could take on either individually or exclusively through the Bogle Center because it was too big and complicated. And so I thought of J-PAL, which is an organization that does experiments in behavioral economics with the goal of reducing wealth and income inequality around the world.
00:08:14 Rick Ferri: Are they affiliated with any academic organization?
00:08:14 Jason Zweig: Yeah. So J-PAL operates out of MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and its co-head is Esther Duflox, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for research that was largely driven through J-PAL. And I wrote about them for the Wall Street Journal about a decade ago, maybe it was 2016. So I was familiar with them and I thought, what could be better than setting this program up as an experiment?
Because what J-PAL specializes in is RCTs, randomized control testing, where you take two groups of people and you expose one to the experimental condition and the other is the control group and you see what happens to each group. So that where it evolved. And that brought in a whole new group of people, actually two groups, because this program will be at the ground level, operated by a youth employment organization that is operated by the city of Boston.
00:09:33 Rick Ferri: So there’s this group that is going to be the subject of this experiment. And we’ll describe what the experiment is in a minute here. But who chose that group? Was that MIT?
00:09:44 Jason Zweig: Yeah. Well, first of all, because of the eligibility rules for a Roth IRA and the importance of being able to track the participants over time, they wanted it to be run through an organization that J-PAL has a long standing relationship with because they’ve already put the data gathering infrastructure in place.
00:10:10 Rick Ferri: Before we get into the administration of this study and initiative, let’s describe exactly what it is. I mean, what are we studying? Christine.
00:10:22 Christine Benz: So the goal of this pilot program will be to get these young people investing. So the study will give them the funds and a little bit of direction about how and where to invest the money with a little bit of a nudge into a target date vehicle. And then J-PAL will study what happens after that.
00:10:48 Rick Ferri: Just so I understand, the study is about if you give these young people $1,000 and give them educational material in this case that might nudge them into a target date fund of some sort. The idea is, see what happens in the future if they build upon that or if they just take the money out of the account and spend it and how that compares to people who you did not give any money to. Is that how it’s supposed to work?
00:11:17 Jason Zweig: Yeah, exactly. And if I can jump in for a second, there’s research from around the world, much of which has been done by people associated with J-PAL, showing that cash grants can be a motivation for future saving. And we don’t know whether this program will work. These young people are under a lot of pressure. They come from poor families and under educated. So we don’t know how they’re going to behave when they get $1,000 in an account that is created for them.
00:11:54 Rick Ferri: In a Roth account.
00:11:55 Jason Zweig: Exactly. Will they immediately withdraw it? Will they leave it there and forget about it? Will they leave it there and add to it as they start earning income of their own? Which of course is what we’re trying to see if we can incentivize.
So that’s the purpose of the experiment, to figure out whether it will work, what works best, and with luck, the lessons that we acquire through this experiment will apply more broadly throughout society and we can help motivate young people across the country and across the world to become long term savers and investors, which is a pretty good way to honor Jonathan.
00:12:42 Jonathan Clements: Let me just jump in here. One thing I want to clarify is that while this initial experiment is going to be based out of Boston, the notion is that this is not going to be Boston only. The hope is that if it’s successful, that it’ll get rolled out into other cities around the country. It’s just for this initial summer program that will launch this summer, right? Jason?
00:13:03 Jason Zweig: Yeah, that’s correct and that’s a very good point, Jonathan. And as Christine said, this is a pilot program. It’s testing the initial feasibility. Like can this be done? What do we need to tweak to make it more effective? What are the problems with young people maybe who don’t read well or who don’t know the difference between a stock and a bond or who’ve never turned heard the term mutual fund or ETF? So there’s going to be a lot of trial and error initially.
But I can tell you in my Wall Street Journal inbox I have at least a dozen emails from readers in other cities saying how can we find out more about this program? Because we want to try it here. And the real purpose of this experiment is to make that possible so that we can take what we learn in Boston and enable people in Minneapolis and Chicago and Los Angeles and San Antonio and the other places I’ve heard from to do it there as well.
00:14:16 Christine Benz: One thing we really liked about J-PAL and its approach was that they’re constantly iterating on what’s working, what’s not working. And so we’ll be able to look at this pilot program and see maybe incentives would help get people to add additional funds to the account.
