Your Money Map Replay: The Investing Mistakes You’re Probably Making, And How To Stop
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Hey everyone, it's Jean Chatzky. We have had so many new listeners join us lately, and I just wanted to take a sec to say welcome. Before we dive into today's episode, let me just take a moment to reintroduce myself.

I am a longtime personal finance journalist. You might remember me from my 25 years on the Today Show. And I started this podcast back in 2016 with one goal, to help women take control of our money and build the financial lives that we deserve.

Whether you are budgeting, investing, negotiating a raise, or just looking to make some smarter financial choices, you're in the right place. And if you're ready to go even deeper, I've got two fantastic programs. Finance Fix is my hands-on budgeting course. And Investing Fix is the investing club I run with Karen Feinerman from CNBC that's designed everything.

just for women. You can find out more about these programs at financefix.com and investingfix.com. And by the way, we spell fix with two X's. We are so glad you're here. Now let's get into the show.

But think about how many tens of thousands of people are out there opining on everything. Most of the time we forget, hey, they don't know who I am. They don't know what tax bracket I'm in. They don't know what state I live in. They certainly don't know what my financial goals are or what my plans are. What have I saved so far? And what am I hoping to use this money for? Is their advice really geared to me?

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Her Money. I'm Jean Chatzky. Today, we are talking about investing. And I know it is a topic that many of you cannot get enough of these days, but we're not talking about it in the way that you might expect. You might have picked up a book or maybe a dozen books on how to become a better investor. But has the advice in those books moved you any closer to becoming the next Warren Buffett, my

My guess is probably not. My guest today, Barry Ritholtz, is an author, columnist, and host of the wildly popular Masters in Business Bloomberg Radio podcast. He's also Chairman and Chief Investment Officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management. He recently joined me on Your Money Map, which is a show I host for the Alliance for Lifetime Income, to talk about his new book, which is called How Natural

not to invest, the ideas, numbers, and behaviors that destroy wealth and how to avoid them. So keep listening and be sure to check out the amazing work being done by our friends at the ALI at protectedincome.org. Here's my conversation with Barry. Barry, welcome to the show. Well, thank you so much for having me, Jean. Can we start with the why? Why

teach people how not to do something? Why not just tell them the right way to go about it from the beginning?

Well, we have a century worth of books telling people how to invest. And my first book was 15 years ago. And every time a publisher said, hey, isn't it time for a new book? And my answer was always, why? There are a lot of great books that I've enjoyed reading over the years, but I'm not really convinced any of them have made me a better investor. And what we have learned is

is that the market is so dynamic and so changing and so unpredictable that imagining that you're going to read a book and suddenly you're going to become a better investor. Hey, ask yourself how many of your friends, family members, colleagues are great investors despite the tens of thousands of how-to books that have come out. And the short answer is almost none. So when the idea kind of hit me, rather than tell people what to do,

Maybe if we told them, hey, you're better off not making these mistakes, avoiding these errors, not getting fooled by these bad ideas, misunderstanding the math, and of course, engaging in terrible investor behavior, they'd be better off. You put your first book out, as you said, 15 years ago. What has changed in the world and in the investing world since then?

Everything. First, we were existing in a post-credit crisis world, meaning the usual credit crisis recoveries, and this is just academic information.

literature, going back and looking at all the different crises we've had over the decades, subpar jobs recovery, subpar consumer spending, weak GDP. That's what the playbook said. But a lot of people weren't paying attention to everything else that was going on. And if you had read the pre-financial crisis books as to what to do, you would have missed one of the best

decades in market history. The 2010s were amazing. I talk in the book about a conversation in a canoe with my buddy Jim Bianco, who started out as a bond guy. I always like talking to bond guys who moved to equities because their perspective is so different than stock guys. And we were like the blind men describing an elephant. We were both very bullish in 2010.

Not because we shared a philosophical perspective, but he said when the Fed takes rates to zero, where else is money going to go? I said once U.S. equities get cut in half, hey, great entry point, 29, go to 73, 74, 87, and of course, 2000. Anytime you see stocks cut in half, you want to be a buyer.

But that really wasn't the lesson. The lesson was all the other reasons and excuses we heard from people. Oh, the market is rigged. Oh, the Fed is repressing. All these ideas that kept so many people out of the market in that decade, they were terrible advice. And very few of these people were ever called out on what they were doing to investors.

I follow the statistics on uncertainty, and uncertainty is right now as high as it's been since the financial crisis. We're just wildly trepidatious about what is happening in the markets and in the world. Has that changed your perspective at all on investing?

