Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At KKR, we've spent 50 years understanding what matters to our clients and companies. From pioneering private equity to investing across credit, real assets, insurance and sports, KKR has built the experience to navigate complexity, the judgment to recognize opportunity, and the conviction to create lasting value. Because when people and institutions are counting on us, understanding what matters isn't just important, it's everything. KKR, understanding what matters. Visit kkr.com/whatmatters.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  The world of business is constantly evolving, and Comcast Business keeps you totally in step with secure AI-backed networking in more than 100 countries. They're powering over 90% of the Fortune 500 and millions of small businesses. That's a lot of muscle. And behind it all, thousands of experts answering your call at 2:00 a.m. like it's 2:00 p.m. One partner powering how business gets done for companies around the globe. When you add it all up, no one does business like Comcast Business.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.

• 1:16Barry Ritholtz?

  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 1,000 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 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.

• 2:00Barry Ritholtz?

  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.

• 2:10Barry Ritholtz?

  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.

• 2:43Speaker 04

  Barry, it's great to see you again, and it's great to be on your podcast.

• 2:46Barry Ritholtz?

  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?

• 3:08Speaker 04

  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 paying 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.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  Can you imagine a world where the highest paying job you get offered out of college is a job in journalism?

• 3:58Barry Ritholtz?

  That's amazing. Journalism today has, you know, technology has changed it so much, that's really hard to fathom. Although you and I, not far apart in age, grew up in an era where media was very specific and thought of as a genuine career. I don't think, even at the journalism schools, people are approaching it the same way. What's your thoughts on the state of journalism in the modern world?

• 4:26Speaker 04

  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 DC. And in many ways, it was the most fun and the most educational experience I had in journalism. I worked for this, you know, rinky-dink little paper that came out every other week.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  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.

• 5:28Barry Ritholtz?

  So you're from the UK, but you've spent a lot of time in the US. Where did you grow up?

• 5:34Speaker 04

  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 DC. So we all moved to Washington DC. 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 DC, but with my parents' encouragement, I stayed on at boarding school in England, went to Cambridge, worked there for a year. And then after a year as a journalist in London, I realized the standard of living for reporters in England seriously sucked.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  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.

• 6:29Barry Ritholtz?

  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.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  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.

• 6:43Barry Ritholtz?

  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?

• 7:04Speaker 04

  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 you would have a couple paragraphs about their investment philosophy and strategy. You would offer three of their stock picks, where they were 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 the star managers, well, their stars started to flame out pretty quickly.

• 7:48Speaker 04

  And this, of course, was the experience of many investors across, you know, the US. And that was, in many ways, you know, the seeds of the index fund revolution. The people bought these star managers, you know, 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.

• 8:18Barry Ritholtz?

  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.

• 8:52Speaker 04

  So in 1994, at the

• 8:55Speaker 04

  Lofty age of 31, The Journal gave me my own column, which in retrospect is absurd. A 31-year-old, their own.

• 9:02Barry Ritholtz?

  It seemed to have worked out well for them, though, to be fair.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. But I'm not sure I would give a 31-year-old that that chance.

• 9:09Barry Ritholtz?

  Okay.

• 9:11Speaker 04

  But yes, I was given my own column and by that point, having seen all these star managers come and go, you know, I had become an index fund devotee and in column after column, I banged the drum for index funds to the point where my editors were asking me, hey, could you write about something else? But the numbers you can't argue with. I mean, we all know that the brutal math of investing before costs, investors collectively will earn the market's return. After costs, they will earn that 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

• 9:56Speaker 04

  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 and a couple of other, you know, 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.

• 10:30Barry Ritholtz?

  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?

• 10:58Barry Ritholtz?

  To indexing, especially considering the bulk of those monies that flowed to BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street.

• 11:04Speaker 04

  Well, so you're right. You know, SPY was, came out, I believe, in 1993, but it was just the S and P 500 and it was just that single fund. The exchange traded index funds really did take off 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, whether they were operating through Merrill Lynch or Schwab, could sell those funds.

• 11:47Speaker 04

  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.

• 11:56Barry Ritholtz?

