Jonathan Clements Explains Why Dying is Hard Work

29:13These are not expensive things. For me, a happy life does not cost a whole lot of money. Yes, we are doing more traveling now, and we are traveling first class or business class, which I wouldn't have done a couple of years ago. So yeah, I'm spending more freely, but the real happiness I get is basically doing what I've always done, which is to do work that I think is important. That is a big source of happiness for me, and not only does it not cost very much, but it actually earns me some money. So the other thing I would say to people is you do not want to do all of this too early on. If I had flown business class regularly in my 20s, it would not be special to me today.

29:54Having a gradually rising standard of living throughout your life is a wonderful thing. You know, if you stayed at Motel 6 in your 20s, staying at Hyatt in your 60s seems pretty special. That's right. That's really interesting. So let's talk a little bit about Humble Dollar. When did you set that up? And you're still running that and publishing yourself with a group of other people. Tell us a little bit about the Humble Dollar. So Humble Dollar was launched right at the end of 2016. I used it essentially to take an 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.

30:37And as part of that, I invited a few people to start writing for the site, and that snowballed over time. And today I have probably 50 or 60 people who write occasionally for the site. They all do it for free. They're all amateur writers. And the thing I say to these amateur writers is, you know, you may not be financial experts, but you are experts on your own life. So I encourage them to write about their own financial lives. And the result has been that people engage in a level of financial disclosure about what they've done with their own money that the readership finds fascinating. They find liberating, and it's become, to my surprise, I mean, this is not what I set out to do.

31:25It's become a place where people happily talk about their own finances, and the readership tends to be very supportive. I do carefully moderate comments. I mean, if I feel like people are getting too rough on somebody, I'll delete comments. I also steer people away from the endless political commentary that's poisoned social media. and it becomes, I like to think, a safe place for people to talk about their own finances. I think that's the right approach. I mean, I had a comment section on the blog on the big picture for, I don't know, close to 10 years and literally millions of comments. And at a certain point, really post-financial crisis, it kind of began going off the rails.

32:07And I did the same thing you did. It's like, hey, this is not a political forum. And if you're going to 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. I don't know what sort of pushback you get to it from the readers, but the other thing I wanted to ask you about that, not just the other writers on The Humble Dollar, but the comments is people are kind of weird about money. Sometimes people are just like it's perplexing how some people think about money or use money.

32:44Tell us a little bit about your experiences dealing with the public and trying to be sort of calm and rational when consumerism and materialism very often isn't. So I'm not sure I have a clear view on how the typical American thinks about money these days. You know, what I have 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.

33:26I mean, that is the biggest struggle. Obviously not a struggle for most Americans. People do have peculiarities about money. you know this as well as I do, it varies enormously. So it's hard to generalize, right? Probably most people are naturally inclined to spend too much and to save too little. But in terms of my audience, their inclination is to spend too little and save too much. So let's talk about that because we have about 30 advisors who are CFPs that work in my shop. And one of the common conversations is I have a client, he's got millions of dollars invested. We can't get him to spend money.

34:00He wants to buy a vacation property. He can't pull the trigger. They want to take the family on a European trip, and he thinks it's going to cost too much. How do you help people who were earners and savers pivot in their 50s, 60s, 70s to becoming spenders? I think that pushing people to spend more is unlikely to work. I think instead you should talk about other goals. I mean, do you want to start giving money to your kids? Do you want to start giving money to charity? Think of other ways to get them to let go of some of their dollars. And maybe that doorway will become the doorway to start spending more on themselves.

34:41Certainly, I've changed it for the last five years. Five years ago, sort of pre-pandemic, I was very careful about spending. I didn't go out to eat a lot, didn't spend a lot on travel. And I think one of the things that for me coming out of the pandemic was a willingness to spend more, to go out and enjoy life more after that long period stuck at home. And of course, my diagnosis has done that even more. And not only have I been spending more, I've also been giving more to my kids, to charity and so on. So I think if you could open the door a little bit and people get comfortable with it, then they'll spend more.

35:15And giving away money, whether to charity or to your children, is a way of opening that door. So I don't know if this is my perspective or if this is accurate or not. I kind of recall prior generations. The wealth was passed down out of the estate. After the person passed away, they would leave their money to their family. It seems like it's a little more modern concept is why not give them the money when you can watch them enjoy it, buy a house, travel, whatever. Is that a skewed perspective or do you see something similar? No, absolutely. People definitely seem to be happier to give away money now.

35:56And it's not simply that you get the pleasure of seeing your kids enjoy the money. You can also guide how they use it. I actually just wrote checks at the beginning of the year to both my kids. And my kids asked, well, what should I do with the money? So it's a chance to say, yeah, 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. And they are at the point where 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.