00:14:35 Rick Ferri: Like a matching of some sort.
00:14:37 Christine Benz: Yeah, it’s not one and done saying we have fixed this issue and we’re going to go forward with it forevermore. It’s saying here’s something we’re trying and then we may try to improve it as we go along. So I think that was a very agreeable approach to all of us because there are no clear cut solutions to helping people emerge from poverty.
00:15:01 Jason Zweig: The other great advantage of doing a project like this is through an organization like J-PAL is of course being run by a team of academics. One of their goals is to publish the findings as a research article in an academic journal which will be of course widely circulated around the world.
Similar organizations elsewhere will have that free intellectual property to build on and to try to create similar programs elsewhere. And if you think about techniques like automatically defaulting employees into a target date fund that has become very popular in the United States, or automatic rebalancing, all of those ideas originally came out of academic research and have been applied successfully in the real world. So we hope if this project takes hold that it’ll have a similar effect.
00:16:05 Rick Ferri: So there’s three parts to this that will get young people enrolled in this program. And I was not involved in the creation of it. You know, I’m learning as I go along. Number one, someone will select the group of people who will get these thousand dollar grants and number two, they will, with some help I assume, they will open up a Roth account and $1,000 will be contributed from the Bogle Center, correct? Christine?
00:16:35 Christine Benz: Well, yes. So the contributions are coming in through the Bogle Center. Contributors have the opportunity to earmark their contributions to this initiative.
00:16:47 Rick Ferri: And the book also that was published, that money will also come into this. Does that go through the Bogle Center, too? The book revenue, which we’ll get to.
00:16:53 Christine Benz: Later, the idea is that the revenues will come in through the Bogle Center and we will then contribute them out to the initiative.
00:16:01 Rick Ferri: So the Bogle Center, being a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, has the ability to do this. And so you are facilitating this through the Bogle Center. So that’s the second thing. The account is open and it’s funded with $1,000.
But the third thing that’s happening is these people who are granted the thousand dollar Roth are going to get educational material. And Christine, I understand that’s also coming from the Bogle Center.
00:17:29 Christine Benz: That has been a collaborative effort, Rick, where the goal is to give the participants at point of purchase enough information to make a good decision. But we don’t want to overwhelm them. We didn’t want to put them through a whole curriculum, make them take a test.
We want to give them enough information to make what we hope will be a good choice. So we’ve crafted some materials about what is a target date fund with some basic detail on what investing in stocks entails, what investing in other safer assets might entail. And so the trick was to provide them with enough information.
But we certainly didn’t want to overload anyone and I’ve been compelled by some of the research at various institutions that have looked at financial education kind of at point of purchase that if you can give people a little bit of information to make a good choice when taking out an auto loan or allocating a 401(k) for the first time, those can be very powerful interventions, perhaps more so than putting someone through a long curriculum where they’re learning things but they’re not in any position to put them to work. So that was the goal here, was just to give a little bit of information at point of purchase.
00:18:50 Jonathan Clements: Yeah, let me jump in here. I think what the research has shown us is that if you do put somebody through a general personal finance curriculum, that the information that they get and the learnings they get degrade relatively quickly. And after maybe 18 months there is as butt ignorant as I was when I was 18.
But if you jump in when they’re about to take out a mortgage, or they’re about to get a credit card, or they’re about to fund a IRA and the information is immediately, to use a word I hate, immediately actionable, then it can be super effective. And so in this particular case, these kids will be getting information right when they’re making a decision and with any luck it will prove super useful to them.
00:19:33 Rick Ferri: So they’re selected to participate in the program, then they are given help to open a Roth and then the money is going to come into their Roth and at the same time the Bogle Center is going to provide them with this educational package. Is that the way it works?
00:19:55 Christine Benz: Basically, the Bogle Center, through J-PAL. J-PAL will be doing this sort of hands on work with the participants to give them the materials.
00:20:06 Rick Ferri: Is this material available online for anybody to look at? So if I have a 18 year old grandchild, I used to say child, but now a grandchild, 18 year old grandchild. I could also take the same information that these young people are getting and give it to my grandson.