So I'll give you a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is if you're saving for retirement, if you just had a child born and you're funding their 529 to pay for college in 18 years, you have to look through the next four years or two years. Who knows how long this sort of chaotic cycle

random flood the zone approach is, I try very hard not to let politics influence my perspective on markets and the long term. Hey, if you're retiring this year, you have every right to be concerned and upset about what's going on. But if you don't need the money for, I don't know, 10 years, 20 years, what happens on any random Wednesday is not relevant.

What makes investing and finance so fascinating, it's one of these areas where you find out if you're wrong really quickly. Like in politics, if you're a farmer and you vote for someone who cuts support for your particular product, you may not know that for a couple of years. If they cut, hey, we're going to remove these sort of surgeries from Medicaid and you need that surgery in 20 years, it'll take you decades.

But if you go into investing, hey, I think the world is flat and I'm going to bet that way. I'm going to invest that way. You find out really quickly you're wrong.

And so I always want to look at the decision-making process, how investors think, how they make the decisions they made. And I couldn't help but notice that every time someone is talking about uncertainty on television, they're really not talking about uncertainty. When we delve into the construction of our mental models,

We find that we all live in this happy little bubble that we've created ourselves. Talk to friends and family, look at whether they're a Boston Celtics fan or they support this political party or that. We're just a gnarly mass of confirmation bias and constructed models that we hate to revisit. And they're cognitively expensive to construct.

And so we have a happy little delusion. And when things get rough, when suddenly volatility spikes, when uncertainty rears its head, really, isn't it always uncertain what the future is going to be? I don't remember anyone in December 2019 saying, hey, global pandemic is going to shut the world next year. Oh, and by the way, that'll be great for stocks. It'll stumble at first, but then the market will take off.

The future is always inherently unknown and so subject to random unanticipated events. Russian invasion of Ukraine, the pandemic, 500 basis points of Federal Reserve hikes, double digit drops in stocks and bonds in the same year, the Israeli Hamas Gaza war. Like nobody was really anticipating these things. And the uncertainty meme kind of just makes me think,

That gets trotted out whenever we become nervous because events make us lose our ability to lie to ourselves. And suddenly we're nervous. This first came to me. I was watching some CEO on Bloomberg TV.

Talking a couple of years ago about uncertainty, it was after the pandemic, but before the whole tariff debate. And you could see this guy generally lacked the ability to just wing it and talk about here's what we see in the coming year for our revenues and profits.

They can't see what their profits are going to be. They can extrapolate the past couple of weeks and carry it forward, but no one has the ability to really see a year out. And once we admit we don't know that, hey, we're not happy with it. We become...

It's uncertainty. Well, and the challenge then becomes not to give in to that uncertainty, which leads to bad behavior. That's part three of your book. I want to do parts one and two first. You essentially, in this book, you delve into three big categories of bad things that people should not fall prey to. They shouldn't listen to when it comes to

investing when it comes to managing their personal finances. The first of the categories is bad ideas. What do you mean when you say bad ideas? So I started on a trading desk, but I had a little more rigorous educational background than the sort of myths and

aphorisms and rules that would bounce around from trader to trader, from the head of the desk to all the traders. And then you're always talking to people on other desks and you start to hear these things. And a lot of people believe them. So I was always curious, hey,

hey, what's the basis for this? What's the data show? Somebody surely must have done a study that stocks that close at the bottom of their price that day, are they likely to continue selling off tomorrow or are they going to snap back? Like all these different

rules, it certainly should have been testable. There are hundreds and hundreds of these rules. Most of them have either not been tested or tested and it's a coin flip. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. So that kind of sent me down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out

And this is 25 plus years ago. Hey, why do we believe these things? Why have they sustained for so long? Why do they keep getting repeated over and over? And when you delve into these things, you just find out that there's an endless fire hose of let's be kind and call it motivated reasoning, often because people are selling a product that

Or they want your time, attention, eyeballs and or focus because it's got value. And they perhaps aren't always interested in what's best for you. And I think as investors, we tend to be a little a little gullible, a little naive and believe these folks.

Well, and we have way too much FOMO, right? We are desperately afraid that we're going to miss out on something, that somebody else is going to get it, that we are going to fall behind as a result. Everything is relative. And so when somebody raises the idea of a SPAC...

or when we hear about the latest meme coin or the latest meme stock. I mean, I'm sure you could give me far more bad ideas that you've witnessed over the decades, but how do you separate the good ones from the bad ones? I remember I was a reporter at Smart Money Magazine when ETFs were launched. They launched the first SPDR.