36:37That money to them in their 30s is so much more valuable than it is to me in my 60s. Right. Right? I mean, they're at a point where they're still under a fair amount of financial stress. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I mean, financial stress. 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. 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.

37:13What other significant shifts have you observed over the course of your career? So we did touch on this as well, which is what is considered financial journalism has changed. It used to be that everybody was solely focused on investing and solely focused on beating the market. I mean, that was the discussion, you know, day in, day out. And to some extent, it still is in the financial media. But, you know, the playing field has widened. So we are talking about things in what I consider personal finance, home ownership, 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.

37:57And 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, what sort of individual are you? Are you a savior? Are you a spender? What is it from your past that is triggering you? I think that in the years ahead, we will start focusing more on that. And that will lead to even more interesting conversations about money as people get to know themselves better.

38:40And that works into how they manage their money. So let's talk a little bit about your announcement last year. You received a stage four lung cancer diagnosis. You're a non-smoker, so this is the genetic variation of the disease. Tell us a little bit about that diagnosis and what motivated you to share it so publicly. So back in May of last year, Barry, I started having balance issues. And I thought I might have an ear infection. I couldn't figure out quite what was going on. So I, on a Sunday, decided to go to an urgent care clinic. And the doctor who saw me at the urgent care clinic must have realized something that was going on that, you know, was obviously I was missing.

39:31So I got dispatched to the emergency room. And the next thing you know, I was stuck in the stroke victim ward at a hospital in Philadelphia. So it was 16 beds up there, 15 guys who were intubated, plus me, sitting on the edge of my bed like, what am I doing here? So after some scans, some MRIs, they realized that I had not had a minor stroke. Instead, I had cancer. they found 10 lesions on my brain and a gulf full size growth on my lungs and after some some genetic testing and so on they discovered that i had a relatively rare form of cancer that tends to afflict people of asian origin and women called egfr exon 20 and it's a relatively aggressive cancer.

40:23The median life expectancy for people who have EGFR exon 20 is 16 months. So by the time I got in to see the oncologist, she suggested I might have a year to live. And that was in June of 2024. Since then, I've had a couple more lesions on my brain, and the cancer has also spread to my spine. In both cases, the cancer of my spine was dealt with with radiation similarly to the new lesions on my brain um i've also had recently uh had a two hour procedure to shore up my spine because the damage done by the cancer um 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 i think i'm going to beat the one year mark that I was given.

41:16I'm hoping I'll make it through 2025. But, you know, realistically, it's unlikely that I'm going to 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. And, you know, this is stage four cancer. There is no recovery. It's just a matter of trying to control the cancer. And I have the good fortune I came into this in reasonably good physical shape. So I've coped with the treatment fairly well. I'm having chemo and immunotherapy every three weeks, taking countless medications.

42:01I'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 going to win. I just don't know when. So come back to answer the question that you asked. So, yeah, after I got the diagnosis, I wrote about it on my website and, 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, an outpouring of love, heard from people I hadn't heard from in years, readers have shown a lot of love. that people also said, you know, you're so brave for sharing your diagnosis.

42:42I was like, brave? I've spent my entire life writing about my own finances. 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 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 right but it really does make you focus on the day-to-day.

43:30I 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 is try to be sort of more purposeful and more mindful about each day because you will get greater happiness out of each day. Well, that's really good advice. You wrote a Wall Street Journal piece, some final personal finance advice, and some of the things you discussed were really, I don't want to say funny, but just the way you phrased them were so blunt and matter of fact.

44:20It was really intriguing. Let me run through a few of these, and I'd like to get your thoughts on it. The first one that leapt off the page was, death is hard work. Explain. So I've always had my finances pretty well organized. But until you know that you're about to pop off, you realize how much, sorry to use the phrase, how much crap you've accumulated. and you realize how hard it will be for your family to figure out your finances. So in the weeks and months that followed, I've done all kinds of things. I got a new will, powers of attorney. I closed accounts so that there are fewer accounts for my family.

45:06Everything's consolidated in one place? They were already consolidated, but for instance, I had a Roth 401k, and it's like I'm not going to fund this anymore, So I'm going to close it and roll it into my regular IRA. I had an inherited IRA from my father. It didn't have very much in it. So I closed that out. But also down in the basement, I had a box of papers, a couple 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 going to look at it.

45:46Well, this was my moment to look at it. And you know what? I didn't. I just started sticking it in the recycling bin. So there was a lot of work to be done in order to simplify things for my wife and for my kids. And I still have more work to do. So all the utilities are currently in my name. and 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 there's one less thing for her to do after I'm gone. Huh, really, really very thoughtful. The other thing that really leapt off the page was so much talking.

