Farewell Friends – HumbleDollar

If this post is appearing, it means I’ve succumbed to cancer or one of its side effects. Please don’t feel sad for me. I’ve had a life filled with love, great experiences and wonderful career opportunities. Despite my demise at a relatively young age, I consider myself beyond fortunate.

I’m hoping that, under the tree in front of our little Philadelphia rowhome, my wife Elaine will place a stone tablet inscribed with my name, and the year I was born and died. Underneath, I’d like the tablet to read:

Family • Readers • Words

(Note to Elaine: If you ever move, feel free to take the tablet with you.)

Family is everybody who’s brought love into my life: Elaine, my two children, my larger family, my close friends. Meanwhile, readers have been those I’ve served, and who rewarded that service with so much loyalty and affection. Finally, words have been my playground, taking the insights I’ve garnered and trying to make them understandable to others. Beside the tree are two metal chairs. I hope family and passersby will occasionally stop by, and fill me in on what I’ve been missing.

I’ve asked Elaine to arrange a memorial service at St Peter’s Church in Philadelphia’s Old City. She’ll post the time and date to the Forum when the details have been worked out.

Regular readers will know much of my life’s story. But I figure it’s appropriate to offer a not-so-brief recap.

I was born at 14 St Margarets Drive in Twickenham, London, on Jan. 2, 1963. At that time in the UK, it was standard practice for mothers to give birth in the hospital if it was their first child—or, in my mother’s case, her first two children. My older brothers, who are identical twins, had been born two years earlier. Because that first delivery went smoothly, my birth would be at home. From what I gather, the midwife took cigarette and scotch breaks with my father during lulls in the action. I was born at 6 a.m., thus establishing a lifetime habit of starting early.

In 1966, my father left financial journalism for a job at the World Bank, and we moved from London to Washington, DC. Two years later, my younger sister was born. In late 1972, my father was posted to the World Bank’s Bangladesh office for four years, and I was dispatched to boarding school in England, joining my two brothers.

After the comforts of a U.S. suburban childhood, it was a brutal change—cold dormitories, disgusting food, endless bullying—and I carried the scars for the rest of my life. But there was a silver lining: After nine years of boarding school, I squeaked into Cambridge University, where I spent much of my three years writing for and editing the student newspaper.

When I graduated Cambridge in 1985, the UK economy was in rough shape and landing a job was difficult. I ended up working for Euromoney magazine in London. Initially, all went well. But then there was a change in editor and, for reasons I never understood, the new editor took an instant dislike to me and made it clear he wanted me gone. But by then, I’d already decided to leave London and return to the U.S.

My then-fiancee and I flew to New York in August 1986. After a desperate scramble, I landed a job as a reporter—read “fact checker”—at Forbes magazine. The pay was miserable, but I couldn’t have been more grateful for that first paycheck. By then, all I had to my name was credit card debt.

Molly and I were married the following June, and Hannah arrived 15 months later. Her younger brother, Henry, would follow in 1992.

After 23 months as a fact checker, I was promoted to staff writer at Forbes, covering mutual funds. The Wall Street Journal, which was also in need of a funds reporter, came calling 16 months later. I’d always thought I’d never be a real journalist until I worked for a daily newspaper, and yet initially I said no.

At the time, I was in the midst of six months as a single parent, looking after Hannah on my own while Molly was in Syria, Greece and Turkey conducting research for her PhD. Still, the Journal wasn’t deterred, saying it would make allowances during my initial months.

In the early 1990s, the Journal was very different from the newspaper it is today. No photos, just the dot drawings for which the paper was renowned. While strong opinions could be found on the editorial page, they were to be avoided in the news pages. The sort of advice journalism I favored was frowned upon by some among the paper’s senior ranks.

Still, in 1994, Managing Editor Paul Steiger said he’d consider a few columnists for the Journal’s news pages. At age 31, and with some trepidation, I put up my hand. Thus was born the Getting Going column, which I wrote for the next 13-plus years, penning 1,009 columns for both The Wall Street Journal and Wall Street Journal Sunday. The latter were branded pages that appeared in some 70 newspapers around the country.

In retrospect, it’s astonishing that I was given my own column at such a young age. It took me a few months to hit my stride, but I was soon pounding away at the virtues of index funds, while also exploring new topics, often scouring academic research for insights I could share with readers.

The decade and a half that followed are something of a blur. I was cranking out columns, commuting into New York City from the New Jersey suburbs, and raising two children. In my memory, the years have the monotony of a hamster wheel. But that wasn’t the reality: There were high points and low points, plus the joy of watching Hannah and Henry grow up. The low points included the World Trade Center attack, my father’s death and a libel suit brought against the Journal. I’d been involved in editing the story that triggered the lawsuit.

