Robin writes:
There’ve been many people who’ve inspired me in the career in financial journalism I embarked on 12 years ago, and JONATHAN CLEMENTS is definitely one of them. So when we were planning guests for our TEBI podcast series Second Lives, about life and money beyond the age of 45, Jonathan was one of the first names we thought of.
Jonathan enjoyed a hugely successful career as a personal finance writer for The Wall Street Journal, but as he candidly confesses in this interview with JONATHAN HOLLOW for the eighth episode in the series, he was, for a long time, almost addicted to frugality and the future at the expense of life in the here and now.
He also worked for Citigroup and lectured college students on personal finance — both experiences he looks back on with less than pleasure, as he explains. In his frank and highly articulate voice, he explains why he’s still restless in his early 60s, and what new challenges he is exploring. He then discusses the lively life stories and examples that emerge from his most recent book, My Money Journey: how 30 people found financial freedom, and you can too. Believe me, this interview is well worth 45 minutes of your time.
Second Lives has been developed in conjunction with financial planning firm Mulberry Bow. Based in London, the firm offers a highly personalised service to around 150 individuals and families. We are very grateful Mulberry Bow for its enthusiastic support for this series.
TRANSCRIPT
Jonathan Hollow: Jonathan Clements, your website is called Humble Dollar. Why do you advocate a “humble” dollar? Surely the point of the dollar is to be mighty?
Jonathan Clements: So, the dollar part … it’s obvious, right? It’s a site devoted to personal finance. But why “humble”? There is so much about our financial lives that we can’t control. We don’t know what’s going to happen to the stock and bond markets. We don’t know what financial misfortunes are going to befall us. We don’t know how long we’re going to live. That’s why a certain level of humility is important. On the other hand, there are significant portions of our financial life that we can control over. We can control how much risk we take. We can control our investment costs. We can control how much we save and spend.
We can, one hopes, control our emotional reaction to the market’s ups and downs. In short, we can lead thoughtful financial lives even when we’re faced by all this uncertainty. So, yes, we should be humble in the face of all the uncertainty that confronts us, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t exert some measure of control over our financial lives.
Jonathan Hollow: And what are the different functions and purposes that the website is for? Who’s it trying to help with those themes?
Jonathan Clements: So if you go back to the launch of the site, the site launched at the end of 2016, and at the time, I had very limited ambitions for the site. I had been putting out an annual financial guide, as a book and as an ebook edition, and it seemed to me that it was just the wrong format – in today’s 24/7 world, where information is constantly updated, having an annual financial guide seemed a little bit like a dinosaur. So I decided … what the heck … I would throw it up on the web and update the guide continuously, make it freely available or run a few ads next to it to maybe make a few dollars. I’d already been blogging, so I thought, alright, I’ll keep blogging and maybe I’ll invite people I know to blog along with me. From there, the site evolved to what it is today: I’m running ten, a dozen articles every week; there is a financial guide, a financial health checkup and so on.
And what if the site has evolved to be, is a site that’s geared towards people who are in, or close to, retirement. It’s heavily focused on index investing. And on those who are trying to pursue a thoughtful approach to managing money. They’re trying to figure out how they can have happier financial lives. So those are the issues that we touch on a lot on the website.
Most of the writers for the site are amateur writers who just happen to have a very keen interest in personal finance. And so one of the things that I say to these folks is: you may not be an expert on the financial world. But you are an expert on your own life. So if you write about what you’ve done, you can do so with great authority.
And that has really led to what is probably our signature type of article where people talk about how they’ve tackled different issues in their financial lives. And I know we’re going to talk about it in a little bit, but that is also the genesis of the book that the site recently put out: My Money Journey.
Jonathan Hollow: So this current phase of your life, in which you’re a website publisher and a writer, you’ve described this as a “third act” of your life. Can you tell us what the first two acts were?
Jonathan Clements: So I got out of Cambridge in 1985, and in college I used to say to people: “I will never get married and I will never have children.” And so, within a year of leaving Cambridge, I was engaged. Within two years, I was married. And within three years, I was a father. I found myself at this point living in New York City with a wife who was a PhD student. And very quickly, I had not one, but two small children to take care of, and to do so all on a junior reporter’s salary in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
One of the consequences of this is that I had to grow up financially very, very fast. While a lot of my friends were enjoying their 20s, bar-hopping, going to parties, I was changing diapers and trying to figure out whether we could afford pizza on a Friday night. The frugality carried me through the first two decades of my life.
