Jonathan Clements

WHAT DOES A GOOD financial life look like? Here’s a quixotic roadmap—comprised of 45 steps:

Stuff part of your babysitting or lawn mowing money in a Roth IRA. Suggest to your parents that they should encourage this sort of behavior—by subsidizing your contributions.
Get a credit card when you head off to college, charge $5 every month and always pay off the balance in full and on time. You’ll soon have an impressive credit score.

AS I’VE BUILT OUT HumbleDollar over the past few years, I’ve come to view the site not merely as a place where folks can learn about financial issues, but as a community that thinks about money in a unique way.
This shows up repeatedly in articles from guest contributors, with their focus on topics like spending thoughtfully, helping family, behavioral finance, indexing and achieving financial freedom. It’s a community where folks are trying to be rational about money,

NEW YORK TIMES columnist Ron Lieber wrote last week about “money guru” Jordan Goodman—and how Goodman had settled charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission that he’d used his radio show to promote an investment firm, without revealing that the firm was compensating him for referrals. Goodman might never have ended up in the SEC’s crosshairs, except it turned out the firm was operating a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme.
It was a story that made me sit up and take notice—because I’ve long thought of Goodman as a fellow member of the informal fraternity of personal finance writers.

LOOKING TO BUILD an investment portfolio—or rethink the mix you already own? Check out HumbleDollar’s new portfolio-building guide.
The guide takes the most important advice from the site’s chapters on investing, markets and taxes, and turns it into nine simple steps that should help you build a sensible, low-cost portfolio of index funds. I’ve included step No. 1 below. If you like what you read, I encourage you to peruse the other eight steps.

MONEY MAY SEEM important—and it is. But it isn’t nearly as important as we imagine. Want a little perspective on your money? First, think about your net worth or how much you earn. Then ask yourself these eight questions. How much would you give:

To have your current life, but be 10 years younger?
To have a deceased friend or family member back in your life?
To avoid the parts of your job you dislike?

WE CAN MEASURE OUR financial progress by the size of our net worth. But that’s hardly the only gauge. Equally important, I’d argue, is the evolution in how we think about money—and how we use it to improve our lives.
What does this journey look like? I picture it as having five stages:
1. Head above water. This is when you emerge from the primordial financial swamp and begin to walk upright.

WE NEED FOLKS TO STAY in the workforce longer—for their sake and the sake of the economy. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing.
I’ve written in the past about the demographic challenges facing the U.S. and other developed nations. The 10-second recap: Many of the economic issues we fret about—soaring federal government debt, lower long-run GDP growth, a shrinking Social Security Trust Fund—can all be traced to the same root cause. We’re rapidly approaching the point where we don’t have enough workers producing the goods and services that society needs.

FOLKS USED TO SAY, “You can’t go wrong with real estate.” They sure don’t say that anymore. It’s been a rollercoaster dozen years for home prices—and some experts think another rough patch is in the offing.
Since mid-2006, the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index first tumbled 27.4% and then bounced back 53.6%, for a cumulative 12-plus year gain of 11.5%, equal to 0.9% a year. Could we be facing another dip?

DO THE CHEAPEST index funds always win? A year ago, I tackled that question—and the results for 2017 were mixed. Since then, the question has become even more intriguing. Last year, Fidelity Investments launched four index-mutual funds with zero annual expenses, while also slashing the expenses on its existing index funds.
Those zero-cost funds have only been around for a handful of months, so it’s a little early to gauge their performance. Ditto for the price cuts for other Fidelity index funds;

WHEN FOLKS HAVE financial questions, they go hunting for the right answer. But what if there’s no right answer to be found?
To be sure, in retrospect, the correct answer is often crystal clear. Looking back at 2018, we should have owned growth stocks until September and then gone to 100% cash. If our home didn’t burn down and our health was good, we shouldn’t have bothered with homeowner’s and health insurance. If we kept our job and survived the year,

WITHOUT A DOUBT, John C. Bogle is the greatest man I’ve had the privilege of knowing. Tomorrow, the newspapers will run obituaries detailing his many accomplishments—how he launched Vanguard Group, started the first index mutual and was, right up until the end, a fierce advocate for the everyday investor.
I first met Jack in 1987, when I was a callow 24-year-old reporter at Forbes magazine. I last saw him in October, at the Bogleheads’

LONG-TERM CARE is the elephant in the room that many of us try mightily to ignore. It’s a potentially huge expense: A semi-private room in a nursing home costs an average $89,297 a year, according to Genworth Financial.
But what should we do about it? For answers, I turned to Christine Benz, director of personal finance at Chicago financial researchers Morningstar Inc., where she’s worked for more than 25 years. Benz has written extensively on long-term care (LTC).

WHEN I STARTED writing my column for The Wall Street Journal in 1994, active money managers dominated the investment scene and index funds were struggling to get noticed. A quarter century later, most money remains actively managed, rather than indexed. The triumph of indexing is not yet complete.
Still, everybody knows which way the wind is blowing. Over the decade through 2017, index funds focused on U.S. stocks—both the mutual-fund and the exchange-traded varieties—attracted $1.6 trillion in new money,

LIKE THE COBBLER whose children have no shoes, I get so busy with this website and other projects that I tend to neglect my own portfolio. I think of it as benign neglect: If you’re invested in a globally diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds, there isn’t much reason to look or much need to trade.
But for the past week or so, I’ve been doing plenty of looking—and a little trading.
By the market close on Dec.

IT MIGHT SEEM RISKY to write about the gifts my kids will receive later today. Won’t that ruin the surprise? Probably not. My children and stepchildren aren’t, I suspect, regular HumbleDollar readers.
My wife and I tag-teamed on gifts this year. Her job was to find one or two items for each kid that we could wrap and throw under the tree. This works well, because she likes shopping—and I loathe it.