Five pearls of wisdom from a financial writing legend

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.

- Ron Lieber

A UK native with a dry wit and a sharp tongue for fools who chased stock market fads, 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,’ 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.

“T think this is nonsense,’ he wrote. “In fact, I think just the opposite is true.”