These were years of professional success, but a very routine life. I was working for The Wall Street Journal. I was there as the personal finance columnist. I was putting away great gulps of money and essentially building the financial foundation that my life rests upon today.
But it was a very structured life. I’m not sure it was the happiest time of my life, but it was certainly a time when I was very financially careful. I lived in a home that was far smaller than I could really afford. And that’s one of the reasons I was able to save great gulps of money. And I reached a point in my early forties – I guess it was a midlife crisis – when I realised that I had achieved financial freedom, and I could start taking more career risks.
So I was a little burned out at The Wall Street Journal. I’d been writing their column for many years. I was recruited by Citigroup to help with a financial startup at the bank. And that later morphed into me being director of financial education for their wealth management side. So I spent six years on Wall Street, seeing the advisory business from the inside. Not a particularly attractive view sometimes!
So that was my second phase.
And then around 2014, I realised that as much as I was making tons of money at Citigroup, I was really making no difference in the world. I spent my time dealing with lawyers and compliance officers, trying to make sure in this very tightly regulated business that we weren’t doing the wrong thing. And I was sick of it. So I left Citigroup in 2014. I waited long enough to get my final bonus, and then I left, and for the past nine years, I’ve had this third phase, which I refer to as my second childhood.
And it’s a period where I tried all kinds of different things. I was involved in another financial startup. I wrote a number of books. I freelanced a column for The Wall Street Journal, as well as some other publications. I did a little bit of consulting. I gave a bunch of speeches. I tried something that I thought I was going to love, which was teaching personal finance at the college level and discovered that I really actually didn’t like teaching.
And then somewhere along the way, I ended up launching this thing called Humble Dollar, which, since it was launched at the end of 2016, has slowly devoured my life! And that is where I am today.
Jonathan Hollow: And why didn’t you like teaching?
Jonathan Clements: It’s interesting. I taught at a small private college in New York State. It’s reputed to be the least expensive private college in New York State, and that is deliberately so. It’s very much geared towards kids who are from the poorer parts of New York City, but one of the consequences of that is that these kids had to work full time jobs in order to afford to go to this college. So they were spending 40 hours a week working. They were doing five classes a semester and those classes were running for three hours. That was 15 hours of classwork time. So they’ve got 40 hours of work, 15 hours in the classroom – that’s 55 hours.
And then, there’s this jerk who keeps giving them homework at the end of every personal finance class!
And surprise, surprise, they just didn’t do it. I felt like I wasn’t making any difference in their lives. Nothing against the kids: I understand, they were in an economic dilemma, but it just wasn’t for me. And, to be honest, when you’re used to writing and reaching hundreds of thousands of people, standing in front of a classroom of 20 or 30 kids and realising, you’re having a much, much smaller impact that doesn’t fit quite so well. It certainly didn’t for me.
Jonathan Hollow: Let’s go back to this frugal theme that developed from what you said in your mid twenties. You have said that through that frugal approach, you’ve amassed more than enough money for your retirement. Can you shape that, quantify that for us?
Jonathan Clements: Well, one way to quantify it is, here in the United States we have Social Security, our national government pension, and my intention is to delay Social Security until age 70, which gives me the maximum possible benefit. And if I delay until age 70, in today’s dollars, I will receive $48,000 a year, according to the Social Security website. And that $48,000 a year will pretty much pay all of my retirement expenses. So, as a consequence, all of this money that I’ve saved for retirement, is, in a sense, useless. It won’t be entirely useless. I hope to do some travelling and so on. But one thing I’ve discovered is I’ve clearly saved way too much for retirement. So probably the biggest beneficiaries are going to be the charities that I support, and my two children.
Jonathan Hollow: And has it been hard to give up on frugality?
Jonathan Clements: The moths appear when I open my wallet, but slowly, the wallet has been opened. I spend money in ways that I didn’t a dozen years ago! I go out to dinner at least once a week, and I like to try new restaurants. And that’s an expensive habit. And I’ve been doing much more travelling.