00:20:25 Christine Benz: We haven’t thought about that, Rick, but that’s not a bad idea. Materials were written explicitly for this sort of point of purchase decision making. But I think they could easily, we could readily put them online on the Bogle Center website.
00:20:39 Jason Zweig: It’s a very good idea.
00:20:41 Rick Ferri: This is very exciting and different ways you can participate. If I wanted to give to this initiative, I could either make a donation to the John C. Bogle center for Financial Literacy for specifically this cause and I could use my donor advised fund to do it.
John C. Bogle Center is obviously a registered 501(c)(3) organization. Or you could buy the book. And the book is “The Best of Jonathan Clements: Classic Columns on Money and Life.” Jonathan, this is your 12th book, as I counted. Is that correct? 12 books.
00:21:15 Jonathan Clements: You know, Rick, after a certain point, you know, it’s like with my marriages, you just don’t count anymore. More than one? More than one. But before we get into this, Rick, I want everybody who’s listening to appreciate just how incestuous this whole project is. So as Jason mentioned, I’ve known Jason since 1987. We were the lowest form of life at Forbes magazine.
I was a fact checker. And then the next fact checker to be hired was Jason. And you know, we worked together at Forbes for three and a half years. We had lunch together almost every day. That was in the days when you could go out, wander out into Greenwich Village and get a lunch for under five bucks, which is our specialty.
And then you think about the other people involved in the project. I’ve known Bill Bernstein since the 1990s, obviously. I’ve known Christine, Alan Roth, Mike Piper, and Karen d’ Amato. I used to work side by side with Karen d’ Amato at the Wall Street Journal.
And then the fact that this has been done under the auspices of the Bogle Center, I mean, that I love, because I love Jack Bogle. I thought he was just an iconic man. I mean, so charismatic. And to have this project operating under the Bogle Center is really great. I mean, it’s just from my point of view, not that my medical condition is a dream come true, but in terms of this particular project really is a dream.
00:22:36 Christine Benz: Well, to work on it was a dream as well, Jonathan. To have communications daily with Bill and Jason and Karen and Alan and Mike was a ton of fun. And I would also say, from the Bogle Center’s perspective, Andrew Bogle, Jack’s son, is on our board. And when Andrew heard about this project that we were working on and the potential for the Bogle Center to be involved, his directive was, go, go, go. He felt that it was very aligned with his dad’s vision, and he was utterly supportive. And we feel that that’s sort of like the family support as well, which is a lovely thing.
00:23:15 Rick Ferri: Great ideas, everybody. Thanks for all the hard work, and hopefully we learn a lot from this. So getting to the book. Alan Roth wrote in the book, “Jonathan has consistently reminded his readers that money is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve what truly matters. Security, freedom, and the ability to nurture what we hold dear. His columns are not about maximizing wealth at any cost. They are about finding balance and aligning our financial decisions with our values.”
And that really, I thought, encapsulates you Jonathan. And in your book, “The Best of Jonathan Clements,” you selected what you believe are 62 of your best columns, and it was combined in this book. So tell me about that process.
00:24:03 Jonathan Clements: So initially, I actually picked out, I think, 75 columns, and we ended up down at 62. Because, as both Jason and Christine can attest, one of the secrets to being a longtime columnist is repetition, repetition, without people noticing. So you just keep saying the same stuff and hope that nobody actually realizes that you said the same thing three months earlier.
Well, as I went through the thousand plus columns I wrote for the Wall Street Journal, there was a heck of a lot of repetition. And so it was really just a question of narrowing it down to some distinct columns that covered different topic areas. So that was where the, you know, we ended up at the 62.
The other thing about being a columnist, I think both Jason and Christine can also attest to this is you don’t want to be the typical Wall Street writer where, you know, what you’re saying hinges on the stock of the day or, you know, the market movement of the month or whatever the hell it is. Right? Because if you’re doing that, you’re doing a disservice to your readers.
So what you need to do is somehow speak eternal truths while making it seem timely. That is the trick to being a columnist. And so, in a sense, what Alan is talking about in what he wrote for the book is about trying to figure out what it is that we can say of lasting value as columnists, but packaged up in such a way that it has some immediate appeal.