  So let me push back a little bit on that. My experience has been that the brokerage side, at least up until recently, was much more interested in the value add, and I'm making air quotes for listeners, of stock selection, fund selection, manager selection. And they seem to have been less keen on passive or indexing, whereas the RIA side of the street, the independent advisor that, or the certified planner, they seem to be more focused on, let's get a plan, let's figure out what your objectives are, and the market will take care of itself. How do you see that, that shift? I've watched that over decades. You,

• 12:40Barry Ritholtz?

  you were in the thick of it. I'm curious as to what you witnessed.

• 12:43Speaker 04

  So, you're right. I mean, the sort of traditional brokers were much slower to adopt ETFs than Fee-only financial advisers, 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, you know, 1%, 1.5%, whatever amount it is, 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?

• 13:20Barry Ritholtz?

  That's right.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  You get the market's return. Surprise, surprise.

• 13:24Barry Ritholtz?

  Well, if you tilt it all towards international or emerging markets or value, there are occasional apologies along the way. Hey, but that's the, what's the old joke? The cost of diversification is frequently having to apologize for something that's not keeping up with the S and P.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  If nothing in your portfolio is performing badly, you're not diversified.

• 13:44Barry Ritholtz?

  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 in 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?

• 14:15Speaker 04

  So Jason was the next employee hired by Forbes after me.

• 14:19Barry Ritholtz?

  That's hilarious.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  And when I left 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. 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 personal finance stories, which means that by the The time I left The Journal and writing a thousand columns, I'd written each of those stories 50 times each.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  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, the sole topic was investing.

• 15:51Speaker 04

  It was all about which fund to buy, which stock to buy. Fortunately, over time, the field 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 when to claim social security, what should you have in your estate plan, what sort of house should you be buying? And then beyond that, writing about things like behavioral finance, thinking about things like money and happiness. The topic that we call financial journalism has expanded enormously over the past three-plus decades. And that's good news for somebody like me, because if I'd still writing only about index funds, I would have been out of a job a long time ago.

• 16:33Barry Ritholtz?

  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?

• 16:58Speaker 04

  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.

• 17:07Barry Ritholtz?

  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. 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.

• 17:42Speaker 04

  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

• 18:26Speaker 04

  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.

• 18:41Barry Ritholtz?

  Right, that's right.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  More than likely, 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.

• 18:57Barry Ritholtz?

  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 pricing, now they're cheap. I'm just a value investor.

• 19:21Speaker 04

  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. You know, what you need to do is indexing, but one way you can tilt the field in your favor is in periods when people are panicking, is to, as I like to put it, overrebound, to move even more into stocks. It's a temporary move, but you know, I've done it repeatedly. I did it in 2000, 2002. I did it in 2008 and 09.

• 20:03Speaker 04

  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 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 prior to the decline, and what you should do is buy.

• 20:35Barry Ritholtz?

  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.

• 20:56Speaker 04

  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.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  At K K R, we've spent 50 years understanding what matters to our clients and companies. From pioneering private equity to investing across credit, real assets, insurance and sports, K K R has built the experience to navigate complexity, the judgment to recognize opportunity and the conviction to create lasting value. Because when people and institutions are counting on us, understanding what matters isn't just important, it's everything. K K R, understanding what matters. Visit K K R dot com slash what matters.

• 21:59Speaker 05

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by Chat G P T. I'm Carol Muster. Millions of Americans are taking peptides, short strings of amino acids that can act as biological signals for cells. Bloomberg's Anika Inamputi reports peptides may be exploring their next frontier, the brain. People are taking peptides for mental clarity and cognitive benefits and to gain a competitive edge or stave off the effects of aging. Both insulin and semaglutide are approved by the U S Food and Drug Administration. Because importing or selling unapproved peptides for human use is not legal in the U S, many people turn to online forums for guidance and overseas vendors with questionable credentials to obtain them. Unapproved peptides, which are marketed as research chemicals,

• 22:43Speaker 05

  have been circulating in what's become a billion-dollar gray market amid the rise of do-it-yourself medicine as people increasingly turn to social media or artificial intelligence for medical help. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by Chat G P T. Get started at Chat G P T dot com.

• 22:59Barry Ritholtz?