One of the things that I would say to anybody who has historically been a great saver who’s reached retirement is that suddenly you have to flip the switch, you have to go from being a saver to being a spender. And it’s a difficult transition for a lot of people. So start small. This is not the time when you go out and you buy that luxury European sedan, because if you do it, it’ll be a deeply uncomfortable experience and you probably won’t enjoy the car and the money involved. But if you start small, if you do go out to dinner, if you buy yourself the latest electronic gizmo, if you take a weekend away, if you start small and those small expenses seem to enhance your life, then it gets a little easier to give up the frugality thing But it’s certainly been difficult and I don’t think that I will ever spend in proportion to the amount of money that I’ve managed to amass.
Jonathan Hollow: I think you said somewhere that you felt that travelling business class would make your travel a lot more pleasurable, but that’s something that you would find quite difficult to do?
Jonathan Clements: The “business class” thing is a sticking point right now. I take a few cues from my mother. My mother just turned 84 and she continues to travel, but now she travels first class. And that was not the way she’s done it historically, but as she’s got older in order for her to enjoy travel and get on that airplane, she feels that she needs to travel business class or first class. And so I look at that and think … yeah. So that’s probably coming down the road, and I’m trying to wrap my head around that. On internal US flights, I’m happy to sit in the cheap seats – it’s okay to be at the back of the plane, but now when I think about travelling to Europe, climbing on a plane, waking up, in London or Paris, having been sitting up all night and staggering into this city that I don’t entirely know … that’s not as quite as an attractive proposition as it was 20 years ago. And so the idea of being able to sleep on the plane and arrive feeling relatively fresh is seeming more and more appealing at some point.
Some point!
I’m not there yet, Jonathan, but at some point. I will, I think, bite the bullet and do so.
Jonathan Hollow: We will await with bated breath. What about the charitable giving? Do you find it easier to give to charities in a more generous way than spend on yourself, perhaps?
Jonathan Clements: So, when you think about what you can do with money, you have a certain amount of discretionary money. So you’ve got to cover your fixed expenses, your mortgage (or rent, if you have that) the groceries, the utilities, the insurance premiums, so that money is basically already designated.
You can’t do anything about all of that, but above that you may have discretionary money. So you can save it. You can spend it on new possessions. You can spend it on experiences, you can give it to charity, or you can give it to loved ones. And I think that when we think about our values, we could learn a lot by looking at how we use our discretionary dollars.
So historically, the thing that I valued most was clearly financial security – because with my discretionary dollars, I saved like crazy. When I was younger, I think I was more apt to buy possessions. Today I buy very, very few possessions. In fact, I’m much happier throwing things out than bringing them into the house. But what I do get great pleasure from these days is spending on experiences. Giving to my kids. And one of the things that I have been trying to get better at and I’ve been thinking about more is giving to charity. But for me, I’m still struggling to find which charity it is that I really feel I want to support. So I’ve been thinking about that and thinking about how I can do it in a more structured way. I think I could be much more generous with charity and I’m figuring out how I can do it in a way that would make me more comfortable to feel like I was being more effective in the way that I use my dollars.
Jonathan Hollow: This theme of a “second childhood”, and still being quite restless in your sixties … it almost sounds like, despite your very significant career success, at least with The Wall Street Journal, you’re still looking for new challenges now?
Jonathan Clements: I think it’s really difficult to say “I have enough and I’ve achieved enough”, at least for me. Other people may be different. I am at the point where I pretty much could have said: I have enough. I probably take more investment risk than I need to, in part because I know I’m not going to spend my savings during my lifetime, or not a significant portion of them.
So I have pretty much reached a point where I can say I have enough. But I’m not sure I’m quite at the point where I’ve said I’ve achieved enough. And, we all, I think, like to think that we’re going to go out on a high note. Yet actually, that never happens! Because the destination is not what counts. It’s the journey. It’s the striving. It’s spending our days engaged in things that we find fulfilling, that we think are meaningful, that we feel that we’re good at, that we think are important, that we find challenging. These are the things that give our lives a sense of purpose, and I still want to spend my days doing those things that give me a sense of purpose.