46:26So two days after my diagnosis, both my kids were in town, Elaine was in town. I sat them down and I explained my estate plan. And, of course, all this was obvious to me. You know, well, there's this traditional IRA. There are these Roth IRAs, the irregular taxable accounts. There's, you know, this account, that account. And they're looking at me like deer in the headlights, like, what is all this about? And it's when I realized that the stuff that's second nature to me isn't second nature to my kids. So I had an hour of discussion then and so many discussions since then, as I've tried to explain.

47:01You 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 to be taxable income on top of your income. Lots of stuff like that that second nature to me just wasn't clear to them. And the last thing was simply taxing matters. I'm assuming your estate is not going to be in the taxable size. So what do you discuss with your wife and kids about taxes? So my kids will be subject to the Pennsylvania inheritance tax, 4.5%. And so that's why I started to distribute money to them now. I had written a private mortgage for my daughter.

47:49It was currently a little over$300 ,000. and I forgave that loan and then adjusted how much she's going to get versus how much my son is going to get. And as long as I make it through to July, past the one-year mark, then Hannah won't have to pay the inheritance tax on that money. It becomes part of the estate and it's non-taxable at that point. Well, it's not part of the estate at all, so she won't have to pay the inheritance tax on that$300 ,000. Oh, okay. So there are a variety of things like that that I've done in order to make things a little less taxing for my kids. It's also why as soon as January 1 passed this year, that's why I made them a gift for 2025.

48:31Similarly, for my grandchildren, I funded their 529 plans early in the year so that I can get that money out of my estate, and hopefully I'll make it past the one-year mark so it's not subject to the inheritance tax. Really, really intriguing. Um, so given your, your diagnosis, has your perspectives on money and happiness at all changed? How have you thought about some of your previous, uh, philosophies and views? I think one of the things that makes me happy through this period is knowing that I don't have to worry about money with everything else that's going on. Money is not a worry. So when I go back to the 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.

49:23Truth is, I haven't really worried about money for years, but it'd be terrible to be faced with huge medical costs potentially and not have the finances to cover it. I've also, however, thought about, this is my retirement, right? If I don't enjoy my retirement now such as it is i'm never going to enjoy so yeah i have been spending more freely you know we went to uh london recently we went to ireland um i took the family on a fairly luxurious long weekend uh this month we're going to paris we've got other trips planned in the months ahead there's a limit how far i can plan ahead because i never know when i'm going to get derailed by some bad diagnosis.

50:08And I hate the idea of the cancellation fees. But we do have trips planned. We've booked the hotels. But I haven't booked the flights because I don't have to cancel them. So we talked earlier about money and happiness. I'm curious as to how you think about the relationship between life satisfaction, well-being, and what money does and does not help you obtain? So money, I believe, can do three things for you. One, it can allow you not to worry about money. We've talked about this already. In many ways, money doesn't buy happiness. It lets you avoid unhappiness, the unhappiness of being broke. But two, money can buy you the financial freedom to spend your days doing what you love.

50:56If you love your job, that's great. That's the greatest combination you can get. But a lot of people clearly don't love their jobs. So what they want is the financial freedom to do whatever it is they wish to be able to do. And you get that by saving diligently year after year, decade after decade. And then third, money can allow you to have special times with friends and family. And whether it's the barbecue, the special vacation, flying across the country to see the grandchildren, whatever it is, money can allow you to do that. So those three things, avoiding the unhappiness of being broke. Two, doing whatever you think is fulfilling.

51:34And three is spending special times with friends and family. That's what money can do for you. That is the way that money can buy happiness. Very intriguing. So you've mentioned a lot of your earlier in life financial decisions have set you up in a good financial situation today. What decisions do you look back and say, oh, I'm really glad I did that? What were the, with hindsight, with the benefit of hindsight, what were the choices you made that you most appreciate today? Probably like everybody you know, Barry, who has amassed some wealth on their own, the smartest thing I ever did was to be a good saver.

52:17If you're a good saver, everything's going to turn out fine. Even if you're not a great investor, as long as you're a good saver, good things will happen. If you're a lousy saver but a great investor, it's unlikely that you're going to succeed financially. So yeah, saving was the number one thing. And then two, I was very early, as you might imagine, on the indexing train, and that has also rebounded to my benefit. But it's being a saver that was top of the list. So let me flip that question around. What do you think most people get wrong? What are some of the biggest myths in investing in finance that we often have a hard time getting past?

