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BEFORE WE GET into it, a brief word. We lost Jonathan last year, and those of us who followed his work felt it more than we perhaps expected. He had a saying that I always liked – that there are really only twenty stories in personal finance, and the financial industry spends most of its time telling them on repeat in slightly different hats. He was right, of course. He usually was.
It struck me that a fitting tribute might be to take his core principles and do something with them, not quote him at length, but wrestle with the ideas in our own words, from our own lives. I’ve chosen “Resist the Urge to Act,” and had a go below. If the idea appeals to any readers posting on the forum, I’d love to see others pick a principle, whichever one speaks to you, and write about it in your own voice. No need to be an economist. Just be honest. I suspect Jonathan would have approved of that approach more than most.
There’s a strange truth lurking at the heart of personal finance that nobody tells you about, possibly because it would put a large number of people out of work. The more urgently you feel you ought to do something with your investments, the more damage you will probably do by doing it. I find this deeply satisfying, not because I’m wise, far from it, but because it seems my instinct to do very little was correct all along. Vindication, when it arrives, should be savored.
Jonathan Clements spent decades writing about money for the Wall Street Journal before founding HumbleDollar, which if you’re reading this you already know, and if you don’t, welcome, you’ve somehow stumbled into excellent company by accident. One of his core messages, boiled down to its purest form, was this: The secret to successful investing is to be comprehensively, almost aggressively boring. He had a list of principles, and one of them was deceptively simple: Resist the Urge to Act. I have a suspicion he knew it was one of the hardest ones, which is perhaps why he saved it for near the end of his various lists. Telling people to do nothing runs headlong into every instinct the modern world has carefully cultivated in them.
The financial news industry has a business model, and it is not, I would suggest, your long-term wealth they’re hoping to help. Their holy grail is your attention span, and attention without action doesn’t keep the lights on. So urgency is manufactured. Alarm is engineered. The moment a headline about Federal Reserve policy or market volatility lands on your phone screen, the correct and sophisticated response, according to Jonathan, is to put the phone face-down and go and make a cup of tea. This is not what the headline wants you to do. The headline wants you to feel that failure to react immediately constitutes negligence. It doesn’t. The information has already been digested, debated, and priced in by people who got it considerably earlier than you did. Acting on it now isn’t smart. It’s like arriving late to a party that ended an hour ago and wondering why nobody’s offering you a stiff drink.
Jonathan was a firm believer in market efficiency, the rather humbling idea that you, me, and most professional fund managers with their impressive offices and Bloomberg terminals, cannot reliably outthink the combined judgment of millions of other investors. Once you genuinely accept this, something might shift for you. You’ll probably stop checking your portfolio three times before lunch. Which matters more than it might sound, because there’s a fairly direct relationship between how often you look at your balance and how likely you are to do something regrettable with it. He had a line I’ve shamelessly adopted as my own: Your portfolio is like a bar of soap, and the more you handle it, the smaller it gets. My wife Suzie heard me say this recently and pointed out that I’ve never shown this level of restraint with actual soap. She’s not wrong. But then again, I liberate hotel soap.
The other temptation Jonathan warned against was treating the market as a hobby. There’s a certain thrill, I understand, in hunting for the next great stock, the overheard tip, the sector everyone’s talking about. The feeling that you’ve spotted something the rest of us turkeys have missed is a powerful one. He was fairly blunt on this point. If you want that kind of excitement, go to the cinema. Go to a casino. These are perfectly respectable venues for the willing suspension of rational judgment. Your brokerage account is not. The urge to act, dressed up as diligence and research, is still the urge to act.
The actual solution is somewhat anticlimactic. Broad index funds, bought automatically and regularly, regardless of what the television talking heads are shouting about. When the market drops and the headlines turn an alarming shade of red, the correct response, the disciplined, intelligent, sophisticated response, is to turn the television off, close the laptop, and take yourself for a walk. Jonathan was clear on this point: Doing nothing, at the right moment, is one of the harder things an investor can do. It only looks like laziness from the outside. From the inside, when every instinct is screaming at you to move, to switch, to sell, to “do something,” holding still takes genuine effort.
I have found, in my own modest experience, that retirement makes this philosophy considerably easier to live by. Urgency has a way of evaporating when you no longer have somewhere to be. The news cycle hums along without me. The market does whatever it decides to do. And I go for my walk. By strange coincidence, the halfway point often coincides with a bar serving decent Guinness. I consider this a stroke of luck.
It seems I was a follower of Jonathan’s advice for many years before I stumbled upon his name and writing. There’s something to be said for arriving at the right answer through a combination of temperament and mild indifference. I’m choosing to call it wisdom.
This piece was never meant to be anything more than one person’s attempt to retell one of Jonathan’s principles in his own words, a tribute of sorts, filtered through lived experience rather than expertise. The voice is mine, for better or worse. The wisdom, unambiguously, was his.
There are more principles still sitting there, waiting. Each of them deserves exactly this kind of treatment, personal, honest, and a little bit imperfect. So, who’s next? Because if there are no takers I’ll have a pretty big task ahead of me.
Mark Crothers is a retired small business owner from the UK with a keen interest in personal finance and simple living. Married to his high school sweetheart, with daughters and grandchildren, he knows the importance of building a secure financial future. With an aversion to social media, he prefers to spend his time on his main passions: reading, scratch cooking, racket sports, and hiking.
Great article, Mark! If you’d like to share your lessons based on JC’s principles, email me at bogdan@humbledollar.com
Mark, this was really good. We were out of town visiting my family last weekend, so just catching up. Jonathan taught me so much when I found HD. Keeping things simple was a big one. Chris
This is a great piece. Let me add a corollary. This explains why it is also a mistake to ever, yes ever, give wide or unfettered discretion to your broker to buy and sell on your behalf. You may subscribe to the “sit still” philosophy, but it is likely your broker without constraints will have already taken lots of action in unsettled times before you know it to “protect” you. Whether or not he or she succeeds, your own commitment to sit still was worthless.