I think even in retirement we need a reason to get out of bed in the morning. And for me at this point, that’s my website Humble Dollar. What I would like to do is get to the point where it doesn’t consume quite so much of my life. Maybe if I look two years down the road, instead of putting up a dozen new articles a week … maybe I only put up four new articles a week. I’d like to get to the point where I can spend maybe half my day working and half a day for myself, but I have not quite got to the point where I can bring myself to be quite that selfish. But I’m trying to get there. That’s the journey.
But I don’t want to ever not have that sense of purpose.
Jonathan Hollow: It’s about the struggle and the strife.
Jonathan Clements: Yeah, absolutely. It’s the hedonic treadmill, right? Every time we look ahead and say, “Well, once I get this done, everything’s going to be fine, and I’m going to be permanently happier.” And of course, it never happens. Whatever it is that you’re striving for, whether it’s buying a home, buying a new car, just getting the work out of the way so you can go on vacation for two weeks … once you get to that point, everything is going to be happier and your life’s going to be so much better … and then two days into your vacation you wake up in the morning, and you’re a little bit restless: “Oh, what am I going to do today?” Suddenly worries come creeping in again.
We are, as humans, not built to relax. We are built to strive. Those are the hunter gatherer genes that we carry within us. And, I would say that we should not fight it. We should find some way to harness it. We will be happier if we always have things that we are striving towards. That’s the nature of us as humans.
Jonathan Hollow: Now let’s talk about the book, My Money Journey. You’ve used the website as a platform to publish and then gather life stories about money, and you’ve gathered some great stories in the book. At the end of the book, you’re urging the reader to write down their own money story. Why do you think that would help every reader, or an ordinary reader?
Jonathan Clements: I think there are really two potential benefits to get from sitting down and spending a couple of thousand words writing about your financial journey. First, when you write about your financial journey, you’re really writing about your life journey. For better or worse, pretty much every aspect of life has a money aspect. And so when you write about your money journey, you write about your life journey. And in doing so from a financial point of view, it gives you a chance to look back and say, what did I do right? What did I do wrong? What has been important? What hasn’t been important? And that can help you going forward.
But the second reason to sit down and write about your money journey is with an eye to future generations. I knew my grandparents very well. I never knew my great grandparents. Would I like to be able to read their account of their life journey and their financial journey. Of course I would. It would be fascinating to know what their life was like.
One of the things that I say to people is that the only immortality we have in this world is in the memory of others. If you want a little bit of immortality, sit down and write about your financial story and your life journey so that not just your children, your nieces and nephews, but future generations can know what your life was like and that it counted for something. So you should, you should sit down and you should write that financial story and then you should put it with your most important papers when they go to find your will, your life story, your money journey should be there as well.
Jonathan Hollow: That’s a really interesting concept. In the book that Robin Powell and I wrote, we were talking about having a “death box” of all the significant financial facts about you (and the fact that a financial advisor is a very good person to be holding those facts when you pass on), but we hadn’t thought of actually suggesting people put a a story in there as well.
Jonathan Clements: The only thing I would say is this: coming from the point of view of somebody who has committed too many words to paper over the years, you should also think carefully about what it is that you want to leave behind. Because if you leave three boxes of family letters, they will never be read, but if you pick out a dozen key pieces of paper and you leave them behind, there is a much better chance that your family will look at them after your death. You need to do the pruning before you go, so that they do actually pay attention to the stuff that you want them to pay attention to.
Jonathan Hollow: Well, let’s turn to some of the individual stories. The subtitle to the book is “How 30 people found financial freedom, and you can too”. But of course, the road to financial freedom can be bumpy, and it’s often the mistakes that tell us more. Tell us about the journey of Juan Forneau. He calls his story “A Bad Business”.
Jonathan Clements: Yes, so one of the things about the book in general that I hope people will find inspiring is that within these 30 stories of how people reached financial freedom (or have nearly reached financial freedom), you will find that every one of them made mistakes along the way.
So even if you’ve made mistakes … don’t assume that you’re doomed. Plenty of people make financial mistakes and still manage to retire in comfort and amass significant wealth. So in Juan’s case, Juan lives in Iowa. He works in a chemical factory. He’s also, interestingly enough, a professional wrestler, this is his “side hustle” as he refers to it. He is clearly an ambitious guy, and beyond working at the chemical factory: he has a whole real estate business. I think last I knew he had six or seven rental properties that he owned in the area.
