Christine Benz, host of The Long View, is a special guest on The Morning Filter this week. Find out whether it’s too late to invest in international stocks, who needs bonds, and what role dividend stocks should play in an investment portfolio.
Today on The Long View, we’re featuring an episode from another Morningstar podcast, The Morning Filter, which you can subscribe to on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Usually, Susan Dziubinski sits down every Monday morning with Morningstar’s chief U.S. market strategist Dave Sekera to talk about the week ahead.
But we’ve got something a bit different for you on the podcast this week. Instead of our usual deep dive into the market and stocks, we’re taking a step back to look at the big picture of investing: things like how to build a smart portfolio, avoid common investment mistakes, and time-tested principles to invest by.
Our special guest is Christine Benz. Christine is Morningstar’s director of personal finance and retirement planning. She’s also the host of The Long View podcast and author of the book How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful and Wealthy Retirement.
Episode highlights:
Read about topics from this episode.
Tune in to The Long View podcast.
Access Christine Benz’s article and video archive on Morningstar.com.
Order a copy of Christine’s book, How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful and Wealthy Retirement.
Register for the 2025 Bogleheads Conference.
Watch the How to Retire podcast, a companion podcast to the How to Retire book.
Follow Dave on social media.
Dave Sekera on X: @MstarMarkets
Dave Sekera on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davesekera
Susan Dziubinski: Hello, I’m Susan Dziubinski and welcome to a special episode of The Morning Filter podcast. Now, usually I sit down every Monday morning with Morningstar’s chief US Market strategist Dave Sekera to talk about the week ahead. But we’ve got something a bit different for you on the podcast this week.
Instead of our usual deep dive into the market and stocks, we’re taking a step back to look at the big picture of investing: things like how to build a smart portfolio, avoid common investment mistakes, and time-tested principles to invest by.
I’m pleased to be joined today by a special guest, my longtime colleague and friend Christine Benz. Christine is Morningstar’s director of personal finance and retirement planning. She’s also the host of The Long View podcast and author of the book How to Retire; 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful and Wealthy Retirement.
Christine and I are going to cover a lot of ground today from stocks to bonds, core investments to dividend payers, things you shouldn’t overlook in retirement, and whether the set-it-and-forget-it strategy is a good way to invest today.
Welcome to The Morning Filter, Christine.
Christine Benz: Well, Susan, it’s an honor to be here. I’m a little nervous about stepping into Dave’s shoes, but we’ll roll with it.
Dziubinski: We’re going to roll with it, and you’re going to be great. We appreciate your time. We really do. So let’s talk a little bit about the current stock market. Specifically, what are some of the biggest risks you think that investors are facing right now? We’re taping this beginning of August of 2025.
Benz: Well, I think the big one is complacency. When I think about investors in the US, we’ve had such an incredible run for US stocks. We’ve had a really nice snapback so far in 2025 after a little bit of scary times back in the spring. And it’s just been a phenomenal long-term run where, when we look at the 10- and 15-year returns from US stocks, they’re well above historical averages. And I think there’s a tendency to believe that it will ever be thus. In fact, there have been some people we really respect who have been kind of banging the drum for the virtues of long-term compounding. And of course that’s an important point. But my worry is that investors will lean a little bit too much into that and not think that they need anything else in their portfolios.
So I think that’s a risk, and the specific catalyst for some sort of downfall for US stocks or at least of a temporary stoppage to this party, I don’t know what it’ll be. It seems like the most likely prospect would be some sort of slowing economic growth. And we had a little bit of foreshadowing of that on Aug. 1 when we had that somewhat worrisome jobs report. There have been some news items about consumer spending that consumers are maybe starting to feel a little bit of the tariff pain. And so I would say that’s sort of the thing I would be worried the most about in terms of derailing US stocks great long-term run.
Dziubinski: Now, as we’re taping this, the stock market looks, according to Morningstar, about fairly valued right now. Given that, how should investors be thinking about their allocation to US stocks today?