  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. City investors rather than journal readers. And I'm sure there's a bit of an overlap there.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  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 MiFi. 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 are, large companies are incapable of innovating in that way.

• 24:08Speaker 04

  It was just 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. 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

• 24:51Speaker 04

  brokers into feelingly financial advisors.

• 24:54Barry Ritholtz?

  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.

• 25:07Speaker 04

  So I became part of this new business and I did a lot of writing and a lot of public speaking over the next four-plus years until I realized that, you know, I really wasn't doing much good in the world. I was collecting a 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 in my, I was 51. So I spent Ten or eleven months preparing to leave.

• 25:50Speaker 04

  I contacted the Journal about writing for them again. I also started working on a book. And after I got my last year-end bonus in early 2014, I walked in and handed in my notice.

• 26:03Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh. 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?

• 26:24Speaker 04

  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...

• 26:33Barry Ritholtz?

  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?

• 26:43Speaker 04

  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, upper-middle-class household. So money was never my priority going into the workforce. You know, I wanted to cover the costs. Obviously, I wanted to save for the future, but I was never motivated by money. If I was motivated by money, I would never have ended up in journalism.

• 27:06Barry Ritholtz?

  That's interesting. And you have said, especially post-diagnosis, you've very publicly said, gee, had I known when the clock was going to run out, I would have spent money more aggressively. It's kind of interesting that you were saving despite having come from a fairly comfortable background. Clarify that a little bit. How did you think about spending money? And how did the diagnosis change your perspectives on this?

• 27:36Speaker 04

  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...

• 27:47Speaker 04

  He was listed in the newspapers as one of the richest men in England.

• 27:51Barry Ritholtz?

  Really? I had no idea. That's fascinating.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  He, um, 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. Um, 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.

• 28:27Barry Ritholtz?

  Classic, three generations, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves.

• 28:30Speaker 04

  So I grew up with that great family story about how you shouldn't, you know, waste money, how you should think about the future. And then added to that was when I got out of college and I got into the workforce, I ended up getting married and having kids really quickly. I was a father at age 25, supporting a graduate student wife and living in New York City and.

• 28:51Barry Ritholtz?

  Tight. Money's a little tight.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, ordering a pizza on a Friday night was a questionable decision. And, you know, I learned to be super careful with money and that continued for probably 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, it's, 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 gonna ask me, which is, do I regret my earlier frugality?

• 29:35Speaker 04

  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.

• 29:50Barry Ritholtz?

  And, and to be fair, you know, I don't want to engage in what Annie Duke calls resulting. When you, you know, all of us. 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?

• 30:33Barry Ritholtz?

  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?

• 30:41Speaker 04

  So first of all, I would say to you, Barry, one of the things that's the greatest source of happiness to me is just the day to day. Just getting up in the morning, having a cup of coffee, sitting at my laptop, writing and editing, going out for lunch, having a glass of wine in the evening with Elaine. 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.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  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. 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. If you stayed at Motel 6 in your twenties, staying at a Hyatt in your sixties seems pretty special.

• 31:54Barry Ritholtz?

  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.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  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, you know, probably 50 or 60 people who write occasionally for the site.

• 32:36Barry Ritholtz?

  Really?

• 32:37Speaker 04

  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.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  I mean, if I feel like people are getting too rough on somebody, I'll delete comments. I also steer people away from the endless political commentary that's poisoned social media. And it's become, I like to think, a safe place for people to talk about their own finances.

• 33:35Barry Ritholtz?

  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 kinda 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

• 34:15Barry Ritholtz?

  that, not just the other writers on The Humble Dollar, but the comments, is people are kinda 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.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  So I'm not sure I have a clear view on how the typical American thinks about money these days. What I have is 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

• 35:23Speaker 04

  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.

• 35:29Barry Ritholtz?

  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?

• 36:02Speaker 04

  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 doorway will become the doorway to start spending more on themselves. Certainly, I've changed it 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

• 36:43Speaker 04

  after that long period stuck at home. And of course, my diagnosis has done that even more. And not only have I been spending 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.

• 37:06Barry Ritholtz?

  So I don't know if this is my perspective or if this is accurate or not. I kind of recall prior generations, the wealth was passed down out of the estate. After the person passed away, 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?

