Brett Arends: Worried About Outliving Your Money? There’s an Answer

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**SPEAKER_2** (0:27)
Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

**Christine Benz** (0:33)
Hi and welcome to The Long View. I'm Christine Benz, Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning for Morningstar.

**Amy Arnott** (0:39)
I'm Amy Arnott, Portfolio Strategist for Morningstar.

**Christine Benz** (0:43)
Our guest on the podcast today is Brett Arends. Brett has been a columnist for MarketWatch, The Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones publications since 2007
His regular column for MarketWatch is called ROI, and he has also written for SmartMoney, thestreet.com and The Boston Herald. In addition, Brett has written several books, including Storm Proof Your Money, Whether Any Economy, Rebuild Your Portfolio, Protect Your Future. Brett took a double first in history at Cambridge University, and did postgraduate research at Oxford University. He's also a Chartered Financial Consultant. Brett, welcome to The Long View.

**Brett Arends** (1:22)
Great to be here.

**Christine Benz** (1:23)
Well, it's great to have you here. We wanted to start with just a little bit about your biography. I think I always operated with the assumption that you're British, but you're actually born in the US. Can you talk about your early life and also how you got interested in financial journalism?

**Brett Arends** (1:39)
Sure. I was actually born in Poughkeepsie, New York. Given my accent, people find that hard to believe. But back in the days when I was on Twitter, I occasionally get angry people telling me to go back where I came from. I'd say, why would you want me to go back to Poughkeepsie?
I was born in Poughkeepsie, back in the days when it was a booming IBM town. Family stuff meant that I moved to England when I was just about to turn nine, I think it was. I was in England for about 25 years actually. I came back a lot, so it wasn't like I was over there exclusively, but I was mainly based in the UK, particularly for high school and college and then the early days of my professional career.
Then in 2004, I came home to the US. It's funny how you explain why did it happen like that, and just life, that's the way it happened. But it was funny because I was at the time a huge fan of the Boston Red Sox baseball team, and I came back and joined the Boston Herald just in time for them to end the curse of the Bambino and win the World Series. It was quite extraordinary to be actually in a bar in South Boston during the famous 2004 playoff series against the Yankees. Anyway, so how did I get into this? It's sort of a convoluted way. I always wanted to be a journalist, but I read history of all things at university. In the UK, you don't just major in something, you just do one subject. So I really, in both undergraduate and grad school, I just did history and then I talked my way into a job at McKinsey and Company, for which I had no qualifications whatsoever, apart from a willingness to learn and I guess a certain degree of native wit. But anyway, I got hired as if I had an MBA, even though at the time I was just doing a history doctoral program. They were hiring, they were looking for non-traditional hires. So anyway, I got into McKinsey and the thing is, when you, if you're not interested in something, it usually means you don't know much about it. Almost anything can be interesting once you learn about it. And the immersion I had in business and finance and economics was so intense that I got absolutely fascinated by it. And then I walked from there on to a job. Initially, well, Fleet Street, I was initially on the Daily Telegraph, Business and Finance pages and then I moved to the Daily Mail, Business and Finance pages. I'm probably the only person in history to have worked for McKinsey & Company and the Daily Mail.
So that was kind of interesting. But what was great about the Daily Mail was that our finance pages were all about stock tipping. It was like a racing sheet. We were all about company news, stock tips, going to, this was in the late 90s, going to actual press conferences, meeting tiny, small companies traded on the London Stock Exchange and writing them up and working out whether the shares were a buyer or so. It was like writing for the Racing Post. It was very, very entertaining.