Benz: I always like to bring it back to time horizon. So the age 50 to me is a really neat cutoff point where, if you’re over 50, I think you want to be realistic about derisking a portion of your portfolio. When we look at the data on when people retire, when they think they’ll retire relative to when they actually do retire, we see there’s a disconnect that oftentimes people are thinking they will hang on longer than they are able to do or want to do.
And so I think at age 50 you do want to start derisking your portfolio a little bit. Not altogether because you could have 45 or more years where you are still going to be wanting to grow that portfolio, but as you move into sort of your late 50s, early 60s I like the idea of building a bulwark of safer assets, probably high-quality short- and intermediate-term bonds, little bit of cash. That’s the main avenue I would advise for people at that age cohort. And then for younger people, I think derisking the portfolio isn’t something you should really have on your radar apart from whatever you have in your emergency fund or if you have short-term goals.
But there, I think globally diversifying that portfolio makes a ton of sense where maybe you’re looking at the global market capitalization and using that to guide how much you have in US versus non US stocks. US stocks have definitely been the path of least resistance. They’ve been very easy to own over the past decade-plus. But the global market cap today is roughly, I think it’s like 62% US, 38% non-US. It’s a rare investor who has that much in non-US stocks but I think that’s a pretty good benchmark, and most younger investors are probably underweight in non-US stocks.
Dziubinski: Let’s talk a little bit about international stocks because we’ve seen a bit of a revival in international stocks this year, and we’ve gotten questions from listeners to The Morning Filter about this very question, like, “Oh, did I miss the boat? Is it too late to start investing in international stocks?” How would you answer that question?
Benz: Well, first, a little bit of a mea culpa in that I was early in terms of banging the drum for non-US. I was probably doing so three or more years ago. I don’t know. Check the date. I and many other people who look at the market were early in recommending non-US stocks. But we have had a pretty good recovery. Amy Arnott recently wrote a piece looking at whether you’re too late to add international. The short answer is she concluded—probably not—and she pointed to a few key factors.
One is the valuation advantage is still there for non-US stocks. Dividend yields are higher for non-US stocks. She also points to the fact that these cycles have historically run not just a year but several years. The most recent reference point was 2002 through 2007. There were also longer run periods where non-US stocks outperformed US in the ’80s, in the ’90s. So it’s usually not just a one-year cycle and we’re done with it. That’s another reason.
And then, finally, Amy points to the dollar. The declining dollar has been a tailwind for non-US stocks. And if that persists, that will also be gas in the tank for non-US stocks. So a few things I think line up in favor of there still being room to add to non-US exposure today.
Dziubinski: Let’s talk a little bit about bonds. Of course, the market’s expecting that the Federal Reserve will act this year and cut interest rates once or twice. But even so, we’re still in a period of interest rates that are higher than they were for quite a long period of time. So given where interest rates are and even where they might be going through the end of the year, what does that mean for an investor’s bond allocation from your perspective?
Benz: Yeah, it’s very difficult to get investors to enthuse about bonds these days because, let’s face it, when you look at the long-run performance of core bond funds, it’s flat to even negative on a real return basis over the past 10 and 15 years. So there is not a lot to be enthusiastic about from a performance standpoint. But you’re absolutely right, Susan, that starting yields set you up for better returns from bonds going forward. So right now, the 10-year Treasury yield is like 4.2%.
It’s Aug. 6 as we’re taping this, and when we look at the returns from bonds, what we see is that the returns that follow pretty neatly correlate with whatever your starting yields are. And that’s especially true if you sort of build a laddered portfolio of bonds and lock it in. But the fact that bonds have been through a little bit of a dislocation recently actually sets up bond investors for better returns. It also provides a little bit of a buffer if bonds do have losses going forward. If bond prices fall, at least you have that higher yield to help offset those losses. So you shouldn’t have significant principal-related losses, I wouldn’t think.