And I looked at this and I was skeptical. That turned out to be a really good idea, the ETF. But how do we recognize the difference? Sure. So first, SPY, I want to say 83, 84, something like that. So it depends on what we're looking at. Let's

talk about, since you were at Smart Money, let's talk about media and journalists. And first, no newspaper, no television channel, no magazine, no website is a monolith. It's made up of people of various skills and experiences. And I am both a creator of media content and a big consumer of media content. And some of this traces back to my days on

On the trading desk where I didn't want to read the papers in the morning. That's how long ago it was. It was papers. I didn't want to read it in the morning because it would influence my thinking process. So I would create a list, sometimes literally tearing it out of the paper, sometimes just printing it out.

of the 10 most interesting stories I wanted to read. And I would read them on the way home. And I noticed something consistent. The people who I regularly saved their columns, magazine stories, blog posts, websites to read, they'd been around a while. They had seen a number of cycles. For the most part, they were a lot more right than wrong. We're all wrong on the regular, sometimes spectacularly so. But

Overall, you want them to have a process that leads them to the right outcome. You want them to be value add. And you don't want them to merely have got lucky once throwing a dart. You want them to be pretty consistent. And when that became my filter, when that became my screen, suddenly I'm reading a whole lot less people running around with their hair on fire.

So in 96, Greenspan gave the irrational exuberance speech. In 97, I think we had the Thai bot crisis. In 98, the Russian ruble collapse and long-term capital management. 99 had its own craziness and the Fed did a big cash issuance in anticipation of Y2K. And then that all topped out in March of 2000. So I began right into a crazy mess with a lot of opinions, opinions,

and a lot of speculation. And that's the other thing you kind of learn is, hey, is this person giving me an analysis of what is actually happening so I understand what's going on here and now? Or is this a lot of conjecture and speculation and opinion? And I think, I feel, I hope,

That stuff is completely useless. You know, there's an old joke. When you're young, you want to read everything. And as you get older, you want to filter out everything. And over the past, I don't know, let's call it 30 years, I've found a number of people who prove themselves useless.

worthy of my time and attention. I only listed 10 in the book. I probably could have gone to 50 or 100, but think about how many tens of thousands of people are out there opining on everything. Most of the time we forget, hey, they don't know who I am. They don't know what tax bracket I'm in. They don't know what state I live in. They certainly don't know what my financial goals are or what my plans are. What have I saved so far? And what am I hoping to use this money for?

Is their advice really geared to me? And the answer is absolutely not. All that noise is marketing for whatever their company or their product is.

Yeah, I feel like over time, I've culled my list of the must-read columns, the must-read journalists, the must-read media sources. And I try to, like you, I consume an awful lot of media, but there are some that make their way into my subconscious and I hold on to, and there's some that I just read and I tend to let them go. We're going to take a very quick break.

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So every time someone says to me, the dollar has lost 96% of its purchasing power over the past century, my initial response is always, why the hell would you hold on to a dollar for a century? I'll give you two examples of this. The shorter term one was, we've all seen the movie Home Alone. Kevin's stuck at the house and he goes to the supermarket. Are you here alone?

Ma'am, I'm an eight year old boy. Do you think my mother would let me be here alone? And the meme that has been circulating is in 1990, Kevin bought twenty dollars and fifty two cents worth of groceries to buy. Those groceries today are going to cost you fifty seven dollars. Look how much value the dollar has lost. And the bigger picture is.

You have to understand context and framing. You have to understand double entry accounting to recognize that is BS. And the short version is I was in the supermarket this past weekend and I bought a bunch of stuff, but I used twenty twenty five dollars that I earned this month. I didn't use nineteen ninety dollars. That's number one.

So to look at this objectively, you have to say, well, if the goods in the supermarket have gone from $20 to $57, how much has the average wage gone up? What's the earning capacity? And back of the envelope is it's risen about 10% more than the price of food is. In fact, food historically has become, other than the past few years, has gotten cheaper and cheaper over the past century as we've made food.

mass-produced farmland, more productive, more efficient. I'm not necessarily saying it's healthier, but it certainly has become cheaper relative to our earnings. So if that cost Kevin $20.52 in 1990, today, that same thing is really about $18. So that's number one. But more importantly, if you look at

Hey, if instead of taking the $20 and buying food in the supermarket, he invested that money and then went to spend it in 2025. Well, yeah, the stuff costs $57. That $20.52 was invested, but it would have been worth since 1990 about 300 bucks. So you could buy all those groceries for $57, still have $243 left over. Wait, my purchasing power has gone up.