• 37:37Speaker 04

  No, absolutely. People definitely seem to be happier to give away money now. And it's not simply that you get the pleasure of seeing your kids enjoy the money. You can also guide how they use it. I actually just wrote checks at the beginning of the year to both of my kids. And my kids ask, 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,

• 38:22Speaker 04

  that money to them in their 30s is so much more valuable than it is to me in my 60s.

• 38:28Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 38:28Speaker 04

  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.

• 38:35Barry Ritholtz?

  It's motivating.

• 38:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. That's how you learn good spending habits. But you also get a lot of pleasure from getting a $19,000 check from your father.

• 38:44Barry Ritholtz?

  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?

• 39:03Speaker 04

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

• 39:42Speaker 04

  And I think the next big focus within personal finance is trying to bring this down to the individual level, not just making, you know, broad generalizations about, you know, investors have this behavioral bias or that behavioral bias, not talking in generalities about how you can use money to, 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. And that will lead to even more interesting conversations about money as people get to

• 40:23Speaker 04

  know themselves better and that works into how they manage their money.

• 40:28Speaker 05

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Millions of Americans are taking peptides, short strings of amino acids that can act as biological signals for cells. Bloomberg's Anika Inamputi reports peptides may be exploring their next frontier, the brain. People are taking peptides for mental clarity and cognitive benefits and to gain a competitive edge or stave off the effects of aging. Both insulin and semaglutide are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Because importing or selling unapproved peptides for human use is not legal in the U.S., many people turn to online forums for guidance and overseas vendors with questionable credentials to obtain them. Unapproved peptides, which are marketed as research chemicals, have been circulating

• 41:12Speaker 05

  in what's become a billion-dollar gray market amid the rise of do-it-yourself medicine as people increasingly turn to social media or artificial intelligence for medical help. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 41:28Barry Ritholtz?

  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?

• 41:50Speaker 04

  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 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

• 42:22Barry Ritholtz?

  Really?

• 42:23Speaker 04

  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?

• 42:34Barry Ritholtz?

  Wow.

• 42:35Speaker 04

  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 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.

• 43:14Barry Ritholtz?

  Wow.

• 43:15Speaker 04

  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's also spread to my spine. In both cases, the The cancer in my spine was dealt with 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's a risk I was going to fracture my spine. So as of today, I'm feeling okay, but you know, the cancer is, you know, is in my blood. It's likely to crop up somewhere else.

• 43:58Speaker 04

  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 you know, realistically, it's unlikely that I'm gonna make it much beyond then, though of course I would love it. I mean, I have to say this, Barry, you know, 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 the treatment fairly well, you know, I'm having chemo and immunotherapy

• 44:42Speaker 04

  every three weeks, taking countless medications, you know, I've had these radiation treatments. As I said, I just had my back operated on in order to shore it up. But you know, at some point, you know, cancer is gonna win. I just don't know when. So come back to answer the question that you asked. So yeah, after I got the diagnosis, I I wrote about it on my website and, you know, put out the word on social media and the response to me was quite surprising. I mean, not only did I get, you know, 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 know, You're so brave for sharing your diagnosis.

• 45:27Speaker 04

  That's like brave. I've spent my entire life writing about my own finances. Why would I, why would I stop now? And, you know, is it that people don't talk about this stuff because of denial? Is it because, you know, they're just, they're embarrassed? Is it because 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 life expectancy, this notion that your life is finite, I mean, of course, that's true for all of us.

• 46:09Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 46:09Speaker 04

  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, 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.

• 46:48Barry Ritholtz?

  Well, that, that's really good advice. You wrote a Wall Street Journal piece, some final personal finance advice. And some of the things you discussed were, were really, I don't want to say funny, but just the way you phrase them were so blunt. And matter of fact, it was really intriguing. Let me run a few, through a few of these and I'd like to get your, your thoughts on it. The, the first one that leapt off the page was, death is hard work. Explain.

• 47:19Speaker 04

  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 accounts so that there are fewer accounts for my family.

• 47:51Barry Ritholtz?

  Everything's consolidated in one place?