52:57Well, 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 worrying in general and worrying about money specifically. And I think this is hardwired into us. You know, we are here because our hunter-gatherer ancestors survived. And why did they survive? Because they were warriors, right? They worried about everything. You know, they wanted to make sure that they were going to be okay no matter what happened.

53:38Well, guess what? You know, the saber-toothed tiger is not going to leap out of the bushes. You know, we do not need to worry the way our ancestors used to. And yet, people worry constantly. I mean, people are serial warriors. it's uh 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 we can't get off that treadmill well there's also a worry treadmill we worry about something choose away from us the worry goes away we're on to something else.

54:14People cannot escape their worries. And what I would want 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. 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.

54:55Things are likely to work out just fine. We are not, you know, back, you know, in, you know, like our hunter-gatherer ancestors, you know, worried about every threat. You know, it's time to let go of those worries. That, to me, is the biggest mistake people make. And I don't have a magic cure for getting away from those worries, but I do believe that is the number one thing we could do for our own happiness. Really, really very interesting. Of all the things you've learned over the course of being a personal finance columnist, first for Forbes and for the Journal and everything you've done at the humble dollar, aside from worry less, what do you think is the most important piece of financial wisdom that you want to pass along, that you want to have outlive you?

55:48What's the most significant thing you wish people would embrace and it would make their life better? I think what people need to do is know themselves, right? Much more than, what's the expense ratio on their index funds or which is the best age in 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, that is likely to lead you to have a happier financial life.

56:30I think one of the problems is that we live too much under the influence of others. It's not just the influence of people today, our friends and family and the people we see in the media, but also we live under the influence of the past, what our parents told us or what they modeled for us. People go through their life buying what their parents bought because they thought it made their parents happy 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. 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.

57:15You'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? 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 uh 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 um much more uncomfortable actually was the photo shoot where i have to sit there and try to smile for an hour right um but it sort of goes back to what i was talking about earlier about the uh the amount of publicity that my diagnosis has generated.

58:17I mean, since that came out, I had the Wall Street Journal article that I wrote. I wrote a piece for the Washington Post. I've got a piece coming out in the ARP magazine. Ron Lieber wrote that piece for the New York Times. I also wrote a piece for my father's old paper in London, The Telegraph, which was a lot of fun. Well, maybe not fun, but it was great to be in there. So yeah, the focus on my diagnosis is a little bit odd and certainly it's uncomfortable for me to be the focus of attention rather than my writing. But I feel in some way, in a way that I didn't really realize, that it's doing some good.

58:54And being of service to others has always been really important to me. I mean, I feel like if I'm not doing some little good in the world, I'm not spending my days usefully. I never want to spend the days focused solely on my own needs. But you were able to use the opportunity to amplify the good message that you had for people, which was, hey, here's just a fundamentally smart way to go about managing not just your investing but your personal finance and your life. That focus must have been gratifying to get that message out. No, absolutely. It was. But it was also a little bit uncomfortable.

59:37Yeah, I can certainly see, knowing you and knowing your personality, I can see it was something like, all right, let me make this trade off. But it all seems to have accomplished the goal of spreading what you wanted to share with the public. And for as long as I am able, I want to be able to continue writing. I do have a whole bunch of articles that I still hope to pen. but you know i know this this ride is gonna it's gonna come to an end probably sooner than i would like but uh you know for now while i can still write well i can still get my fingers on the keyboard i hope to keep punching out a few more articles so normally at this point i shift to some of the favorite questions i ask all of my guests um i'm not sure how relevant these are but but But let's run through them for posterity stake.

1:00:33What's keeping you entertained these days? What are you doing if you just want to kick back and relax a little bit? Yeah, that's not a thing I'm very good at, kicking back and relaxing. That said, as I mentioned, if I'm going to be retired, which I don't think I'll ever be fully retired, this is the moment. If I don't do it now, I'm never going to get to do it. and for the first time in probably 20 years um 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 uh so yeah have you played with red zone at all No.

1:01:17My nephews are just crazy about it. It's just the highlights of every big game kind of all at once. It's just – it's an amazing – if you're a football fan, you might want to explore that. It's pretty bonkers. So I live down in Philadelphia, so the Eagles are an obsession. Yeah. And you can't help but catch a little bit of the fever. On a Sunday afternoon, half the people – and this is not an exaggeration – Half the people you see walking on the street are wearing eagle's gear. Wow. I mean, that's how much of an obsession it is in the city. And it's fun. I've been taught by my son-in-law that when you go into a store in Philadelphia to buy something on a Sunday, what you have to say when you leave is, go birds.