And then it also just gives policymakers another tool in the toolkit in terms of managing the economy when yields were so low for so long. One of our former colleagues, I remember, described it as: The Fed has a family of four and a blanket for one. Basically, when yields are as low as they are, there’s no room to cut. Well, now that we’re at higher levels, if the Fed does determine that, “Well, it looks like the economy is weakening a little bit more rapidly than we would have hoped,” the Fed has some room to maneuver. So all of those things, I think, line up in favor of bonds. But again, it has been difficult to get investors to be believers, and it’s easy to see why.
Dziubinski: Now, talk a little bit about core investment holdings, Christine. You’ve been a proponent for a very long time of using mutual funds, ETFs, some sort of managed product at the core of an investment portfolio rather than buying individual stocks at the core. Why is that?
Benz: Well, a couple of key reasons, Susan. One is that it’s very simple to assemble an ultra low-cost portfolio of broad market index funds or exchange-traded funds. And then you don’t have to spend a lot of time on oversight. It’s pretty easy to see if you do need to do some rebalancing, you can quickly determine where the rebalancing should happen. And another thing, you know that I often work on retirement planning and think a lot about aging, and one thing we know is that as we age, we’re more likely to experience some diminishment in our cognitive functioning. And it only makes sense to try to simplify and streamline our portfolios as we age.
Then finally, the other key advantage to an index portfolio is that you’re not betting on active management. Because when we look at the data, and of course we have reams of data on the performance of active managers relative to index funds, it’s not a super-compelling picture, especially with respect to large-cap US equities. Active managers haven’t been able to add a lot of value. So as an investor I would kind of question my own ability to a) pick funds that will outperform or certainly build a basket of individual stocks that will outperform.
Dziubinski: So then how would you define maybe what a core stock fund or ETF holding might look like for someone who has a longer time horizon, is trying to build wealth over time?
Benz: Well, I think the total market indexes are a great representative of core holdings. So if you have a US total market and non-US total market, you have the whole world there. You’re also diversified by sector and style. So I think that’s kind of the starting point. You might have modest divergences relative to those benchmarks, but I think they’re pretty good starting points for people.
Dziubinski: What role do you think individual stocks can play in a portfolio? Obviously not the core, but can they be more satellite holdings? How would you suggest investors think about that?
Benz: Well, it’s interesting. We, in the past, would do these portfolio makeovers, and so I’d have an opportunity to peer into real investors’ portfolios. One thing I commonly noticed was that the individual stock portfolio was often quite duplicative of the fund portfolio. So when people go out and pick individual stocks, they often do gravitate to those companies that are already well represented in their mutual funds, especially in those total market index funds. So I wouldn’t do that because you are doubling down on exposure to the market’s biggest companies.
My bias would be to go off the beaten path a little bit. To the extent that I held individual companies, I would research them scrupulously. I would not own those largest names. And then I would also lean into what I would perceive as my advantages as a small investor. And the big one is my long time horizon. That sometimes active fund managers are very much feeling the pressure. If they own companies that are not performing well, they might get rid of them preemptively. As an individual stock investor, you don’t have to be bothered by the short-term pressures. Your superpower is your ability to be patient, your ability to lean into that long time horizon, if you have really done your homework and know those companies.
Dziubinski: Let’s talk a little bit about dividend stocks. They’re very popular with most of our readers on Morningstar.com. And they’re also very popular of course with retirees who often will use dividend stocks to generate income in retirement. Talk a little bit about what you think specifically of that strategy, of the role dividend stocks play in retirement income.
Benz: Well, I would say I get it, because the bird in the hand is very comforting. Once you are separated from your paycheck, the idea of having stable sources of income or semi-stable sources of income is very, very appealing. Then the other thing I would point to is that dividend-paying companies typically are more financially stable than non-dividend-paying companies. There is a sense of financial wherewithal that you get from a dividend-payer. And then when we look at the historical data, we also see that dividend-payers have historically been a little bit less volatile, especially in periods of economic weakness, than companies that do not pay dividends.
So those are some important factors lining up in favor of dividends. I can definitely see investors emphasizing dividend-payers in their equity portfolios, maybe going exclusively with dividend-payers, but I would augment them with some safer investments. Coming back to cash, coming back to a little bit in high-quality bonds.