• 47:52Speaker 04

  They were already consolidated. But for instance, I had 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. 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 of boxes of papers. Some of them went back to when I was in college. It's 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 gonna look at it. Well, this was my moment to look at it. And you know what? I didn't.

• 48:35Speaker 04

  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, for my wife and for my kids. And I still have more work to do. So I, all the utilities are currently in my name. And in the weeks ahead, one of the final things I want to do is to make sure that I move, you know, the internet, the cell phones, the gas, the water, the electricity, all into Elaine's name so that this one less thing for her to do after I'm gone.

• 49:03Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh, really, really very thoughtful. The other thing that really leapt off the page was so much talking.

• 49:11Speaker 04

  So two days after my diagnosis, both my kids were in town, Elena 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 had an hour discussion then, and so many discussions since then, as I've tried to explain, you know, why you should not spend the Roth IRA until the end of the 10-year period, but you'll have to draw down the traditional IRA over time because it's going

• 49:54Speaker 04

  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.

• 50:02Barry Ritholtz?

  And the last thing was simply taxing matters. How, 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?

• 50:17Speaker 04

  So my kids will be subject to the Pennsylvania inheritance tax, four and a half percent. And so, you know, that's why I've started to distribute money to them now. I had written a private mortgage for my daughter. It was currently a little over $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.

• 50:52Barry Ritholtz?

  It becomes part of the estate and it's non-taxable at that point.

• 50:55Speaker 04

  Well, it's not part of the estate at all. So she won't have, you know, she won't have to pay the inheritance tax on that $300,000.

• 51:01Barry Ritholtz?

  Oh, okay.

• 51:02Speaker 04

  So there were a variety of things like that, that, you know, I've done in order to make things a little less taxing for my kids. It's also why as soon as January 1 passed this year, that's why I made them a gift for 2025, similarly for my grandchildren, you know, I funded their 529 plans early in the year so that I can get that money. You know, out of my estate and hopefully I'll make it past the one year mark so it's not subject to the inheritance tax.

• 51:29Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh, 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?

• 51:44Speaker 04

  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 twenties and thirties and the sacrifices I made, I'm glad I made them so that I have that financial security today, so that amid everything else that's going on, money is not something that's top of mind for me. Truth is, I haven't really worried about money for years, but, you know, it'd be terrible to be faced with huge medical costs potentially and not have the finances to cover it. I've also, however, you know, thought about, you know, this is my retirement, right? If I don't enjoy my retirement now, such as it is, I'm never gonna enjoy it.

• 52:29Speaker 04

  So, yeah, I have been spending more freely, you know, we went to London recently, we went to Ireland, I took the family on a fairly luxurious, long weekend. This month, we're going to Paris, we've got other trips planned in the months ahead. There's a limit how far I can plan ahead because I never know when I'm gonna get derailed by some bad diagnosis, and I hate the idea of the cancellation fees. But, you know, we do have trips planned, we've booked the hotels, but I haven't booked the flights because I don't wanna have to cancel them.

• 53:03Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh. So, so we talked earlier about money and happiness. I'm curious as to how you think about the relationship between life satisfaction, well-being, and what money does and does not help you obtain.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  So, money, I believe, can do three things for you. One, it can allow you not to worry about money. We've talked about this already. In many ways, you know, money doesn't buy happiness, it lets you avoid unhappiness, the unhappiness of being broke. But, two, money can buy you the financial freedom, spend your days doing what you love. If you love your job... That's great. That's the greatest combination you get, but a lot of people clearly don't love their jobs. So what they want is the financial freedom to do whatever it is they wished to be able to do. And you get that by saving diligently, year after year, decade after decade. And then third, money can allow you to have special times with friends and family.

• 54:00Speaker 04

  And, you know, whether it's, you know, 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.

• 54:25Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh, very intriguing. So you've mentioned a lot of your earlier in life financial decisions have set you up in a good financial situation today. What, what decisions do you look back and say, oh, I'm really glad I did that? What were the, with hindsight, with the benefit of hindsight, what were the choices you made that you most appreciate today?