And so with many of these columns, that was my goal. I remember so many times going in to talk to my editor at the Journal, and he’s like, well, what’s the news hook? What’s the news hook? And I was like, do we really need to have a news hook? Can’t we just run a decent article? And so in some cases, with these columns, what I did is actually remove the news hook when we put them into the book, because the news hook was not important. What was important was the meat of the pieces.
And I’m pleased with the way the book came out, though I would also say, and I think, again, Jason and Christine will echo my thoughts. When you go back and you look at the stuff that you wrote 20, 30 years ago, it’s like, whoa, that was really not very good.
00:26:18 Rick Ferri: Or what I found when I did a lot of writing for Forbes is that the articles that you don’t think are very good are actually the ones that are the best. It’s the one that resonate with people.
I’d write an article, and I’d say, well, that was just terrible, but I’m going to publish it anyway. And people rave about it, how great it was. And then I write something that’s really insightful, really important to me.
00:26:40 Jason Zweig: Nobody cares.
00:26:41 Rick Ferri: It doesn’t get any.
00:26:42 Jonathan Clements: Nobody cares.
00:26:43 Jason Zweig: Well, this does remind me of what I call Zweig’s Law, which is, if I like it, you hate it. And if you hate it, I like it. Yeah.
00:26:54 Jonathan Clements: Jason and I have had this conversation, actually, that the amount of research you put into an article is inversely proportional to its popularity.
00:27:02 Jason Zweig: Exactly.
00:27:02 Jonathan Clements: If you work really hard on a piece. It’s going to be like crickets when it comes out.
00:27:08 Jason Zweig: Yeah.
00:27:09 Jonathan Clements: And if you whip it off in five minutes, people are going to love it.
00:27:13 Jason Zweig: Exactly.
00:27:14 Rick Ferri: So you started out with 75 and whittled it down to 62. So tell us about the process.
00:27:20 Jonathan Clements: What happened in this case was that I came up with the initial 75. Bill Bernstein went through and put them into categories and he wrote little intros for each of the chapters, as folks will see. And then I went took it and I was like, eh, this sounds a little bit like this one. So that’s how we went from 75 to 62.
And then the greatest human impulse is to edit other people’s work. I went through and revised Bill’s categorization and that’s how we ended up with the book. And then along the way, Jason, Bill and Alan Roth all wrote pieces that appear in the book either at the front or the back.
00:28:01 Rick Ferri: Very good. And you ended up with 11 sections. And if you don’t mind, we’ve got some time to spend on each section and so we could all maybe throw in some input. So the very first section is basically categorized as talking with family about money. And this you put up right up front how to talk with parents, children, so forth.
00:28:18 Jonathan Clements: Well, in the end, why do we manage money? Why do we accumulate money? I mean, for most of us, we have a core group of people we care about deeply and we want not only our own financial security, but we also want to make sure that they’re okay financially.
I say to people, either you’re in the circle or not. And if you’re in the circle, I will do everything in my power to make sure that you are okay. So family is not necessarily a blood relative, but it’s whoever is in the circle and the people that you will go to the ends of the earth to make sure they’re okay.
00:28:52 Christine Benz: Jonathan, I have to say that this is one of my favorite sections of the book because it’s so differentiated. Discussions of talking to your kids about money, trying to inculcate healthy financial decision making in them. When I look looked at this section of the book, it was one of my favorites because I just don’t see this discussion in a lot of other personal finance writing about how to talk to children, how to help develop them as savvy financial human beings.
And I think the really happy part of this story is that your kids have generally taken what they learned to heart. I mean, things turned out here, which is really nice sort of end cap to this, to this piece of the book.
00:29:39 Jonathan Clements: Well, I treated my kids sort of as financial guinea pigs, and I experimented with them in all kinds of different ways. Fortunately, all the manipulation doesn’t seem to have left too many scars.
And in fact, it’s had a generally good output. You know, both my kids are quite financially responsible. When I was on your podcast, Christine, I talked about how my son, during his seven years getting his PhD, he was getting $30,000 a year as a stipend. And over the seven years, he managed to save $100,000.
00:30:07 Jason Zweig: Bravo.
