Remembering the Life and Work of Jonathan Clements

31:50And we partnered with them because we really felt that getting Jonathan's vision from an idea into an actual program was beyond us. We needed help. And so J-PAL works with academics at universities all around the world. And between Boston University, University of Chicago, and some other... Northeastern, I think. Northeastern, we were able to round up some great economists and researchers to make the program a reality. And last summer, it was piloted with some basically high school kids in Boston from poor families who were randomly selected to get money to open a Roth IRA. And we're testing whether there's particular kinds of messaging or other techniques that can not only encourage them to invest, but then to turn them into investors by changing their own behavior over the long term.

33:25And it's still very early. We don't know whether it'll work. But we hope it will. And even if it fails, we're pretty confident we'll learn some useful things about how to encourage good long-term investing behavior. It turns out it's really hard to give away money to kids for a Roth IRA. Yep. This is before we passed, I don't know if you want to call them baby bonds or Trump accounts or whatever that$1 ,000 initial tax deferred. It predates that, yeah. And by the way, that dates back to, I'm drawing a blank on his name, but he's a VC out in California. Michael Bell. First proposed this a decade ago and was slogging away trying to get it accepted.

34:17So let's let's those are what the proceeds are going to be used for. Let's talk about the book itself. Sixty, 60 columns out of over a thousand. That has to be a tough list. Anything on the list surprise you, make you scratch your head? How do you think of the arc now that you guys helped structure and organize this, which really is half the battle? Once you have it structured, it becomes a whole lot easier. Yeah, I don't think that Jonathan had an organizing principle. I think he just went through his his thousand and nine columns. Actually, it was more than that, too. And he picked out just his favorite ones.

34:57And then it fell to the three of us to organize the book, which which took some took some work. And, you know, they were organized according to, you know, the things that Jonathan wrote about. I mean, you know, the principles of indexing, the importance of saving, how to calculate how much money you need, and then all of the behavioral issues that we talked about. And so I think we came up with seven or eight basic chapter headings. But also, Jonathan did something else that was unusual and frankly risky, which is he wrote really often about his family and their issues with money. Particularly, I don't think Hannah and Henry would mind my saying this.

35:51He sort of used his kids as guinea pigs to test out how do you motivate children to save? How do you get them to become long-term investors? And we did not do this in my household. And on the one hand, I'm glad we didn't because I think it can make your kids a little crazy if you turn them into lab rats. But on the other hand, his kids probably have healthier finances than my kids do. And healthier financial outlook, too. I mean, Mike, I'm about a decade older, more than that, than Jonathan was, and so are my kids. In fact, considerably older than his because I had my kids later than he did. and a couple of the tricks that he came up with, I just thought, God damn, I wish I had thought of that.

36:46When your kid asks for a soda, the$4 soda at the restaurant, it's like, I'll give you a buck if you take the water. I'd be richer if I, I'd probably have a couple grand, I'd be a couple grand richer if I had thought of that one first. That's a great parenting hack. Share some others. What other financial tricks was he using that ended up having a good impact on the children? Either of you. Well, the bank of mom and dad, he closed that. So instead of opening your wallet for the endless supply of five and tens and twenties when they wanted something, at age 11 or 12, he gave them ATM cards that he would load up at the beginning of the month.

37:32And then when the money was gone, the money was gone. That's it till the next month. Yeah. And that's a great trick. I got to imagine a lot of parents are listening to this and saying, closing the bank of mom and dad. What happens when they burn through the ATM in week one? Now you have three weeks of whining. How do you manage around that? Yeah, that's tough. That's tough nuggies. Yeah. You ignore the whining. Yeah. Apparently. Plan better next month and we won't be having this conversation. Right. That's really pretty amazing. So it appears to me that Jonathan spent a big part of his career, and I always hate this word, but democratizing good financial advice.