• 54:53Speaker 04

  Probably like everybody you know, Barry, who has, you know, amassed some wealth on their own. The smartest thing I ever did was to be a good saver. You know, if, you know, if you're a good saver, you know, everything else is, everything's going to turn out fine. Even if you're not a great investor, as long as you're a good saver, you know, good things will happen. If you're a lousy saver but a great investor, you know, 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, it's been a saver that was not top of the list.

• 55:30Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so let me flip that question around. What do you think most people get wrong? What are some of the biggest myths in investing in finance that we often have a hard time getting past?

• 55:43Speaker 04

  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, let me broaden it out, Barry, to something that I've been thinking about a lot of late, which is most people, and, and this is, was true of me in the early days, spend too much time.

• 56:04Speaker 04

  Worrying in general and worrying about money specifically. And I think this is hardwired into us. You know, we are here because our hunter gather ancestors survived. And why did they survive? Because they were worriers, right? They worried about everything. You know, they wanted to make sure that they were going to be okay no matter what happened. Well, guess what? You know, the saber tooth 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, you know, 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.

• 56:49Speaker 04

  We can't get off that treadmill. There's also a worry treadmill. And 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 for listeners and I want for my readers is please 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, you know, hopefully you don't take on too much debt. You know, 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.

• 57:32Speaker 04

  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 gather ancestors, you know, worried about every threat. You know, it's 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.

• 58:05Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh, really, really very interesting. Um, of all the things you've learned over the course of being Being a personal finance columnist, first for Forbes and for the Journal and everything you've done at the Humble Dollar, aside from worry less, what do you think is the most important piece of financial 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 lives better?

• 58:38Speaker 04

  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.

• 59:20Speaker 04

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

• 59:44Barry Ritholtz?

  Good, good advice. Let me throw you a curveball. I remember last summer, towards the end of July, you were the focus of a New York Times piece headline, "A Money Guru 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?

• 1:00:20Speaker 04

  Well, 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. But, you know, I I knew Ron was not going to be unkind. I've known Ron for decades. He's a 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.

• 1:00:51Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 1:00:53Speaker 04

  But it sort of goes back to what I was talking about earlier about the 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 had I wrote a piece for the Washington Post. I've got a piece coming out in the ARP magazine. Ron Lieber wrote that piece for the New York Times. I also wrote a piece for my father's old paper in London, The Telegraph, which was a lot of fun. Well, maybe not fun, but it was 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 it's it's doing some good.

• 1:01:38Speaker 04

  And

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

  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 I'm not spending my days usefully.

• 1:01:54Speaker 04

  I never want to spend the days focused solely on my own needs.

• 1:01:58Barry Ritholtz?

  But you 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.

• 1:02:14Barry Ritholtz?

  That focus must have been gratifying to get that message out.

• 1:02:17Speaker 04

  No, absolutely. I it it was. But it was also a little bit uncomfortable.

• 1:02:23Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah, I can I can certainly see, knowing you and knowing your personality, I can see there was something like, all right, let me let me make this trade off. And and but it all seems to have accomplished the goal of spreading what you wanted to share with the public.

• 1:02:39Speaker 04

  And, you know, for as long as I am able, you know, I want to be able to continue writing. I do have a whole bunch of articles that I still hope to pen, but, you know, I know this. This ride is gonna, is gonna come to an end. Probably sooner than I would like, but you know, 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.

• 1:03:03Barry Ritholtz?

  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, but let's, let's run through them for posterity stake. What's keeping you entertained these days? What are you doing if you just wanna kick back and relax a little bit?

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's not a, a thing I'm very good at, kicking back and relaxing. That said, you know, as I mentioned, you know, if I'm gonna be retired, which I don't think I'll ever be fully retired, this is the moment, right? If I don't do it now, I'm never gonna get to do it. And for the first time 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.

• 1:04:00Barry Ritholtz?

  Have you played with red zone at all?

• 1:04:02Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:04:02Barry Ritholtz?

  My nephews are just crazy about it. It's just the highlights of every big game kinda all at once. It's just, it's an amazing, if you're a football fan, you might wanna explore that. It's, it's pretty bonkers.

• 1:04:16Speaker 04

  So I live down in Philadelphia, so the Eagles are an obsession.

