He spent 40 years teaching us how to save, invest, and spend wisely. His final personal finance lesson was about what money can't buy.
There are people who change the way you think about money. And then there are people who change the way you think about life, and do it through the lens of money. Jonathan Clements was one of those people.
The former Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist and founder of Humble Dollar passed away in September 2025, leaving behind a final book, Money and Me: How to Make Your Finances Work Harder for You and Your Family. His dear friend and fellow Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig, who wrote the foreword, recently joined Jean Chatzky on the HerMoney podcast to reflect on his legacy and the lessons he left behind for all of us.
His Personal Finance Philosophy Was Remarkably Simple
In a world of fintok influencers and prediction markets, Jonathan Clements believed that the best personal finance strategy was also the simplest one. According to Zweig, his investing philosophy could be boiled down to a single sentence.
“Buy and hold a handful of low-cost index funds for the rest of your life,” Zweig said, “and maybe rebalance once a year, or if you have a major life event that justifies it, or the markets move dramatically. But otherwise, don’t do anything. Just dollar cost average — keep adding more money every month — and take the time that you save and, of course, the money that you save by not making bad investments, and use it to improve your life elsewhere instead of wasting it on the latest hot fund or prediction markets or whatever other gambling temptation comes along next.”
It’s a philosophy Clements had been championing for decades. “He was pounding the table for index funds,” Zweig noted, “and he did that for almost 40 years.”
What Money Is Really For
In his final year, Jonathan Clements turned his considerable intellect toward a question that had motivated him for the last two decades of his career: what is money actually for?
“The topic that motivated him the most was the interaction between money and happiness,” Zweig explained. “Jonathan’s diagnosis really hammered it home for him, and in the last year of his life, he thought constantly about, ‘What is all this for? What’s the point of having money? What’s the meaning of it?'”
Clements landed on three central lessons:
The first: having enough money gives you freedom from worry. “If you’re measuring your house against the other houses on your block, or you’re measuring your paycheck against your fellow workers, then there’s no amount of money that is going to make you happy if that’s your attitude. You have to get that social comparison under control,” Zweig said.
The second lesson was about how to spend. “Spending money to create experiences is really, really important,” Zweig said. “Instead of spending on possessions — the bigger house, the bigger car, the new kitchen, the new bathroom, all of which are nice, but all of which you’ll also adapt to and eventually find yourself bored with or jaded by — instead create experiences with the people you love. Flowers, feasts, vacations, family reunions, things like that.”
The third lesson was perhaps the most profound. “Using your money to create meaning,” Zweig said. “Think of the things or the causes that you really value in your life; the environment, politics, your church, your synagogue, your mosque. Whatever is larger than you that you care about, you should get involved with and contribute both money and time.”
Jonathan Clements Legacy: Family. Readers. Words.
In his final chapter, Jonathan Clements described wanting a stone tablet placed outside his Philadelphia home, inscribed with just three words: Family. Readers. Words.
When Zweig would visit him in Philadelphia, the two old friends would do what Jonathan loved most. “We went out for these long lunches,” Zweig recalled, “and just had a fabulous time walking around downtown Philadelphia, going to the museums, having a nice lunch. He made sure that he made time for me and for other dear longtime friends to visit him. And it always revolved around food and art or music.”
“He was essentially saying, ‘I can’t take [my money] with me, so let’s have some fun.’” Zweig said. “And it meant a lot to him, but frankly, it probably meant even more to us.”
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