00:30:08 Jonathan Clements: Yeah, that’s frugality. The only thing I worry about a little bit is that maybe they learned the frugality a little too well. You can overdo it. You don’t want to be so frugal that as Alan Roth always likes to talk about, you don’t want to be the richest person in the graveyard.
00:30:25 Jason Zweig: I would just add that the temptation for people who think about money and investing a lot is to think about the how. Should I buy this index fund or that one, should I hedge my foreign currency exposure? And Jonathan wants us to refocus on the why. It’s like, why are you doing this? And that’s a really important message that gets overlooked.
00:30:53 Rick Ferri: Great point. The next topic in section number two, your money and your house, and Jonathan’s view is your house eats your money. Tell us about that.
00:31:04 Jonathan Clements: So over the course of my life, I’ve owned four houses. And yes, all of them have eaten money. A lot of people, you know, do this creative accounting where they somehow turn their houses into fabulous investments. But if you sit there and you run the numbers on how much it costs to own a house, you know, all those remodeling projects, all the money you spend on homeowners insurance and property taxes, and how much you fork over in mortgage interest, and so on and so on. And of course, the opportunity cost of where else the money could be.
Houses are not a great investment. They’re not terrible. I owned one house after another. I like owning the place that I live, but I would never jump up and down and say, a house is be all and end all. It does really two things for you. One, it fixes your housing costs. If you buy a house, you know what your housing costs are going to be pretty much from year to year. And two, it’s a form of forced savings as you pay down the mortgage.
00:32:02 Christine Benz: Christine, this section is so interesting because to me, it tackles household capital allocation, which is the thing that we don’t talk that much about. We sort of move straight to investment allocation and the decisions you’re making around your investment portfolio. But all of us have a set of choices that precede investing in our portfolios. And I love that this section discusses that decision making squarely.
And I was struck by how prescient some of the columns were about over-allocating to real estate that they preceded the big real estate market meltdown where Jonathan is to going cautioning about not going overboard on improving your home, on over investing in properties. So that was something that was, was quite striking was just how prescient those conversations were.
And I’m not sure there were that many people talking about over-allocating to real estate prior to the to the real estate crisis. Certainly there were murmurings, but it’s impressive how these columns seem to predate the problem.
00:33:15 Jason Zweig: Yeah. And I guess the only note I would add is that if you look at data from Robert Shiller, for example, the Yale University economist, you’ll see that the long term real return after inflation, the long term real return on residential real estate is zero.
That’s based on roughly a century of data. And there have been more recent studies that go back to the 17th century. And the consistent finding is that your home is not a particularly good investment in a financial sense. But I love the way Jonathan brings across the fact that this, like a lot of other investments, is not necessarily about the financial return. I mean, you get a psychic return from investing in your own home, even if you don’t necessarily get a high financial return.
00:34:13 Rick Ferri: All great points. The next few sections have to do with investing. We start out with your money and the markets and then the math of investing, how the media tries to influence you on investing, the financial industry. So I want to sort of group all those together about investing. And Jonathan, if you could summarize, you know, the main topics. And by the way, within this is there’s a list chapter which has columns that are lists. And I notice you like lists.
00:34:50 Jonathan Clements: Every columnist loves lists.
00:34:53 Christine Benz: And lists are fun to read too.
00:34:55 Jonathan Clements: Readers love lists. Yeah, there are a couple of sort of different themes within these. I mean, one is like the basics of investing. And you know, I’ve done this column countless times, 10 things you should know about investing, about how you’re not going to beat the market and the importance of paying attention to costs and so on and so on. But another aspect of these pieces, and I think Jason could talk to this much more readily than I because it’s really in his wheelhouse rather than mine is in the late 1990s, behavioral finance really exploded. It hit the popular consciousness.
And while Kahneman Tversky had been looking at this stuff since the 1970s, suddenly all kinds of other academics were weighing in. Tons of research was coming out. And for me, as a columnist, that research gave me extra legs. I mean, look, if you’re trying to figure out something to write every week and there’s a new interesting piece of research, it’s like, hooray, that’s another one down.
And this was really a golden era of behavioral finance research, late 1990s, early 2000s. And so that also played into a lot of those pieces that appeared. And Jason, of course, during this time, you came out with your book, “Your Money and Your Brain.”