38:14It sounds like this initiative is the culmination of all of that and maybe further because he's trying to reach people that are normally completely ignored by the wealth management and mutual funds world. Yeah. I mean, part of the problem that we have is the behavioral problem of getting people to save. And hopefully, this initiative, this research project will shed a little bit of light on that, that will help people save for their own retirement, both through employer plans and on their own. so so let's talk a little bit about the behavior gap both of you have written about this jonathan has written extensively about it um essentially it's what people um know they should do and then what they end up doing despite knowing what they should do um how do we uh how do we contextualize this behavior gap from Jonathan's perspective?

39:23Well, I think Jonathan did something really important, which is there was a firm, which I won't name, that in the 90s used to say that the behavior gap was, oh, 7 % or 8 % a year for people who didn't use stockbrokers to buy their mutual funds. And in other words, if you were willing to pay an upfront sales charge to buy a mutual fund, you would end up earning a much higher return than somebody who didn't go through a stockbroker. Does the math bear that out? The math does not bear that out. No, no, no, no. The behavior gap is real, but it's nowhere near that big. Two to three percent, something along those lines?

40:15Probably a little smaller. I remember a Vanguard study that specifically said for people who have behavior issues, it's worth paying half a percent or 1 percent to somebody if it prevents them from making 3%, 4 % in errors. I'm talking my book. They were talking their book. How do you perceive the ability for someone to talk an investor off the ledge when every instinct in their body is like, no, no, we want to sell now because in March 2009 or March 2020, this is going to get much worse than it is right now. Yeah, that's a completely separate issue than what we're talking about. I mean, what we're talking about is what is the gap?

41:04And the answer is it's not 7 % or 8%. It's closer to 1 % or 1.5%, which is less than the cost of engaging conventional advice, certainly through a full-service financial institution. The other issue which you're asking is how do you prevent people from jumping off the ledge? And the answer is that's very hard to do because you have to be able to impart a sense of financial history to people, which is something that maybe one out of 50 investors takes seriously. That low, the numbers are that low. Because I'm thinking about your quote about managing your own limbic system. If you can't do that, you're going to die poor.

41:48Tell us about how all these columns and the book from Jonathan. Well, the limbic system very, very crudely is system one. It's the fast-moving system that engages when we hear the hiss of the snake or see the yellow and black stripes in our peripheral vision on the African savannas. We overcome it with our system two, which is our thinking part of the brain, the neocortex, basically. and the neocortex has to learn something about financial history. And good luck with that. Well, good luck with not only teaching it, but it seems that the half-life of financial literacy is really short, that even if you teach people stuff, you've got to keep drumming it in because events seem to move so fast, people kind of forget pretty quickly.

42:36Yeah, people do learn when they get hit over the head by a two-by-four, which they did in 08, 09. And 2000. And Einstein is supposed to have said that the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest, which of course he never said, but the most powerful force in the financial universe is amnesia. So people forget. What's the Galbraith quote? The one thing we learn about financial history is no one learns from financial history. So it's really true. So let's talk a little bit about this book, starting with, first of all, who gets a terminal diagnosis and says, I know, I will write a book.

43:18I mean, every one of us at this table have written more than one books, and I think we would all admit they're kind of a slog. Where did this come from? What was the motivation here? You know, Jonathan never told, he didn't tell me he was doing it. I don't know if he told you, Bill. No, he did not. I only found out about it several months after he died. And I think it was part of how he coped with knowing that, you know, his time was limited. He just wanted to make the most of the time he had left. He spent a large part of every day with family and friends and creating new memories that the people who remained behind when he was gone would be able to cherish.

44:16But I think he also spent part of every day doing what he liked best, which was writing. Yeah, were you to ask Jonathan who he was and what he did, he would say, first of all, it's about my family. And then secondly, who I am is a writer, and he could no sooner stop writing as if he could stop breathing. Mm hmm. So so the book Money and Me combines a lot of writing he did at the humble dollar, as well as some fairly personal reflections on his diagnosis. Is this book very different in tone and goals and ambitions and his earlier writings? What what are your thoughts on this? Yeah, it's a biography.

