Jonathan Clements, the Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist who may have done more than nearly anyone who didn’t work at Vanguard to bring index funds to the masses, died over the weekend after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis last year. He was 62.
A U.K. native with a dry wit and a sharp tongue for fools who chased stock market fads, Mr. Clements was resolved to see out his days in the wake of his diagnosis much like he lived them before, in a cheerful state of frugality.
Before I visited him last year to ask him if he had any regrets about having planned financially for a very long life (he had none), I reviewed scores of columns and articles he had written, spanning three decades, plus a pile of his books. There were many pearls of wisdom and thought-provoking conversation bombs that I couldn’t incorporate into that article.
So here they are now — five things that all of us could stand to consider, wherever we are in our life cycle.
Doing the thing you’re passionate about is overrated — for the young.
“When I talk to college students, I don’t tell them to follow their dreams,” Mr. Clements wrote in “How to Think About Money,” which came out in 2016. “Instead I tell them to focus on making and saving money.”
He goes on to consider the assumption that pursuing your passions is better to do in your 20s than in your 50s.
“I think this is nonsense,” he wrote. “In fact, I think just the opposite is true.”
If you can get yourself into great financial shape early — far from a sure thing in some economic environments, including the present one — you can spend the last quarter or more of your career worrying less about money and more about happiness at work.
Winning isn’t everything, but not losing is really something.
In that same book, Mr. Clements issued a two-word commandment: Minimize subtractions.
He was talking about two things. First, there are investments with high fees that chip away at returns; financial advisers who charge too much or keep certain costs hidden; and any money that you put in high-fee annuities.
Then, there is the wide category of risks and what we can — and can fail — to do to protect ourselves. Portfolios may have too much money in stocks. If so, emotions can get the better of you during a market crash, leading you to sell everything and lock in losses. And you may buy the wrong kinds of life, property and disability insurance — or buy the right kinds, but not get enough.
The taxman favors the patient.
“The tax code is stacked in favor of savers,” Mr. Clements wrote in “The Little Book of Main Street Money.”
You know, if you have enough money to put some of it away.
Pretax savings in your 401(k) or similar workplace savings account. Tax-deferred growth in your individual retirement account. Then there’s the Roth I.R.A., where you can pull the money out later without paying any taxes as long as you follow the rules.
Health savings accounts work similarly. Money can compound for decades and then come out tax-free for health expenses in retirement, including care in a nursing home.
And 529 accounts bless the patient as well. You may get a state tax break when you put money in, the money grows without you paying any capital gains tax and then you put it toward college expenses two decades later.
Grandparents can get in on the 529 action as well, and the wealthy can rack up millions in just a handful of decades.
Don’t just stand there. Do something.
“Want to enjoy life more?” Mr. Clements wrote in “From Here to Financial Happiness.”. “Put down the remote, back slowly away from the television, and do something where you’re a participant, not an observer.”
I’ve adapted that one over time in my own life. I try to do rare things with great people. More specifically, I grasp for things that have high odds of blowing my mind, with the kinds of people I never could have imagined existing in the world until I sought them out.
No, really. Do something!
“There is a reason the world’s gardens are full of benches that nobody ever sits on,” Mr. Clements wrote in “How to Think About Money.” “We aren’t built for leisure or built to relax. Rather, we are built to strive.”
This realization can be key to a happier retirement. Given how much we humans love the feeling that we’re making some kind of progress, retirement can be a kind of continuation of one’s career.
“We still need fulfilling work,” he wrote. “The only difference, in retirement, is that we don’t have to worry so much about whether that work comes with a paycheck.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Clements would like you to pay him a visit and have a seat, at least for a bit. In his last column, published posthumously on Monday on his website Humbledollar.com, he mentioned two chairs that sit near a tree in front of his Philadelphia rowhouse.
“I hope,” he wrote, “family and passersby will occasionally stop by, and fill me in on what I’ve been missing.”
Ron Lieber has been the Your Money columnist since 2008 and has written five books, most recently “The Price You Pay for College.”
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