In early 1995, while in Pittsburgh, I went on a nine-mile run with my brother-in-law, who was training for the city’s marathon. I’d long viewed running those 26.2 miles as a heroic endeavor. I committed to returning for the next year’s marathon. But I didn’t simply want to complete the distance. Instead, I set a goal of finishing in under three hours. I managed it, though barely, crossing the finish line 24 seconds under the three-hour mark.

I ran countless road races over the next dozen years. I had my greatest success with half-marathons, finishing third in the four races I ran on land—and first in the 2001 half-marathon held on the deck of a boat floating off Antarctica. In shorter races, from one mile to 10, I also managed perhaps a dozen first-place finishes. What about the tearful, wimpy English schoolboy who had previously shunned athletic endeavors? Over countless miles, I managed to leave him behind.

Career and athletic success were not, alas, rivaled by relationship success. Molly announced she wanted a divorce in 1998. It would be the first of two failed marriages—not an achievement I’m proud of. But the third time was a charm. In the midst of the pandemic, Elaine and I met in August 2020, the month my second marriage officially ended. We were living together by the end of the month and married almost four years later, in May 2024, five days after my cancer diagnosis. I met Elaine during one of my life’s roughest periods, and was so lucky to have done so. Elaine, I fear, was not so fortunate, for now she must navigate the world on her own.

By 2006 or so, I’d started to tire of the Getting Going column, and began casting around for what to do next. I had a few conversations with potential employers, but those came to naught. Then, one day in early 2008, my phone rang. It was Andy Seig from Citigroup. He was heading up a startup within Citi known as myFi, which was aiming to deliver advice on a client’s entire financial life in return for a flat monthly fee. It was, I imagined, the exit from the Journal I was looking for.

I joined myFi that spring, and it soon became apparent that launching a startup in the middle of a huge corporate bureaucracy was a foolhardy endeavor. Layered on top of that was the financial crisis that unfolded through the year. By mid-2009, myFi was dead, and we employees spent a long, aimless summer trying to figure out what was next.

Next turned out to be a new wealth management operation cobbled together by combining myFi’s remaining employees, who had been hired to launch an innovative new financial service, and the old school brokers who sat in Citi’s bank branches. It wasn’t exactly a match made in heaven.

I toughed it out at Citi until spring 2014. Money was undoubtedly part of the reason. I was making more than $300,000 a year, a gaudy sum for a onetime ink-stained wretch. And the job wasn’t without interest. As director of financial education for the U.S. wealth management business, I gave more than 30 speeches in some years—forcing me to overcome my fear of public speaking—and I was dealing with financial topics I’d rarely written about as a journalist, while also learning about the investment business from the inside. Still, I was also frustrated by the nit-picky oversight of lawyers and compliance officers, and vowed to leave.

For a year, I planned my departure, getting my finances in order and setting in motion some work projects for my life after Citi. I waited until I got my final year-end bonus in early 2014, and then handed in my notice.

What followed was a period I came to call my second childhood. Initially, that meant a 15-month return to The Wall Street Journal as a freelance columnist—I left when my editor got ousted during a round of layoffs in 2015—and also working on two annual editions of the Jonathan Clements Money Guide. That guide eventually became the core of HumbleDollar, which I launched on Dec. 31, 2016.

The two printed editions of the money guide were among the nine books I wrote over my career—eight personal finance books and a novel. I also edited two books, including My Money Journey, a compilation of 30 essays by HumbleDollar writers, and contributed essays to  a fistful of other tomes, including penning the foreword to two Bill Bernstein books. None of the books I authored was a huge success. But my favorite, and the one with the best sales, was my 2016 book, How to Think About Money.

In 2016, I was also contacted by Peter Mallouk, president of fast-growing Creative Planning, a registered investment advisor that favored index funds and sought to help clients with their entire financial life. As at Citi, I was again given the title of director of financial education, though I remained an independent contractor and worked limited hours for Creative. Still, for me, it proved to be one of my career’s most enjoyable professional relationships. Peter was great to work with, and together we hosted a monthly podcast that ran for the rest of my life.

By May 2024, I’d been living in Philadelphia for more than three years, I was engaged to Elaine and living just an eight-minute walk from my daughter, son-in-law and two grandsons. The youngest was born that month. Elaine and I were talking about retirement, trying to figure out how we could travel more and have more time for each other, even as I kept HumbleDollar humming along.

And then I got my cancer diagnosis.

The period immediately after was astonishingly busy, as I tried to get my affairs in order and prep HumbleDollar for a life without me, even as my diagnosis triggered a surprising amount of media attention. The New York Times wrote about my illness, I was interviewed for Consuelo Mack’s WealthTrack, and I was asked to pen articles for The Washington Post, The Telegraph of London, The Wall Street Journal and AARP magazine. Who knew that candor about one’s own death would generate so much interest? It was an odd bookend to a life spent partly in the public eye—one that had previously been most notable for pounding the table for index funds.

I faced the final months not with sorrow, but with great gratitude. I had spent almost my entire adult life doing what I love and surrounded by those that I love. Who could ask for more?