• 1:04:20Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21Speaker 04

  And you, you can't help but catch a little bit of the fever. On a Sunday afternoon, half the people, and I'm, this is not exaggeration, half the people you see walking on the street are wearing Eagles gear.

• 1:04:34Barry Ritholtz?

  Wow.

• 1:04:34Speaker 04

  I mean, that's how much of an obsession it is in the city. And it's fun. You know, I, I've been taught by my son-in-law that when you go into a store in Philadelphia, you know, to buy something on a Sunday, what you have to say when you leave is, "Go Birds!"

• 1:04:51Barry Ritholtz?

  That's very funny. Tell us about your mentors who helped shape your career.

• 1:04:55Speaker 04

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

• 1:05:40Speaker 04

  So if I ever, for instance, see a piece of copy with an exclamation mark on it, I immediately hear Lesley's voice in my head saying, "You only ever use the exclamation mark if it's World War III. Otherwise, no exclamation marks."

• 1:05:53Barry Ritholtz?

  That's really interesting. Tell us about some of your favorite books. What have you been reading recently?

• 1:05:59Speaker 04

  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 U Penn campus. And where I live now used to be full of Irish immigrants who worked on the wharves 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

• 1:06:44Speaker 04

  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...

• 1:06:56Speaker 04

  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 Brooks. And I particularly remember-

• 1:07:25Barry Ritholtz?

  Once Upon a Time in Galunda, is that John Brooks?

• 1:07:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Gogo years.

• 1:07:28Barry Ritholtz?

  That's right.

• 1:07:30Speaker 04

  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 Loser's Game.

• 1:07:58Barry Ritholtz?

  That's right. That, in fact, that began life as a research paper. I don't remember if it was the CFA Institute, but it was published somewhere.

• 1:08:09Speaker 04

  I think it was the Journal of Portfolio Management.

• 1:08:10Barry Ritholtz?

  I think you're, that's exactly right. But it was a short 20, 30-page thing, which has persisted. Winning the Loser's Game is one of my favorite finance books. And you know, Charlie has a new book coming out this year.

• 1:08:23Speaker 04

  Yep. Charlie's Unstoppable.

• 1:08:25Barry Ritholtz?

  Yes.

• 1:08:27Speaker 04

  If you can find Charlie's original book, Investment Policy, which is the one that I believe came out in 86, you know, 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.

• 1:08:42Barry Ritholtz?

  Wow. That's a, that's a big deal. I'm gonna have to hunt that down. I may have to reactivate my eBay account to get that. Our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in financial journalism or investing?

• 1:08:59Speaker 04

  Well, so 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, it's, 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'll make you some money. But spending a couple of years in journalism in your twenties, when you don't really need to worry about making a lot of money, is a great thing to do. So yeah, I would encourage people to do it, but don't imagine you're going to make a career out of it.

• 1:09:42Barry Ritholtz?

  And our final question, what do you know about the world of investing today you wish you knew 30 years or so ago?

• 1:09:49Speaker 04

  That's an interesting question. What do I wish I knew? I guess what I wish I knew was to, was that if I did the right things for long enough, everything was going to work out just fine. If, you know, as long as I saved, as long as I didn't fiddle around too much with 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 in Quicken. You don't need

• 1:10:34Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:10:44Barry Ritholtz?

  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 them. 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

• 1:11:29Barry Ritholtz?

  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.

• 1:11:54Speaker 06

  If you listen to financial news, you know a lot of time is spent thinking about what's next, the next opportunity, the next investment, the next move. But sometimes what matters most is being ready for what you never saw coming. For more than 75 years, Cincinnati Insurance has worked with independent agents to help protect businesses, homes, valuables, and more. Because planning for the future isn't only about knowing what's next, it's about making sure you're ready for what you can't predict. Let Cincinnati Insurance make your bad day better. Find an independent agent at C I N F I N dot com.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  The world of business is constantly evolving and Comcast Business keeps you totally in step with secure AI-backed networking in more than 100 countries. They're powering over 90% of the Fortune 500 and millions of small businesses. That's a lot of muscle. And behind it all, thousands of experts answering your call at 2 a.m. like it's 2 p.m., one partner powering how business gets done for companies around the globe. When you add it all up, no one does business like Comcast Business.