And you’re protecting yourself in a few key scenarios. One would be that sort of market downturn if stocks are down and you have something else to pull your cash flows from in retirement, if you can pull from the cash or bonds, you can reinvest those dividends back into your dividend-payers when they’re arguably a little bit inexpensive. So that’s an advantage to having that safe buffer of assets.
And then it’s not unprecedented that even companies with really good track records of paying consistent dividends cut them. And kind of burned into my brain is that 2008 period, the global financial crisis, where banks, which had historically been a phenomenal source of long-run dividend payments, were forced to curtail their dividends during that period. So you want protection against an environment like that because in an environment like that, if you are a seller of your actual position, if you need to liquidate to meet your cash flow needs, that’s just not a position you want to be in, which is why I would come back to augmenting my portfolio with a complement of cash and high-quality short- and intermediate-term bonds.
Dziubinski: So then how would you recommend that investors think about the role of dividend stocks in their portfolio? Are there certain types of dividend stocks you think they should consider more so than other types?
Benz: Yeah, I love dividend growth strategies. So there are a couple of exchange-traded funds that are kind of my go-tos for dividend growth. Vanguard Dividend Appreciation VIG is a fund that I really like quite a bit. And one thing people will see when they look at these dividend growth strategies is typically you’re not getting a dividend yield that is much higher than the broad market. So, so much for the bird in the hand. But you are getting a very stable, high-quality basket of companies that does tend to be less volatile.
So I tend to like the dividend growers. That strategy appeals to me, but even there I would augment it with some non-dividend-growers, some non-dividend-payers, because we have market environments, and I think we’re living through one currently, where the non-dividend-payers perform very, very well. So the large-cap tech names, for example, would tend to be underrepresented in a dividend growth strategy. So I would hold kind of a total market index, which is giving me exposure to those types of companies, alongside the dividend strategy.
Dziubinski: Let’s talk a little bit about risk again. We led with that and I want to come back to it. What are some signs that an investor might be taking on too much risk or maybe playing it too safe with their allocations?
Benz: Well, again, I think it comes back to time horizon, Susan, and people can use age 50 as kind of a rough cutoff as to whether they should care about taking too much risk. I do sense that there’s a lot of complacency among older adults. They’ve had a great run in the stock market. And it’s kind of a perverse thing. As we age and we become more battle-tested in terms of the ups and downs, we feel more risk tolerant, but our actual capacity to absorb risk has gone down.
And the last significant sustained economic downturn, gosh, it’s 17 years ago. We were all 17 years younger at that point. Chances are it’s going to feel different to us if we do experience a sustained drawdown. I do think it makes sense to mentally prepare and to do that preemptively, to do a little bit of repositioning within your portfolio to give yourself a runway of safer assets.
Dziubinski: Talk a little bit—we hear a lot in the financial media talking about behavioral mistakes that investors make. Again, you’ve done portfolio makeovers, you do a lot of public speaking, you speak with investors all the time. What do you think are some of the mistakes that investors could be making, particularly when we’re in a bull market like the one we’ve been in, let’s be honest, for the past couple of years, despite some bobbles earlier this year.
Benz: Right. So it’s that recency, that tendency to want to believe that whatever we’ve seen in the market will continue to persist, and then another one is kind of crowding in whatever has been the hot part of the market. So the AI-related companies, for example, the Big Tech names at the top of the index, I think there’s a tendency to just want to believe that their returns will continue to be phenomenal—and they may be long-run great companies to own, but you do need to be prepared for periodic downdrafts in those companies. And by all accounts, the AI companies are a higher-quality basket of companies than the last period that we had, the late ’90s period of pets.com etc. This is a better group of companies, real companies, but nonetheless I think you want to protect yourself and you don’t want to be huddled in those companies at the expense of everything else.
Dziubinski: What tips would you have for investors who maybe have a little struggle keeping their emotions in check when investing either when the market’s going up, market’s going down, whatever. Are these investors who really should adopt that set it in, forget it mentality? Is that still valid today?