1:02:06That's very funny. Tell us about your mentors who helped shape your career. So I would call out one person, which was the editor of this little newspaper that I worked for when I was 19. Her name was Leslie Levin, and she had just got out of the American University Journalism School. And she had all of this knowledge about journalism that she was anxious to pass on. And literally, she taught me how to write. She taught me how to report. It was a great experience. I was so fortunate. And in fact, this was all before I went to college. And I took the advice that she gave me about how to run a small newspaper.

1:02:48And then I took it and I used it when I edited the student newspaper at Cambridge. And I've used it ever since. So if I ever, for instance, see a piece of copy with an exclamation mark on it, I immediately hear Leslie's voice in my head saying, you only ever use the exclamation mark if it's World War Three. Otherwise, no exclamation marks. That's really interesting. Tell us about some of your favorite books. What have you been reading recently? Lately, I've been doing a lot of reading about Philadelphia and about the neighborhood where I live. I live very close to the Schuylkill River across from the UPenn campus.

1:03:28And where I live now used to be full of Irish immigrants who worked on the wharves along the Schuylkill. and next to me is a very elderly lady. I think she's probably in her 90s and her son lives with her and he's in his mid-60s. And Charlie tells me that when he was growing up in the neighborhood, there were two Italian families and everybody else was Irish. And the fact that he was aware that there were only two families in the neighborhood who were Italian and everybody else was Irish tells you something about that neighborhood at the time. So I enjoy reading about Philadelphia. But in terms of favorite books, the best time in terms of learning about finance was when I was at Forbes in the late 1980s.

1:04:17Back 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, 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 Once Upon a Time in Galanda, is that John Brooks? The Go-Go Years That's right and then there was this little book that I discovered in the Forbes library called Investment Policy by Charles Ellis and Investment Policy I believe came out in 1986 and I think the original edition was 94 pages and it just seemed like Charlie went through and picked out every word in that book with enormous care.

1:05:07Since then, the book has ballooned a little bit. It's over 200 pages, but that, and it's now, of course, called Winning the Losers Game. That's right. In fact, that began life as a research paper. I don't remember if it was the CFA Institute, but it was published somewhere. I think it was the Journal of Portfolio Management. I think that's exactly right, but it was a short 20, 30-page thing, which has persisted. Winning the Losers Game is one of my favorite finance books. And you know Charlie has a new book coming out this year. Yep. Charlie's Unstoppable. Yes. If you can find Charlie's original book, Investment Policy, which is the one that I believe came out in 86, you know, it's 94 pages.

1:05:51It's a great read. And that, I think, was probably the most influential book on investing that I've ever read. Wow. That's a big deal. I'm going to have to hunt that down. I may have to reactivate my eBay account to get that. Our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in financial journalism or investing? Well, I think I already answered the financial journalism one, which is don't do it. I'm not entirely serious. I mean journalism is the most fun you can have while keeping your clothes on. I mean, newsrooms are great places to be.

1:06:29You will never meet a group of people who are more fun to be with and more cynical. I mean, it's just so much fun to be in a newsroom. So, yeah, go off and be a journalist for a couple of years. Learn how to write. Learn about the world. And then go off and do something that will make you some money. But spending a couple of years in journalism in your 20s when you don't really need to worry about making a lot of money is a great thing to do. So yeah, I would encourage people to do it, but don't imagine you're going to make a career out of it. And our final question, what do you know about the world of investing today you wish you knew 30 years or so ago?

1:07:04That's an interesting question. What do I wish I knew? I guess what I wish I knew was that if I did the right things for long enough, everything was going to work out just fine. As long as I saved, as long as I didn't fiddle around too much in my portfolio, if I just let it ride, I could just go off and worry about other stuff. Not worry about it at all. Things generally do work out today. There are not many people who go out into the world and are reasonably prudent in managing money and so on who don't successfully get to retirement. You don't need to fret about it every step of the way. You don't need to analyze every month's spending and Quicken.

1:07:48You don't need to fine-tune your portfolio every month. Just set up a sensible asset allocation, buy some index funds, save regularly, and good things will happen. Jonathan, thank you so much for being so generous with your time and your incredibly insightful advice. We have been speaking with Jonathan Clements. He is the author of numerous finance books that you can find at your favorite bookseller, as well as the Humble Dollar blog. If you enjoy this conversation, well, check out any of the 500 or so we've had over the past 10 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you find your favorite podcast.

1:08:31And check out my new book, How Not to Invest, The Bad Ideas, Numbers, and Behavior That destroys wealth and how to avoid them. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps me put these conversations together each week. My audio engineer is John Wasserman. Anna Luke is my producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Sage Bauman is the head of podcasts at Bloomberg. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

1:09:08Thank you.