45:03It's an autobiography. It's a biography, but having not read it yet, I suspect it's a biography with a lot of insightful lessons learned along the way. Yeah, we covered a lot of those in the first segment of the interview, which is, you know, what's money for? What's life all about? What's the meaning of life? you know that's that's that's what he wanted to approach he wanted to put a code onto his life and i think that's that's what the book was for a coda yeah i mean i i i've been thinking a lot about this um because i i mentioned jonathan and the writing he did at the end of his life in a book I've just finished of my own.

45:52And the way I sort of came out was that I think Jonathan took heart from giving heart. He gave heart to so many people in the last year of his life by writing incredibly candidly about what is it like to know you're dying? You know, what do you have to do before you're done? And how do you go about accomplishing everything you want to achieve in the very limited time that's left to you while retaining your dignity, while spending time with the people you love? And how do you set those priorities? And how do you put all that in context? And Jonathan got not hundreds, but thousands of emails and letters from people who were dying, people who were taking care of loved ones who were dying, people whose loved ones had died, people who were afraid of death, people who had gotten a terminal diagnosis and then gone into remission or been cured completely.

47:14and over and over again those people just it was this incredible outpouring of gratitude and love and you know the thing that I think is the biggest tribute to Jonathan is you know in the writing that I did about him in the last year of his life in my column and also in the newsletter I do for the Wall Street Journal, I easily got 300 or 400 emails myself. And the single most common thing that readers said about Jonathan was, he was my friend. And they said that even though none of them had ever met him. They all said he was my friend. And it was true, he was, because he really cared about the average person.

48:11He loved his readers, even the ones he'd never met. And he understood that, you know, when you're an individual investor, you're just like this little piece of plankton in a sea of sharks and barracudas, and you're at the bottom of the food chain and Jonathan was their advocate and then when he got that terminal diagnosis he realized he could be an advocate for an entirely new group of people you know those who have been touched by by terminal illness yeah you he had a he had an ability that almost no journalist has which is that you read him and you say, this man knows my life. And even before he got his terminal diagnosis, you know, he quits Citicorp around 2018 or no, 2014 or so.

49:12And he says, well, what am I going to do? I'm going to give back. And so he founds Humble Dollar, which, you know, continues He's publishing even after he's gone. So he's created something that still was very useful while he was publishing it and is still providing a service. So, you know, I mean, his life was service more than anything else. Coming up, we continue our conversation with William Bernstein and Jason Zweig discussing Jonathan Clement's forthcoming book, Money and Me. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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52:18I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guests today are Jason Zweig and William Bernstein. We are remembering Jonathan Clements, the humble dollar and Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist. He has a new book coming out posthumously, Money and Me. So let's talk a little bit about service, not just to his readers, but to his family. So if you preach delayed gratification and then you realize, hey, that window is only small, you then want some of that gratification. when I interviewed him after his diagnosis, he was planning a number of events and travel and other sorts of things with his family.

53:08Tell us a little bit about what he got to do in the last year of his life that he might have postponed under different circumstances until years later. Right. Yeah. I mean, obviously, you know, we should be respectful of Jonathan's privacy, but I think I can share most of this. He did discuss a lot of it and I'm assuming some of this is in the book. So I'm not asking for secrets. No, no, no. Tell us what he was public about. I mean, his son was planning to get engaged and got engaged and got married and Jonathan and his wife Elaine got to travel to London to go to the wedding. Jonathan himself accelerated his engagement and marriage to Elaine, his wife.

54:03He organized those things knowing that they were important to him and his family. And he also went on a bunch of trips with his mom and his siblings. and he had to cancel a couple of trips because he had various points. He was too sick to travel. But his siblings and kids would meet in Philadelphia. They went to a couple other places together and he just maximized the amount of time that he spent with his family but also with his friends. I mean, I visited him twice. Another mutual friend of ours from our days at Forbes magazine went with me on one of those visits. Is this to London? No, no, to Philadelphia.

