Jonathan Clements

IT’S TIME TO PAY IT forward.
That’s a phrase I often use when talking about helping the next generation. But my efforts have been mostly focused on my children and grandchildren. What about others in future generations, especially those from less affluent families?
Welcome to the Jonathan Clements Getting Going on Savings Initiative and the accompanying book, The Best of Jonathan Clements: Classic Columns on Money and Life.
The savings initiative aims to get young adults started in the financial markets with $1,000 contributions to Roth IRAs,

I’M TRYING MY HAND at retirement. It isn’t going so well.
As a teenager and when I was in my early 20s, I would take to the couch and happily spend the day consuming a novel. Could I do that at age 62? It seems not.
At some point over the past four decades, I lost the ability to do things solely for my own enjoyment. It seems the endless demands of work, family and household chores have crushed my inner self-absorbed teenager.

I’M ALL IN FAVOR of striving. But I’ve also belatedly come to see the appeal of acceptance.
Should we strive for more, or should we accept what we currently have and what’s currently on offer? As I’ve noted in earlier articles, there’s great pleasure in striving. We love the feeling of making progress, even if our achievements don’t make us happy for long. It’s an instinct we no doubt inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

WE WANT OUR STOCKS to behave like bonds, and our bonds to behave like cash investments. That leads to all kinds of portfolio contortions—some of them damaging to our investment results.
Remember, risk is the price we pay to earn higher returns. Many folks want those higher returns, but they’re anxious to avoid risk. Chalk it up to loss aversion: We get far more pain from losses than pleasure from gains.
Result? Think about stock-market strategies like purchasing equity-indexed annuities and writing covered call options.

WHEN I STARTED writing about personal finance in the late 1980s, my focus was on giving “actionable” money advice. Here, at the end of my career, I’m more interested in offering thoughts that’ll help folks with all areas of their life, financial and otherwise.
I’m not sure how many articles I have left in me. Fingers crossed, it’ll be many more than my current diagnosis suggests. But whatever the case, here are four thoughts that I’d like readers to remember:
1.

WE’RE ALWAYS STRIVING—the next pay raise, the next consumer purchase, the next self-improvement goal. But to what end?
Our time on this earth is fleeting, our impact minimal and our legacy quickly forgotten. A decade after we’re gone, we might be remembered by family and close friends, but not by many others. And yet we keep pushing forward.
Does death’s approach shed any light on this curious behavior? Far from it. If anything,

MANY FINANCIAL IDEAS are tough to embrace. But perhaps the toughest can be summed up in one simple word: enough.
Will we ever feel like we have enough and that we’ve accomplished enough? Accepting that we have enough and done enough might seem like worthy goals, a serene acceptance that’s possible for those at peace with themselves and the world around them. Indeed, for many, “retirement” and “enough” seem to be pretty much synonymous,

WHICH FINANCIAL dangers should we focus on? The possibilities seem pretty much endless. In fact, five years ago, I decided to make a list—and ended up offering readers 50 shades of risk.
Yet our notion of risk used to be far more circumscribed.
In the late 1980s, when I started writing about personal finance, insurance was considered important, but it wasn’t much discussed. Instead, the only risk that seemed to merit serious analysis was investment risk,

I LIKE TO THINK I’M rational in the way I spend my dollars, and I suspect most readers do, too.
We are, of course, deluding ourselves.
Spending is never simply about buying what we want or need. Instead, behind every dollar that leaves—or doesn’t leave—our wallet is a complex mental dance that reflects how we feel that day, the influence of others, how we want to be perceived, and our own financial history. We might declare that we’re using our money to buy happiness.

IT’S THE ONE ASSET we’re all born with, and it pretty much defines our financial life. I’m talking here about our human capital, our ability to pull in a paycheck.
That paycheck—or the lack thereof—drives our ability to save, service debt and take investment risk. It also dictates our insurance needs and how much emergency money we should hold. Put it all together, and our human capital should arguably determine how we manage our money over our lifetime.

I MOVED FROM LONDON to New York City in 1986, when I was age 23. That’s when my financial education truly began.
I’d previously studied economics for three years and spent a year writing about the international financial markets for Euromoney magazine. Still, I knew almost nothing about investing, insurance, homeownership and other topics crucial to managing a household’s finances.
I’ve learned a ton since, and the focus of that education keeps changing,

RETIREES ENDLESSLY debate how best to draw down their retirement savings, and yet it all comes down to two simple rules: Don’t spend too much each year, and don’t sell stocks during down markets.
How do we put these two rules into action? Retirees can pick from a host of withdrawal strategies, including the five popular choices listed below. You’d likely fare just fine with any of the five strategies—but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pick carefully.

I’VE SPENT MUCH OF MY life trying to better understand the world, especially the financial world. But I wonder whether I should have spent more of that time trying to better understand myself.
Why do some financial situations scare us, while others leave us unperturbed? Why do we spend time and money in ways we later regret? Why do we find our bad habits so difficult to change? Why do we admire some folks,

IT’S SEVEN MONTHS since I received my terminal diagnosis. Cancer is now the reality that looms over each day, and it’s been a rocky road, though the latest abdomen scan suggests I’ll be around for a while longer.
Where’s my head at? Here are four questions I’ve been asking myself—questions, I suspect, that might also be interesting to those who aren’t facing a terminal diagnosis.
1. Am I afraid of dying? No,

I’M WRAPPING UP MY final big investment. Going into it, I knew it would lose money, unleash unwanted disruption and chew up time when it’s never been more precious—and yet I still went ahead.
As readers might recall, last year, Elaine and I remodeled the kitchen in our Philadelphia home. This year, we decided we’d revamp the upstairs bathroom, despite my cancer diagnosis and the forecast that I might live just 12 more months.