Most of us will live an amazingly long life and should not worry so much about dying young.
Those are the words of Jonathan Clements, 61, who wrote more than 1,000 personal finance columns for The Wall Street Journal between 1994 and 2015. Plan on living past 90 and save accordingly, he advised, when he wasn’t running marathons or riding bicycles.
In May, he saw a doctor about some balance issues. Two days later, he received a devastating cancer diagnosis. Scans revealed a golf-ball-size tumor on his lung, and the disease has spread to his brain, his liver and elsewhere.
Anything beyond 12 decent months would be a victory. “I’m definitely on the clock here,” he said as we sat at his kitchen table this week.
Asking Mr. Clements whether he wishes to take any of his advice back might seem like the height of callousness, but he doesn’t shy away from much. He has already turned his horrible luck into crisp prose, filled with bold-font takeaways on his website, humbledollar.com.
He regrets very little. I wanted to know why.
Mr. Clements once described himself as a professional nag. To devoted readers like me, however, who hung on every word and did what we were told, he was a patron saint of fiscal prudence. (He and I were also Wall Street Journal colleagues from 2002 to 2007, though I felt sheepish about my occasional incursions onto his journalistic turf and did not try to befriend him then.)
His longevity planning instructions to readers included three components: First, save as much as you reasonably can and do it as soon as possible, so that compound interest can work in your favor for a very long time. Second, avoid taking Social Security before age 70, so the larger payment from that age onward can help you if you hit your 90s.
Third, give strong consideration to immediate fixed annuities, where you turn over, say, $100,000 in exchange for a monthly check for the rest of your life. Then, use those payments plus Social Security and any pension to cover basic living costs. Once you take care of housing, food and other essentials with those guaranteed payouts, you can spend the rest on yourself. Or, invest it aggressively (given that you don’t need to worry about covering those monthly expenses) and have a lot left over for your heirs.
Even on a journalist’s salary, Mr. Clements managed to follow the savings part of the blueprint. After 23 years in the trade, Mr. Clements took a job at Citibank in 2008 and doubled his income for the six years he was there. In some years during his career, he saved about 30 percent of what he made.
Marrying also helped, since the mother of his two children is an academic whose job offered partial tuition benefits. Divorce may have, too, even though he still spent plenty on his kids. “I got to call the shots,” he said. “I got to be as frugal or lavish as I wanted.”
Indeed, aside from one obvious contributing component — having had two full-time employers with excellent benefits, something too many people lack through no fault of their own — the biggest factor in Mr. Clements’s success as a retirement saver was his modest living.
“I spent years in a house that cost far less than what I could afford,” he said. “Those initial decades in a mediocre house in the New Jersey suburbs is what set me up.”
As for Parts 2 and 3 of his longevity plan, well, he most likely won’t reach that part of the manual. He couldn’t take Social Security until next year even if he wanted to, and he wasn’t planning on buying annuities until later anyway.
Because you often don’t get your money back from an annuity provider when you exchange a lump sum for a monthly check, the money that he didn’t spend on annuities will now benefit his heirs, including his current wife. So will everything else in his retirement accounts.
For a column in 2004 about frugality, Mr. Clements spoke to a financial adviser named Jonathan Guyton. “I wouldn’t want to be the financial planner who has to look an 85-year-old client in the eye and explain why he has so much money and why he’s had so little fun,” Mr. Guyton told him.
When Mr. Clements and I met, I turned the question back on him: Had he, perhaps, been much too kind to his future self all along? I didn’t think he’d say yes. There was art he loves on the wall in the next room and a $3,500 bicycle in the basement, set up on a trainer since his doctors don’t want him on the streets anymore.
Indeed, to the Jonathan Guytons of the world, he offers research from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, showing that the biggest difference between people with high and low levels of financial well-being is their savings and ability to absorb an unexpected expense.
“I haven’t worried about money in more than 20 years,” Mr. Clements said. “The No. 1 thing money can do for us is to give us a sense of financial security, and the way it does that is not to spend it and to hang onto it.”
Nor is he lacking in fun. In the near future, there are trips to Ireland, Paris, the Poconos and England, for his son’s wedding, even as doctors bombard him with medication, radiation and chemotherapy. Besides, he has his own, expansive view of the term.
“What I really like doing is getting up, pouring a cup of coffee, doing some writing and editing, exercising and eating well, having a glass of wine,” he said. “This is what I’ve enjoyed doing for decades, and I can’t think of a better way to spend the time that I have left.”