55:04Unfortunately, to Philadelphia. Philadelphia is great. Don't get me wrong. I love Philly. But London is maybe more fun maybe for an American anyway. Anyway, but he – and I guess the thing I would point out, because I saw this firsthand, is that that may not sound like that big a deal to most people listening or watching us. You know, sort of like, oh, yeah, your time is limited, so speed stuff up and make it happen. Making it happen isn't as easy as it sounds. I mean, you know, you're getting chemo, you're getting radiation therapy, you're getting, you know, surgical cement squirted into your spine.

55:59You know, you're getting cut open for this thing or that thing. You know, your hair is falling out. Eventually, you know, walking is difficult. And through all of that, Jonathan was like, yeah, come on, you know, come next Tuesday. You know, I got nothing but time. No, no. Nothing but nothing but time when you're we all have limited time. And he knows pretty, pretty realistically how short that is. It sounds like this could be a morbid or depressing category. But but knowing how he discussed things after his diagnosis, I have a sneaking suspicion that this book is more uplifting. than depressing.

56:50Tell us a little bit about the tone he takes in what most of us would think of as really difficult circumstances. Well, most of the book doesn't cover his terminal illness. That's maybe 10 or 15 percent of the book. And he does a beautiful job of describing just what what Jason did, what he's really describing is his journey, uh, through the relationship between money and happiness, uh, and, and how he arrived at the place that he, that he, that he did. Um, you know, the, the, the thing that, that struck me when, when I would go to visit him was, and, and talk to him on the phone was, you know, I've been in, in, in the practice of medicine, And I spent a lot of time talking to dying patients.

57:41And he was just the easiest person to talk to. You would get off the phone with him. You would come away from a visit with him. You would feel uplifted. I can tell you that's not true most of the time. And does that translate into the book? Yes. Yeah, I mean, what I would jump in with, Barry, is that I think the – I mean, it may sound like a strange word. but the word I guess I would use is joy. I mean, Jonathan talked and wrote about dying from the most positive perspective you could possibly imagine. And, you know, it's as if he really felt that he had lived the life he wanted to live and above all he wanted to go out on a high note and he wanted to bring everybody along with him yeah that was his great gift and his great endowment we talked a bit about hedonic set point uh you know he just wasn't a glass half full kind of guy he was a glass seven eights full kind of guy well just that headline i remember if it was the journal or the times piece, dying is easy, planning for death is hard, just is filled with that sort of mischievous sense of humor about something that everybody else takes very seriously.

59:10And when confronted with it, it's like, hey, you got no choice but to laugh and plow ahead. And that seems to be what he did. Yeah. I mean, one of the lines he used that I'll never forget is, and it was maybe the second to last phone conversation I had with him, And he said, you know, when I got my original diagnosis, they told me I had five to 12 months to live. And that was, now I may not be remembering correctly. I think at the time he was talking with me, it was maybe 13 months prior. And he said, so, you know, I'm already playing in overtime. And I mean, I burst out laughing just the way you did.

59:59my friend is dying and I'm laughing, but I'm laughing with him. As he cracks jokes about it. Yes. And, and he wasn't, it wasn't like, if that, if that had been me, I might've been joking, but I would have been joking to like cover my fear and whatever. And he was joking because he thought it was funny. Yeah. So, so there's a line from Howard Marks that I suspect reflects a lot of what's within this book. And I'm just curious as to your thoughts. Experience is what we get when we don't get what we want. And in the journey of the overlap between happiness and money and that Venn diagram, which has, I suspect, less overlap than most people realize until they get that experience, which might not be what they wanted.