Benz: Well, for most investors I would say you want to keep in mind the idea that your portfolio is like a bar of soap, and the more you touch it, the smaller it’s going to get. And that’s not my creation, but I love that metaphor—try to keep your hands off of your portfolio. And this is not self-serving for Morningstar, but I happen to believe that a good once annual review of a portfolio is plenty. You might pay attention to some of the performance going on in the market. And of course we all live and work in the economy, so it’s hard to tune that out.
But to the extent that you are making changes in your portfolio, try to use some kind of an investment policy statement to guide the changes that you make. Do a once annual review where you’re looking at performance. You’re looking at whether rebalancing is in order, you’re looking at whether any tax planning maneuvers might make sense, whether charitable giving or donating appreciated securities. But I think that can be accomplished in a good once annual review. And not spending too much time monkeying around is probably going to redound to the benefit of the long-term portfolio and plan.
Dziubinski: So let’s pivot and talk a little bit about your podcast, The Long View. Fill in The Morning Filter’s audience, what the podcast is about, and some of the topics that you’ll typically talk about.
Benz: Well, The Morning Filter has been a runaway success and you all focus on the markets and the economy squarely. That’s your focus every week. And we do focus a little bit on those topics or maybe a lot on those topics. But we also try to spend time on personal finance, leveraging outside experts. So we interview a few people inside Morningstar, but mainly outside experts on how to manage our portfolio, how to navigate situations like long-term care and planning for it, healthcare considerations. Retirement planning is a recurrent evergreen theme for us because that’s something that I work on and think a lot about. So we’ll be a little more in the personal realm in terms of helping people think about how to manage their portfolios and their total plans.
Dziubinski: Now The Long View’s been on the air for six years, right?
Benz: Yes.
Dziubinski: Whoo. During that time, what have been maybe a couple of your favorite interviews and why?
Benz: Well, speaking of recency bias, I just talked to Carl Richards yesterday, and he’s one of my favorites, mainly because he keeps beating the drum for what’s it all for, that we’re not just looking for the biggest number in our portfolio. We want to be thinking about our goals, what we’re trying to achieve on this earth. And he just comes back to that again and again.
J.L. Collins is another person I always love talking to. He is the author of a book called A Simple Path to Wealth, and his message is that simplicity is your friend. And of course I agree with that message. The more I know, the more I believe that we should be pretty simple with respect to our portfolios.
And then a conversation that was probably four years ago that stands out as one of my favorites was with Laura Carstensen, who’s head of the Stanford Center on Longevity. And she has focused a lot on relationships in her work on longevity and aging. And it turns out that wealth actually doesn’t matter that much in terms of our sense of our success in life. What matters is who loves us, who we love. And I think that that is just an evergreen message that is well worth remembering—that it really doesn’t matter your level of wealth as long as you have those things.
Dziubinski: Now, how did your experience with The Long View influence your book, which published last year, How to Retire?
Benz: Well, it definitely helped me find the stable of experts that I interviewed for the book. So there were 19 interviews with external folks in the book and then you interviewed me for one of the chapters and it helped me identify who I wanted to help address various topics. I knew I wanted Mike Piper on tax planning because he’s super clear. Mary Beth Franklin has been my go-to on Social Security planning. So it helped me put together that stable, that dream team of people that I leaned on for the book. And then it also, I think, helped me become a better interviewer myself. It helped me figure out how I wanted to address these interviews to help get good answers out of the people I was talking to.
Dziubinski: And the book is wonderful.
Benz: Thank you. Thanks for your help with it.
Dziubinski: One of the things that strikes me, and that’s really impressive about the book, is just how holistic it is. It feels like there was no topic that was not discussed related to retirement in this book. And I’ll be honest, topics that I had never thought about. So what would you say, given the experience with the book, might be a few of those retirement topics that you ended up talking about in the book, interviewing people about in the book, that maybe aren’t discussed as much and should be?
Benz: Well, in the realm of money, I think we tend to gravitate directly to what should my retirement portfolio look like, how big should it be, and how much can I spend from it? And those are certainly important considerations. But in a way by focusing on those things, we’re kind of joining the movie already in progress. We should take a couple steps back.