10x because the dollar is a medium of exchange. It's not a store of value. I get paid in dollars. You get paid in dollars. I use that money to pay my rent or my mortgage, buy food, all of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, maybe a little entertainment. I pay my taxes with it. I invest with it.

That's it. That money is out of my hands as soon as possible. You should not be leaving thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting in a bank earning 1%. You want the market to compound for you. The other example I give, and I'll keep this short, two people go off to World War I in 1917. One buries $1,000. They have a small fortune. One buries it in mason jars in the backyard. And

And leaves a note for the family. Here's where the money is hidden to be open upon my death. The other soldier invested in the stock market. Well, if it was your great grandfather that buried in the backyard, technically you can say that $1,000, a small fortune back then, has lost 96%.

of its purchasing power, but that's only because your great-grandfather was innumerate and didn't understand markets. The person who put that money into the stock market 100 years ago, well, when I ask people, what do you think it's worth? Just broadly invested in the stock market, oh, it's got to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, a million dollars. When I show them the compounding math with dividends reinvested that it's worth $32 million,

Their heads explode. Nobody can wrap their head around it. So the most important thing about the bad numbers is try not to interfere with the market's ability to compound your money for you.

Yeah, I'm smiling, Barry, because when my father went to the Army, he gave his father his pay. He sent his paycheck home to his father, and he told him, my grandfather, to invest the money in IBM. And my grandfather thought he knew better and invested in something else entirely that didn't do anything.

nearly as well as IBM did. And my father barely got over it, barely got over it. The third category is bad behavior. And this is sort of where we started. And I think it is, I think it's the most important of the three categories because the

human beings, by the sheer fact that we're human, are not wired to be good long-term actors. We're wired for short-term gratification. That hurts us in so many ways where our money is concerned. I'll go even further. Not even short-term gratification. We evolved to adapt and survive on the savanna, a very dangerous and changing landscape.

The prime driver of our actions and reactions is our amygdala, our fight or flight response. In addition, we are social creatures. We are cooperative creatures. We don't have fangs or claws or armor. We're soft and chewy and delicious. And so you have to be cooperative in order to be protected.

A group can be on the lookout for a leopard and be aware of alligators and recognize threats. And cooperatively, a whole bunch of clever monkeys are going to do a whole lot better than any one primate alone. And we are, if nothing, very clever social primates. And it's why humans exist.

have dominated every corner of the earth, not because we're bigger or stronger or tougher, but because we have an ability to think and to engage in thoughtful conceptualization about the future. Most animals can't do that. Unfortunately, most of us animals often don't do that. We react and

the way we have for, how old are humans? A few million years at most? So how do we protect us from ourselves? So there's a couple of ways to do that. First, I think we need to acknowledge that

So investing requires a strong amount of humility, not exactly what Wall Street is known for. Masters of the universe aren't the most humble people in the world. But when you get down to it, when you think about how little we know about what's going on right here and now.

and how even less we know about the future, hey, maybe a portfolio that doesn't require you to predict the future is going to be more robust, be able to withstand the ups and downs. So that's number one is you just have to be aware of how little you know. And then second, I talk in the book about survivorship bias and how everything we interact with is a winner. An iPhone has beat out

thousands of other products to become one of the best selling, fastest selling products of all time. You

You don't see all the losers that have come and go. You don't see the previous versions of this, but it doesn't have to be technology. It could be a pen or a pencil. When you look at how has the number two pencil that we all grew up with in grammar school with lead and the yellow and the rubber tip it, why did that become the most dominant one? How many other types of pencils have come and gone and just haven't survived? And so why,

In finance, we learn about survivorship bias from the mutual fund industry in the 1990s, where all these funds, fund families were claiming that they beat their benchmark, they beat the index, they beat the market. And then you find out,

Well, that's only if you don't count the ones that went belly up, that either were retired or merged into another one. Once you take the whole data set and look at how well have all the mutual funds done, not just the survivors, hey, you find out that most of them underperform. But

The data is in any given year, an active fund manager on average will underperform their benchmark. You know, sometimes it's by a little, sometimes by a lot, but typically less than half beat their benchmark. You take that to five years, 83% fail to beat their benchmark.

10 years, it's over 90%. You go to 20 years, net of fees, but including all the dividends reinvested, virtually no one does. The handful of people, you know their names, Peter Lynch, Warren Buffett. There's a few dozen of them. They're the exceptions that test the rule. They're not what drives it. And so-

The first thing you could do is at least behaviorally have the core of your portfolio be a broad market index. So at least you're going to be beating those guys. Whoever is running an active mutual fund, other than the 1%, 2% that maybe beat it over 10 years, hey, at least you're going to be ahead of 90% of those.