1:00:55Um, how, how has his journey evolved? How has his perspective, Jonathan's perspectives changed, uh, about his thought, his thoughts about money, happiness, and, and the purpose of living a rich life? Yeah, I mean, I think he started out as a young man, the way he describes in the book with a conventional view of money, which is that, you know, money is to buy things and to help you get by in life. when he started out his career in journalism. He had credit card debt. He had student debt. And, you know, probably all that he was thinking about was getting out from under that. And unlike most people, he evolved beyond that very, very, very quickly to, you know, get to the higher uses of money that we've been talking about.

1:01:53Anything to add to that? I mean, I guess maybe the thing I would add, Barry, is just that it takes a lot after all the years that I've been doing financial journalism to get me to feel I really learned something important. because I've sort of, I guess I haven't seen it all, but I've seen most of it. And I really learned from Jonathan that, you know, you know,

1:02:37how you live under sort of the ordinary conditions of daily life is one thing, but how you live when you've got a death sentence is something else. And he really shows that, you know, you can still celebrate, and you should. And you should figure out how to comfort the people who love you in a way that will always console them after you're gone. And, you know, the book really shows that, of course, we're all afraid of dying, but we're probably afraid of it for the wrong reasons. And I think what Jonathan really showed is the thing you should be afraid of about dying is going out the wrong way.

1:03:36Like not giving the people who will live after you the positive things that you can give them as gifts. And that's what he did. Yeah. And the other thing which he was aware of is, you know, he realized he was a very positive person and that he was dealing with his terminal illness as well as any person could. And he was much more acutely aware of how much harder it was for the people around him. And he talked about that a lot. About how hard it was, particularly on his kids. That makes perfect sense. So last question. If Jonathan were here, what do you think he would want the takeaway to be from the book about the relationship between money and a life well lived?

1:04:27He would tell you to figure out who the heck you are and what you really enjoy doing. And that's what the money is for. sounds wise jason you want to i i have i have nothing to add did we did we miss anything is there something i haven't brought up that you guys because i don't want this to be a morbid conversation it we're we're all solemn but i know each of you have a um a long and and positive relationship with Jonathan. So I don't want this all to come across as morbid because just because it involves death, it doesn't mean it's sad or morbid. What else do you want listeners to take away from Jonathan's life, his work, his books?

1:05:20What should people be aware that this isn't a downbeat book, this isn't depressing. We're being respectful, but at the same time, he was a happy, joyful person. We don't want to get into anything that's morbid, but when I was in, my dad died when I was in college, when I was 22. And I remember the thing that he was most worried about as he lay dying, because he died of lung cancer, he kept saying to me, I don't want you to remember me like this, you know, as a sick person. And I kept saying to him, I'm not going to remember you like this. And I couldn't know that that was true. But it was. I don't remember my dad as a sick person.

1:06:14I remember him as this incredibly vital, physically strong, you know, mentally agile, impressive person. And what I will always remember about Jonathan is every time I think of him, I hear him laughing. That's the first thing that comes in my head is he didn't just laugh. He cackled. And his laughter was contagious. And it never stopped the last conversation I had with him. He was laughing at himself at how, you know, dying was such a weird thing. And, you know, if people only knew what it was like, they, you know. They wouldn't fear it. They wouldn't. Or they would fear it less. Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate you guys coming in to talk about the life and times of Jonathan Clements.

1:07:13It was a absolutely unique life, one that left behind a tremendous legacy for all of his not just friends and family, but readers. The ability to touch tens of thousands of people and in a very positive way is a very, very rare thing. I hope people appreciate the conversation, not as a morbid remembrance, but as a hopeful and uplifting one for somebody who left a very positive mark behind. Yeah. Well, thank you, gentlemen, for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Jason Zweig and William Bernstein, remembering the lifetimes and writings of Jonathan Clements in anticipation of his final book, Money and Me, coming out May 26th, 2026.

1:08:11I would be remiss if I didn't thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my podcast producer. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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