In the years leading up to retirement, spend some time tracking your spending. I don’t want to do this myself, but I will do this. Spend some time really tracking a budget and then look forward 10 years into retirement. Try to build out a budget for your first 10 years where you’re forecasting your known knowns and your known unknowns like roof repairs or roof replacement, new car replacement, and so forth. Maybe big fun trips that you have planned with the family. Try to plot those on a calendar for the first 10 years of your retirement. That’ll give you some clarity into your actual retirement spending.
And then try to look to nonportfolio income sources. Social Security is the biggie for most of us. Some people may want to consider an annuity. A shrinking share of us will be bringing a pension into retirement. But you want to try to maximize those nonportfolio income sources, and then everything gets easier with the whole plan in terms of structuring it, figuring out your withdrawals, and so forth. So that’s my main money diatribe from the book. And there’s a lot in the book about how to do those things.
In terms of nonfinancial considerations, I have to say, I’m one of these people who has underrated all of the nonfinancial considerations that should precede the decision about whether and when to retire. So I think we all have to understand—love them or hate them, our jobs probably are bringing us some sense of purpose, maybe a sense of identity, certainly a sense of relationships and regular social connections, some physical activity for many of us if we’re commuting or whatever. So take stock of those things and be preemptive about replacing them before you show up in retirement. You do want to kind of have a plan for those things before you actually retire.
And finally, I would urge people to read Jordan Grumet’s chapter, which is the last chapter of the book. Jordan is a hospice doctor, and I remember my husband was like, “Seriously, you want to interview a hospice doctor for your last chapter?” But the chapter is super-uplifting because Jordan talks and a lot of his work relates to purpose. And he makes the point that many people have purpose anxiety. We have this sense that, “Oh, I need to climb Everest or write a book or start a foundation” or something like that. “Big P Purpose,” he calls it. And his point is maybe you do those things, but maybe you just do some smaller P purpose things that you really love, whether it’s cooking a great dinner every night for your family or reconnecting with some childhood hobby that you left behind. So to me, that’s kind of a comforting message—that maybe you can let your brain percolate on what big P purpose might be. But in the meantime, keep yourself busy and have some fun with the small PE purposes.
Dziubinski: That was a chapter that really stood out to me. It was very freeing reading it, to be honest with you. It just sort of takes this weight that we just seem to put on ourselves with retirement that honestly doesn’t make a ton of sense. So, yeah, that was a very special chapter. So the book published last September, Christine. What’s next?
Benz: Well, I do have in mind another retirement-related book, probably one that would be just from me about some of the things that I’ve worked on in retirement over the years. We’re working on our retirement spending research, which is something that we revisit annually, and we’re always coming up with new bells and whistles that we plan to incorporate into the research.
I’ve gotten obsessed with the topic of long-term care, partly born out of my own family’s story with long-term care, but also realizing that this is kind of the elephant in the room for a lot of older adults, especially affluent ones who have portfolios but are worried that maybe they can’t handle a big balloon payment at the end of their lives. So I’ve been writing and researching long-term care and how to best address that risk.
And then I have some side projects. My unpaid part-time job as president of the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy keeps me busy, too.
Dziubinski: Talk a little bit about the Bogle foundation. Of course, for those who are unfamiliar, Jack Bogle passed away a few years ago. He was the founder of Vanguard, really got the index fund running and off the ground. Very outspoken about investing during his entire career. How’d you get involved with the group?
Benz: Well, I think it was just that I started going to the Bogleheads conference to interview Jack annually and it became a little bit of an annual ritual for us, which was one of the great privileges of my career, the opportunity to meet him, and get to know him a bit, and even call him a friend.
And then I just came to love the Bogleheads community. Of course, they have the forum, thebogleheads.org forum, and this annual conference that we put on and Boglehead’s books. It’s just a wonderful community of people who are similarly focused on simple, low-cost investing and kind of simplifying other aspects of your financial life as well.