Then if you want to stick whatever your own flavoring is, if you want to own a value sleeve or momentum or, hey, I think Japan and India are interesting, I could buy ETFs for that. My favorite is emerging market small cap value. There's an ETF for that. So however you want to decorate it, knock yourself out, but at least give yourself a chance to

At the beginning of this conversation, we talked about people entering retirement. We are right in the midst of what the Alliance for Lifetime Income has dubbed peak 65, the fact that more people are turning 65 on a daily basis than at any point in history. And I think that's a really important point.

How should a person who is approaching retirement fast not invest? And how should...

a person who's already in retirement, not invest? In other words, what are the mistakes that these folks need to be aware of? So think back a few decades ago or even further when Social Security was first rolled out. You would retire at 65 from whatever your job is, play a few rounds of golf and then drop dead because our lifespans were not what they are today. You make it to 65,

And the odds are that you're going to make it to 80, 85, 90. It's very, very, I mean, there's a lot of demographic variability, but once you hit retirement age, the concern becomes, hey, am I going to outlive my assets? So that's a big challenge. In the old days, you would retire and you'd go from a 60, 40 or a 70, 30 stocks and bonds portfolio to something that was mostly bonds.

I don't know if that makes sense, especially if you have long-lived parents. If you're coming to the party with some good genetics and you're relatively healthy, you should anticipate at 65, hey, I need probably another 20 years worth of income, maybe 25 years, who knows? There are more and more centenarians and other people living to just unimaginably long lifespans. So that's number one. Number two is,

And this is the flip side of that. If you have enough money saved for a comfortable retirement and then some, I'm always shocked at how people who have been successful and hardworking their whole lives and work, work, work, save, save, save, invest, invest, invest.

are reluctant to spend their own money. Absolutely. Right? So two recent conversations that are kind of funny. Hey, we want to take the whole family to Europe and we want to visit. I want to take 10, 20 relatives and visit the homeland and see some old family members and really do it up. You look at their portfolio. Hey, you

Go do that. Why not? I'm kind of a car guy. And one of our clients asked an advisor, I'm thinking about buying a new Ferrari. Speak to Barry. So I have a conversation and I say, first of all, you look at the portfolio. Hey, this guy can buy a Ferrari every year for the rest of whatever. Don't worry about it.

But my advice to him, and this goes back to what is money, it's not a store of value, it's a medium exchange and a tool that can buy you experiences and memories and things. My advice to him was get the car, but then take the whole fam down to the Ferrari high performance driving school, have everybody go through the class, and then they put you out on the track with a driver.

And the dirty little secret of these racing schools and these high performance driving schools, they're really defensive driving classes disguised as race courses. So not only will everybody have a ton of fun driving these crazy, expensive, beautiful, fast cars on the track, but when you're done, you, your spouse, your kids, you'll all be better drivers. And they did it. And I got a really nice email afterwards saying,

So much fun. I recommend everybody go out and do it. So you have to remember what the point of money is. It's not a scorecard. You shouldn't just hold on to it forever. Hey, we're not going to be here forever. Before you shuffle off this mortal coil, take some time and enjoy what you've worked for your whole life. If you're in retirement and you're working with someone who explains you can easily afford this, go do it. Well, go do it.

Absolutely. And what's so interesting about what you just said is there's a lot of research coming out from the Alliance for Lifetime Income and the Retirement Income Institute that points to exactly this problem, that retirees are amassing money, having so much trouble spending it. And what we're learning is that if you convert some of that income into a lifetime paycheck,

You're going to have a much easier time spending it. We'll talk about that more on a future show coming up with Michael Finca and Tamako Toland. We're excited about that. For now, Barry, let me say thank you. The book is How Not to Invest. It's been burning up the charts on Amazon. So congratulations on that. Where can we get more information on you? Thank you so much.

So if you want to learn more about the book, it's how not to invest book.com. Very clever URL. I post regularly on what's going on in the economy, in the markets, and who my guests are on masters and business at ritholtz.com. And if you want to learn about our asset management fund, it's ritholtzwealth.com. We work with about 4,000 families managing about five and a half billion dollars and just celebrated our, I want to say,

11th anniversary. Congratulations on that. And if you'd like more information on the work that we do at the Alliance for Lifetime Income, sign up for our newsletter. Lots of information on everything retirement. You can find more at protectedincome.org. Thanks for watching, everybody. Thank you, Barry. Thanks so much for having me.

If you love this episode, please give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. We always value your feedback. And if you want to keep the financial conversations going, join me for a deeper dive.

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