Updated: February 23, 2020
Jonathan Clements, author of “From Here to Financial Happiness” and “How to Think About Money,” and editor of HumbleDollar.com., is the former personal-finance columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He has devoted his entire adult life to learning about money.
That might sound like cruel-and-unusual punishment, but he has mostly enjoyed it. For more than three decades, he has spent his days perusing the business pages, reading finance books, scanning academic studies and talking to countless folks about their finances.
Yet, despite this intense financial education, it took him a decade or more to learn many of life’s most important money lessons and, indeed, some key insights have only come to him in recent years.
Here are 10 things he wished he’d been told in his 20s—or told more loudly, so he actually listened:
— Read on www.marketwatch.com/story/10-money-lessons-i-wish-id-listened-to-when-i-was-younger-2020-02-12
1. A small home is the key to a big portfolio. Financially, it turned out to be one of the smartest things he had ever done, because it allowed him to save great gobs of money. That’s clear to him in retrospect. But he wished he’d known it was a smart move at the time, because he wouldn’t have wasted so many hours wondering whether he should have bought a larger place.
2. Debts are negative bonds. From his first month as a homeowner, he sent in extra money with his mortgage payment, so he could pay off the loan more quickly. But it was only later that he came to view his mortgage as a negative bond—one that was costing him dearly. Indeed, paying off debt almost always garners a higher after-tax return than you can earn by investing in high-quality bonds.
3. Watching the market and your portfolio doesn’t improve performance. This has been another huge time waster. It’s a bad habit he belatedly trying to break.
4. Thirty years from now, you’ll wish you’d invested more in stocks. Yes, over five or even 10 years, there’s some chance you’ll lose money in the stock market. But over 30 years? It’s highly likely you’ll notch handsome gains, especially if you’re broadly diversified and regularly adding new money to your portfolio in good times and bad.
5. Nobody knows squat about short-term investment performance. One of the downsides of following the financial news is that you hear all kinds of smart, articulate experts offering eloquent predictions of plummeting share prices and skyrocketing interest rates that—needless to say—turn out to be hopelessly, pathetically wrong. In his early days as an investor, this was, alas, the sort of garbage that would give him pause.
6. Put retirement first. Buying a house or sending your kids to college shouldn’t be your top goal. Instead, retirement should be. It’s so expensive to retire that, if you don’t save at least a modest sum in your 20s, the math quickly becomes awfully tough—and you’ll need a huge savings rate to amass the nest egg you need.
7. You’ll end up treasuring almost nothing you buy. Over the years, he had had fleeting desires for all kinds of material goods. Most of the stuff he purchased has since been thrown away. This is an area where millennials seem far wiser than us baby boomers. They’re much more focused on experiences than possessions—a wise use of money, says happiness research.
8. Work is so much more enjoyable when you work for yourself. These days, he earn just a fraction of what he made during my six years on Wall Street, but he is having so much more fun. No meetings to attend. No employee reviews. No worries about getting to the office on time or leaving too early. he is working harder today than he ever have. But it doesn’t feel like work—because it’s his choice and it’s work he is passionate about.
9. Will our future self approve? As we make decisions today, he think this is a hugely powerful question to ask—and yet it’s only in recent years that he had learned to ask it.
When we opt not to save today, we’re expecting our future self to make up the shortfall. When we take on debt, we’re expecting our future self to repay the money borrowed. When we buy things today of lasting value, we’re expecting our future self to like what we purchase.
Pondering our future self doesn’t just improve financial decisions. It can also help us to make smarter choices about eating, drinking, exercising and more.
10. Relax, things will work out. As he watch his son, daughter and son-in-law wrestle with early adult life, he glimpse some of the anxiety that he suffered in my 20s and 30s.
When you’re starting out, there’s so much uncertainty — what sort of career you’ll have, how financial markets will perform, what misfortunes will befall you. And there will be misfortunes. he’d had my fair share.
But if you regularly take the right steps—work hard, save part of every paycheck, resist the siren song of get-rich-quick schemes—good things should happen. It isn’t guaranteed. But it’s highly likely. So, for goodness’ sake, fret less about the distant future, and focus more on doing the right things each and every day.
You can follow Jonathan Clements on Twitter @ClementsMoney and on Facebook at Jonathan Clements Money Guide.