Dziubinski: Now, I attended a Bogleheads conference in Chicago a few years ago, and it was a wonderful experience because not just for the great speakers that were there, but to meet these investors who I’ve followed for years. They started actually on Morningstar.com 20 some years ago.
Benz: Right.
Dziubinski: So to meet them, to hear their stories, to listen to how they think about investing was a great experience. I really enjoyed it. And there is a Bogleheads conference coming up in fall?
Benz: That’s right. Oct. 17 through 19 in San Antonio. We’re almost pretty close to sold out, but we have just a dream team of speakers. Susan, thank you for mentioning it. Ed Slott will be there. People Morningstar viewers love. We love it. He’ll be there. Salim Ramji, who’s Vanguard CEO, will be there, and Ron Lieber will be there as well, The New York Times money columnist. And he’ll be talking about college funding. So we have a great lineup. And then the Boglehead’s regulars, of course. Bill Bernstein is going to be there. John Rekenthaler plans to be there. So yeah, it’ll be a fun event.
Dziubinski: Well, that’s great. All right, so we’re going to wrap up, Christine, with a couple of rapid fire questions about investing. Now this isn’t something I typically do, so if this works well, I might spring it on Dave. So, let’s start out with: What’s one investing role that investors should never break?
Benz: Have a goal. I think too many times we just start amassing assets, accumulating investments without that clear goal in mind. So always have a goal, never invest without a goal in mind.
Dziubinski: All right. What one investing rule do you break? You personally break even though you know you shouldn’t.
Benz: Well, a couple I’ll share. One is that I’m underweight bonds. My husband and I are underweight bonds. We are busily trying to accumulate bonds in line with our ages, and I think all of our new contributions are going into bonds these days. And then we have perennially held too much cash just because bonuses pile up, whatever. And it never feels like a great time to invest. Don’t do that. It’s something I do, but don’t do that.
Dziubinski: What one book or podcast are you recommending to investors today? Well, a book called The Best of Jonathan Clements came out earlier this year. This is a compendium of The Wall Street Journal columns from Jonathan Clements, who wrote this wonderful Getting Going column for many years. Jonathan is kind of a seminal figure in my own career trajectory as well as in the Bogleheads community. So Bill Bernstein, Jason Zweig, Alan Roth, and I spent some time curating Jonathan’s columns. He actually did the first pass on his favorite columns.
Jonathan has been dealing with terminal cancer diagnosis. He is writing and blogging about his experience, which has been incredibly valuable and moving. But for people who want to buy this book, which holds up remarkably well, all the proceeds are going to a charity that we are standing up in Jonathan’s name to benefit Roth IRAs for young working adults. And that was kind of Jonathan’s vision. So if you buy the book, you get some wisdom in its pages and your dollars will all go to charity.
Dziubinski: That’s wonderful. All right. Lastly, what is the most overrated investing concept that you wish would go away?
Benz: Well, it’s a bit of a contrarian take, but I feel like the financial-services industry frankly overdoes this sense that investors are always going to be the dumb money, making decisions that undermine their own finances. And I think it’s a little bit self-serving on the part of the industry that there’s this sense that, “Oh, you will always need us to help address this issue that you keep making.” When we look at the data, yes, we see that. We have our investor return/mind the gap data. We definitely see the ill-timed purchases and sales, but a little less, I think, than the industry makes it out to seem.
Inertia is the biggest behavioral force by far, and I have exhibited this in my own financial life. So I think the thing about inertia is that oftentimes that’s pretty good. That policy of what Warren Buffett calls “benign neglect” is a pretty good investment strategy a lot of the time. And so I think we overdo this thesis that investors are always their worst enemies. Sometimes they’re not.
Dziubinski: Christine, this was such a joy. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today. I really appreciate it.
Benz: Thank you for asking, Susan. It was a lot of fun.
Dziubinski: Absolutely. Well, that’s it for this week’s episode of The Morning Filter. Dave and I hope you’ll join us next Monday at 9 a.m. Eastern, 8 a.m. Central. In the meantime, please like this episode and subscribe and have a great week.