00:36:11 Jason Zweig: Yeah, Jonathan, as he often is, he’s being overly modest. He was really the pioneer in bringing attention to this field. This research had been around for a while, and certain people in the investing world were aware of it, but it had never really gotten much attention. And Jonathan really brought it to the fore and introduced the idea that, as I like to put it, it’s not investments that make or lose money, it’s investors.
And he really brought to the public consciousness the idea that you should look in the mirror as an investor. Don’t just look out the window at all those stupid people down on the street, but look in the mirror and look at the dummy who’s looking back at you.
00:37:09 Christine Benz: I love the sections on investing. I have to say, from a personal standpoint, I learned so much about investing, but also talking to investors from Jonathan, from those columns. I wrote about this on Morningstar.com just how influential he was to me in terms of kind of shaping the direction I wanted to go in with my career.
Did I want to be someone who was sort of adding to the confusion and the cacophony about investing or did I want to be someone who was helping to clarify? And it seemed like with every column, Jonathan was there clarifying and helping. And that is a through line in all of these columns, is just helping. With the advice about having a decent savings rate, having a sane asset allocation, having a plan that you can live with through a variety of market climates, that those things would put you on a firm financial footing.
And I was also struck, as I read through the columns, just, frankly, the courage in them, in that so many of the entities that Jonathan would criticize, the financial advice industry, certainly the asset management industry, with its constant production of various products of varying degrees of helpfulness to investors, he was very critical. And I found power in that. And it really helped, I think, give me courage to say some of the same things when I was eventually charged with helping investors in the same way.
00:38:47 Jonathan Clements: When I was at the Wall Street Journal through this period, the managing editor for, I think, pretty much the entire period was Paul Steiger. And really wonderful individual, super supportive. And even though I was saying stuff that people on Wall Street didn’t necessarily like, Paul was always supportive.
I remember one time a delegation from Merrill Lynch came in to complain about something I had written. And so we ended up in the big editorial conference room on the ninth floor, and, you know, sitting around and they’re whining about this and that. And they’d cooked up a bunch of numbers that contradicted a set of numbers that I had, and their numbers were just flat out wrong. And so we sat there and they made their spiel. I took it apart, and as we walked out of the conference room, Steiger leaned into me and whispered into my ear, “they didn’t lay a hand on you.”
And that was the way it was. So even though we were obviously taking their advertising dollars, it wasn’t expected that we should kiss their feet. It was okay to be critical, which was wonderful.
So coming back to the stuff about behavioral finance, as I went through my time at the Journal, there were really sort of four sets of interesting research on what I would say is the human side of money. Gave me sort of a few extra years as economist, and one was behavioral finance. Then there was there again, Jason did much more on this than I did. But neuroeconomics. Then there was the whole area of evolutionary psychology, which is very closely connected to neuroeconomics and how it influences our thinking.
And then an area that became particularly close to my heart, and there’s a chapter within the book devoted to some of the columns on happiness research. And those four areas, happiness research, evolutionary psychology, neuroeconomics, and behavioral finance, to this day remain great fruitful areas for anybody who wants to write about human behavior, and particularly human financial behavior.
00:40:57 Rick Ferri: Sounds complicated, but you break it down to a user level in the book. I can read this stuff, and I can understand what you’re talking about.
00:41:05 Jonathan Clements: I guess the only real trick here, and not much of a trick because I could figure it out, was just to look at the research and say, what does this mean for the average individual? How can I take the insight that some poor PhD has spent years looking into and turning it into one or two nuggets that people can use everyday life, and that’s the trick.
I, as a reporter, as a columnist, I hated picking up the telephone. I didn’t like interviewing people, but I enjoyed reading the research. So instead of calling people up on the phone, I would just scroll through and see what was the latest research out there and read the papers and see if I could somehow turn it into an article.
00:41:43 Jason Zweig: My dad had an expression that I think really applies to Jonathan’s work in this area. My dad used to say, the hardest thing in life is to make something look easy. And Jonathan makes it look easy. So don’t underestimate how much work it takes and don’t believe him when he says it.
