How Jonathan Clements’ Advice Helped Scores of Investors, Including Me

When I was an analyst in Morningstar’s manager research group in the mid-1990s, I made a habit of reading The Wall Street Journal from cover to cover. I wasn’t a business or finance major in college, so I figured I needed to get up to speed on the world of business and investing. I read about management changes at McDonald’s and Citigroup, the Enron and WorldCom scandals, and multiple market downdrafts: the Long-Term Capital Management debacle, the dot-com bust, and the global financial crisis.

I quickly realized that a lot of the daily news flow was noise—utterly unimportant to the decisions that most investors needed to make. But one columnist in the Journal consistently rose above the din and emerged as my favorite: Jonathan Clements. In his weekly “Getting Going” column, Jonathan told people what they needed to know in order to reach their financial goals, all with a dash of self-reflection and wit.

Jonathan’s formula was commonsensical: He counseled thrift and maintaining a healthy savings rate and evangelized about building a broadly diversified, low-cost portfolio that made sense for your life stage. But his fearlessness impressed me the most: He railed against brokerage firms and asset managers peddling the investment du jour, even though many of them doubtless were Wall Street Journal advertisers. Rather cheekily, as someone on the Journal‘s payroll, he also criticized the financial media for parroting Wall Street jargon and pinning deep meaning on daily market gyrations.

Jonathan wrote more than 1,000 columns for the Journal, educating legions of investors, including me, along the way. As a side note, Jonathan’s work also very much motivated my own career pivot to focus more on personal finance and helping investors with the decisions that make or break their plans. I’m so grateful for that, and it has been a wonderful privilege to get to know him a bit over the past several years. He wrote the foreword for my book, How to Retire.

What’s amazing about Jonathan’s Wall Street Journal columns, now collected into a single volume, The Best of Jonathan Clements: Classic Columns on Money and Life, is how well they stand the test of time. Jonathan’s work always centered around the evergreen principles of thrift, discipline, and harnessing the power of compounding. But he was also consistently ahead of the curve on matters that we take for granted today. Behavioral finance has been thoroughly mainstreamed into the investment discussion, but three decades ago, Jonathan was warning investors about the role of emotions in investment decision-making. His cautions against overinvesting in real estate were also prescient, predating the real estate meltdown in the late 2000s. Despite the serious topics at hand, the columns also have a delightful sense of playfulness about them. As I previewed the audio version of the book, I found myself laughing out loud in several spots, particularly his takedowns of Wall Street doublespeak.

Investors who pick up The Best of Jonathan Clements will also be supporting a worthwhile cause: the Jonathan Clements Getting Going on Savings Initiative. About a year ago, Jonathan disclosed that he was grappling with a devastating cancer diagnosis, and he’s been writing candidly about his journey on his HumbleDollar website ever since. Friends of Jonathan’s asked him what we could do to honor his immense legacy. A financial journalism award in his name, perhaps? Jonathan demurred, telling us he’d rather be associated with making a difference.

And with that—and much work behind the scenes from William Bernstein, Jason Zweig, Allan Roth, Mike Piper, Karen Damato, and a bit from me—we created a program that will make direct financial contributions to help young working adults start Roth IRAs. All proceeds from the sales of The Best of Jonathan Clements book will go to benefit the program. You can also make a direct tax-deductible contribution to the Jonathan Clements Getting Going on Savings Initiative via the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, a 501(c) (3) where I’m proud to serve as president. Either works!

I’m grateful to Jonathan for his valuable body of work and especially for showing us all how to live with grace. And I’m grateful to you for considering support for his legacy. Jonathan made a difference, and so can you.