But his entrepreneurial streak also led him to launch a coffee shop. And the coffee shop did not live up to his ambitions, and it very quickly failed. Juan pushed on with the coffee business for too long, and one of the things that he ended up having to do was to dip into his retirement savings during the 2008/2009 stock-market collapse. In fact he ended up setting himself up for bankruptcy, and of course setting himself back financially. But the good news is that he’s still on track to retire early, despite that mistake. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from reading about people’s mistakes and his story is a fascinating one.
And I think what interested me about it was that he had a very different reaction to that of his wife. She was really focused on the good things that had happened during the year or so that they’d been running the coffee shop. She was talking about the customers that they met, and the friends they made through the business. He was more focused on the fact that the business had not succeeded and that there had been a large financial loss involved.
I think that probably if it had happened to me, I would be in the Juan camp. I think I would find it hard to see the silver lining in this.
Jonathan Hollow: Another really great story in the book was from John Goodell, and what was lovely about it is that he talks about deliberate choices he made to spend money rather than save it or accumulate it.
Jonathan Clements: Yes, I think this is a very telling story and an important story. And certainly for me, a reminder that the relentless pursuit of more money is not necessarily the path to greater happiness. So John spent, I believe, 14 years in the army. He was a lawyer in the army, but that also meant that he had to do active duty. For instance, he served in Afghanistan.
In the book he talks about three times that he essentially set back his own march towards financial freedom.
One of those three times was one when he was at on active duty in Afghanistan, when he committed to buying a new car – I think it was a Mustang, some special Ford Mustang car – and how thinking about that car and picking out the specs for it and ordering it, and knowing that it would be waiting for him when he got back to the USA, helped him to get through the experience of being on active duty in Afghanistan.
In the second event, he talks about financial costs that his wife and he occurred when they adopted three children from South America, including the fact that there’s an adoption credit here in the USA that was theoretically available, but because the kids came up for adoption earlier than they expected, they weren’t able to get that adoption credit, for various technical reasons. But they still went ahead! Because having the three children was more important than getting a break on their taxes.
Then subsequently, John left the army and left behind a very lucrative pension. If you’re in the military in the USA and you do 20 years of active duty, you get a pension that’s equal to half of your final three years’ salary. And he actually decided to leave the army early. He’ll still get a pension down the road, but not nearly as generous. He now had these three adopted children – part of army life is constantly moving – and he thought it was unfair on the kids, and unfair on his wife, and that it would be much better if they could be in one place. And, so to do that, he left the army.
Again, he set back his progress towards financial freedom, but in return, he had a happier financial life. I’m not sure I would be able to make that financial sacrifice, but have to say, I admire that he did it. And I think that we should all be cognisant of those trade-offs and not necessarily put the almighty dollar at the top of our list.
Jonathan Hollow: I suppose my reflection on that story was that it gave a new meaning to the idea of financial freedom, because for a lot of people, it’s a kind of nirvana of a mountain of money, big enough for you to stop working. But for him, it was freedom from being too concerned about that goal.
And in your own chapter, you’ve said “I’ve come to see not thinking about money as perhaps the greatest luxury that money can buy”, which I thought was a really interesting thought. Can you expand on that?
Jonathan Clements: Sure. We ask this question all the time: does money buy happiness?
And I would contend that the real role of money is to help us avoid unhappiness. And one of the ways that money can help us to avoid unhappiness is that it can allow us not to think about money. One of the terrible situations to be in is to not have enough money, be constantly worried about how you’re going to pay the bills.
Once you reach financial freedom, I think there are two key elements of that. one is that your time becomes your own. You can decide how you’re going to spend your days. And one of the key things you should do with that time, I believe, is to engage in activities that you find meaningful, that give your life a sense of purpose.
But the other aspect of financial freedom is this ability not to worry about money. And that’s huge to me. I mean, that not having to think about money on a daily basis is a wonderful thing. And for a lot of people, unfortunately, that goal remains elusive.
The United States government did a study of well being in the USA – financial wellbeing. And they looked at all kinds of different factors. But the the biggest factor was essentially money in the bank, and people who had $5,000 or more in the bank were, on their scale roughly 50 percent happier than those who had $250 or less: just by having cash in the bank, some reasonable amount that could ensure that the bumps of daily life don’t derail your existence. That’s enormous. But for people who are living on the edge, it’s misery.