00:42:03 Jonathan Clements: Well, Jason, you knew from early on you saw the chewed up pens.
00:42:07 Jason Zweig: Yes, that’s right. That’s right.
00:42:09 Jonathan Clements: When I was at Forbes magazine, Jason and others would go into the metal desk and pull out the drawer and there would be a series of pens that had been, the tops of which had been chewed to nothing.
00:42:23 Rick Ferri: Smithereens.
00:42:24 Jason Zweig: Smithereens. And I would add, that’s a practice that you continued at the Wall Street Journal.
00:42:31 Rick Ferri: I’ll paraphrase Alan Roth on this, who said, there’s a complexity to getting to simplicity.
00:42:35 Jason Zweig: Yeah, that’s right.
00:42:37 Rick Ferri: Okay, I want to get into money over your lifetime. I found this section to be really interesting to me. In other words, what is it all about?
00:42:48 Jonathan Clements: So money over your lifetime. One of the things that I, right towards the end of my time at the Journal, so 2007, 2008, the concept I became super interested in was human capital and how human capital is really the thing around which you can arrange your entire financial life.
Your human capital, you know, drives your ability to borrow money, it drives your ability to save, it drives your portfolio’s allocation. You know, you want more in stocks early in your career, when you still have this big paycheck coming in, you want less as you head towards retirement, it also drives your insurance need. You know, to protect your human capital, you need health insurance, you need life insurance, you need disability insurance. So human capital, of all the concepts out there, when it comes to defining your financial life, is probably the most important. And so that’s really where that section kicks off.
00:43:38 Jason Zweig: This section is a great reminder to people that you can think about your human capital as resembling maybe it resembles a stock, maybe it resembles a bond. If, for example, you’re a tenured high school teacher and you’re fairly young, your human capital is probably a lot like a bond. You’ve got job security, you’ve got decades ahead of you.
So because your human Capital, which is a portion of your overall portfolio, is quite safe and secure, you can afford to take more risk with the financial part of your capital. Somebody whose human capital is like a bond can probably safely afford to invest quite a bit more in stocks than somebody whose human capital is probably more like a stock.
00:44:44 Rick Ferri: People who work in the medical field are generally human capital is like a bond, I mean, because it’s not economically cyclical, people get sick all the time, get hurt all the time. So it has nothing to do with the economy. Whereas maybe if you’re in manufacturing or something, it’s more like a stock. So that may have some effect.
And even in technology workers, programmer or something, I mean, you may have cyclical earnings, ups and downs of the technology industry. So you’re more like a stock than a bond. And so you may adjust your portfolio accordingly based upon your human capital and the potential to have consistency of human capital. It’s all very interesting, Christine.
00:45:27 Christine Benz: I love the components of the book that delve into retirement and finding enough. Determining whether you’ve actually saved enough to retire and quantifying enough, as Jonathan discusses in the book, is a very subjective question. Helping people determine whether they have saved enough and how much they can reasonably spend, how much they can give to their loved ones. Some of the columns on that topic I think are incredibly valuable and, and do stand the test of time.
00:46:03 Jonathan Clements: So I’d like at this point to just put in a plug for Christine’s book that came out last year, which I think is superb, absolutely superb.
00:46:10 Rick Ferri: And I interviewed Christine for “How to Retire,” the name of the book, in episode number 73.
00:46:17 Jonathan Clements: What it speaks to, to me is the complexity and difficulty and emotional trauma of giving up your human capital and moving into retirement. Retirement is hung out there as this sort of prize at the end of this four decade journey of saving investing.
But in fact, when you retire, you not only lose a paycheck, you lose your identity, you lose social connections, you lose your emotional, intellectual and physical stimulation. I mean, it is a trauma and I don’t think it’s appreciated enough. And if you read some of the interviews that Christine does in that book, you really come to appreciate how difficult retirement is and it’s not disappearing off into the sunset for 20 or 30 years of fun, fun, fun. It’s quite different.
00:47:09 Christine Benz: Well, thanks for that Jonathan. And it’s a badge of honor that you wrote the foreword for the book. I so appreciate that. And my sound bite on the book is just that this is not a math problem and that’s a message that to the Bogleheads® who might be listening, who sometimes get a little lost in the spreadsheets, that there are many more dimensions to retirement planning than some sort of number.
00:47:31 Jason Zweig: Yeah, and Christine’s book is so good that my four month old puppy ate the entire thing. And after my puppy ate the entire book, I immediately went out and bought another copy and put it on the top shelf where it’s safe as a reference.
00:47:51 Christine Benz: Thank you for that.
00:47:53 Rick Ferri: Okay, the last part of Jonathan’s book covers what is a rich life? Jonathan, you talk about this thing called a rich life and money and wellbeing. And I want to describe in your own words here you are right with your situation. I mean, what is a rich life to you?
00:48:13 Jonathan Clements: So in the book is the final column that I wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2008 before I departed for Citigroup for six years, or as Jason and my other friends from the journalism world would call to the dark side. And in that final column for the Journal in 2008, I said that the rich life, the happy life, sort of consists of three key components. I mean, one is, yes, you do want a sense of financial security and that is why we do all this saving, investing over many decades.
But two, you want social connections, you want to be surrounded by people you love. And all the research says that having a rich social network is a huge source of happiness. And then third, you need a sense of purpose. You need a reason to get out of bed in the morning. And it’s not just during your working years, it’s also during your retirement. You know, people head off into retirement and say, I’m going to relax. No, you head off into retirement and after two months of relaxing, you’re bored out of your brain. And then you need to reason to get out of bed in the morning.
So here I am. I don’t know how many more months I have. My best guess, based on how my treatment is going and so on, is that I might have seven or eight more months. I don’t know that it’s going to be much more than that. That’s better than I was initially promised. When I, when I was diagnosed 12 months ago, I was given 12 months to live. So I’ve, I’ve made it to that. And at this point I’m still in okay shape. But for those who are curious, my treatment plan is failing. And so I’m trying to get onto a new treatment plan, I’m trying to get onto a clinical trial, but the cancer is continuing to spread, spreading up and down my spine. It’s spreading in my brain. You know, I’ve had frequent doses of radiation and so on, and I need a new treatment plan if I’m going to make it any more than sort of seven or eight months. So that’s where I stand today.
Nonetheless, despite all of that, despite the fact that I know that time is short, I do not get up every morning and binge watch Netflix. I get up every morning and think about what it is that I can do to have that sense of progress, that sense of striving, that sense that I’m doing something useful with my life. I can’t tell you, I mean that, you know, it’s better than crack. Well, not that I’ve ever tried crack, but I think it’s better than crack, you know, to have that sense of purpose to come to the end of the day and say, yeah, I accomplished something that’s really valuable.
And for anybody out there who’s trying to have a richer life, I would encourage them to figure out what it is that they are passionate about, what will make their days fulfilling, and focus on those things. And the wonderful thing about being financially independent and having a healthy amount of savings is that you can devote your life to the things you care about most. And I would encourage people to save and invest and manage their money with the goal of being able to lead the life that they want.
00:51:22 Rick Ferri: Jonathan, that’s a very powerful message. Thank you so much for everything you’ve done and thank you for being on the podcast. Thank you, Christine. Thank you, Jason, for being with us today.
00:51:32 Jonathan Clements: Well, thank you, Rick. And thank you for the Bogle Center for pursuing this project. I mean, if this is the last thing I do and it works, I will happily take that as a legacy.
00:51:44 Christine Benz: We all are so happy to do this for you, Jonathan. It’s been a real honor. So thank you.
00:51:49 Jason Zweig: Yep. The best form of friendship is being able to show you’re a friend.
00:51:53 Rick Ferri: Thank you for listening. Visit boglecenter.net to make a contribution to the Jonathan Clements Getting Going On Savings Initiative and read “The Best of Jonathan Clements: Classic Columns on Money and Life. This concludes this special podcast. We’ll have a new episode next month and hopefully meet many of you in October in San Antonio.
In the meantime, visit boglecenter.net, bogleheads.org, the Bogleheads Wiki, Bogleheads Twitter, the Bogleheads YouTube channel, Bogleheads Facebook, Bogleheads Reddit, join one of your local Bogleheads® chapters and get others to join. Thanks for listening.