Jonathan Hollow: There’s another story in the book by Phil Kernan called “Project Mickey”. He and his wife and family decided to have a constant reminder of a money goal, gradually growing in front of them. Can you tell that story?
Jonathan Clements: So Phil is a financial advisor in Kansas City. Before he became a financial advisor, he worked in banking and he and his wife realised that they weren’t going to be financially free in the near future, meaning they weren’t going to be able to completely stop working. But they would have substantially more financial flexibility if they didn’t have a mortgage.
So they set a goal of getting their mortgage paid off as quickly as possible … and getting their kids on board with the frugality that would be involved in getting their mortgage paid off as quickly as possible.
They promised this reward – which was that everybody would go to Disney World. And to bring this alive, Phil’s wife went out and she bought a large jigsaw puzzle of Mickey Mouse. And whenever they paid off, I believe it was $1,000 of the mortgage principal, they would add pieces to the puzzle, to see their progress. And when the puzzle was completed, it would be time to go to Disney World. And so sure enough over the years that followed, every time they paid down the principal by a thousand dollars or more, they would add pieces to the puzzle and slowly Mickey appeared before them and finally off to the Disney World they went.
Jonathan Hollow: I thought it was a very clever way to bring a financial goal to life and to get everybody on board with the sacrifices that are necessarily involved. (I had a bittersweet reaction to it though, because I can’t stand Disney nor Mickey Mouse!)
In the foreword to the book, you expressed a regret, I suppose, about the lack of female voices among the authors. You can explain how that came about – it wasn’t really your choice as such. What’s your take on the different relationships that women and men have with money in the United States?
Jonathan Clements: So, of the book’s 30 authors, five of them are women. And I wish it were more. One of the reasons the number is relatively small is simply this, that I run the website on a shoestring, I can’t pay contributors very much. So I was really at the mercy of whoever put up their hand and said, “Yes, I’d like to write for you”. A lot of the people who read the website previously read me at The Wall Street Journal. And as I took to joking when I was at the Journal and continue to joke to this day: the Journal’s readership is basically dead white males. And so those are the people who read Humble Dollar. And so in the category of dead white males … you don’t find many women.
Nonetheless, I think there is an issue here that, historically, men have tended to manage the household finances, and women have taken a back seat. And that itself is extremely unfortunate. We know from the studies that on the one hand, women do tend to be somewhat more risk averse. On the other hand, they also tend to be much more careful as investors and tend to get better investment results. Men tend to trade too much. I think, and hope, that the story has changed and will change further, as women have reached a more equal footing in the workplace, and are taking greater charge of their own financial futures. But for now, in this one book, it is disappointing that only five of the contributors are women.
Jonathan Hollow: Do you think it’s also because men are more willing to step forward and tell stories about themselves?
Jonathan Clements: I do think that men definitely are more willing to step up and – to some degree – assume that what went on in their life is going to be interesting to other people! Maybe women are a little bit more modest and a little bit more cautious about that and are thinking, “Is the story that I have to tell necessarily exciting enough to grip, the interest of other readers?”
Jonathan Hollow: Well, notwithstanding the male female balance, it’s a very interesting book. Just remind us again of the title and what you think it can do for its readers?
Jonathan Clements: So the book is called My Money Journey: how 30 people found financial freedom, and you can too. I hope that it can do a number of things for readers. One, I think it can inspire them to keep going with their financial journey. Two, I think it will make them realise that managing your money is not that complicated. As has been said by many others, managing money is simple, but it’s not easy. There is an emotional component that is difficult to handle. But in terms of the mechanics of investing, you don’t need to own the latest Wall Street contraption. You can make great financial strides using simple, low cost financial products.
I think the other thing that the book can do for people is give them a chance to have a real look at people’s finances. We don’t talk about money in an honest fashion … nearly enough.
Jonathan Hollow: I think so, and I think also that your own candour and honesty (because your own story is also told in the book), is a driving force behind what other people have been willing to put into the book. So thank you for sharing that too, on this podcast.
Jonathan Clements: Oh, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you for having me on it, Jonathan.
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