Investing - Theory, News & General • An Update on the Jonathan Clements Initiative

The Jonathan Clements Getting Going on Savings Initiative is up and running!

This joint effort involving the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, a team of academic researchers and the City of Boston is spreading the word about Roth IRAs to working teens and young adults, many from lower-income backgrounds. And most concretely, as envisioned by the late financial columnist Jonathan Clements, it has started the process of making payments of $1,000 each to selected qualifying individuals to fund Roth IRAs. The academic researchers will study if payments like this are an effective tool to help young adults establish an early habit of setting money aside for later in life.

The Bogle Center Board is delighted to share an update on the progress so far, the great work of our partners and plans for the future. Please note that given the outpouring of contributions and the time needed to build out the program, the Bogle Center isn’t seeking additional funds for the Clements Initiative at this time.

A busy summer in Boston
After a small pilot in 2025, the Clements Initiative saw a full rollout across participants in Boston’s 2026 summer jobs program for teens and young adults. It has been a complex and labor-intensive effort led by researchers associated with J-PAL North America (a research center based at MIT), Boston’s Office of Youth Employment and Opportunity and the city’s Bank On Boston program to help residents access high-quality, low-cost financial services.

As of late September, the team had presented workshops on Roth IRAs and investing to 487 summer employees. There were more than 30 workshops because program participants were dispersed across city departments and nonprofit organizations.

Of the workshop participants, 154 were 18 or older and thus eligible for the Clements Initiative payments and the related research study. As of late September, the team had enrolled 79 people into the study and had assisted 73 of them to open Roth IRAs at Vanguard Group. Recruitment and account-opening meetings were continuing. Meanwhile, in a second round of meetings, the team is giving each new IRA holder $50 from the donations to the Clements Initiative and helping them deposit and invest those funds in a global stock exchange-traded fund in the IRA.

The team hopes to sign up 100 study participants from the summer 2026 cohort. Soon those participants will be randomly assigned to either the treatment group or the control group. The young adults in the treatment group will receive a further $950 contribution from the Clements Initiative funds – for a total of $1,000 each – and those in the control group will receive a second $50.

Over time, the researchers will study if the larger upfront gift leads to greater financial well-being and behaviors associated with building long-term savings.

Challenges addressed
Turning the Clements Initiative into reality has involved a lot of operational challenges that were successfully addressed over the past year. The J-PAL team – which includes professors at University of Chicago, Northeastern University and Harvard University – obtained grants to hire undergraduate and graduate students to assist with the large number of workshops and the multiple meetings needed with each recipient. To address a language barrier, they had all the workshop materials translated into Spanish.

To track the study participants’ Roth IRA activity over time, the researchers are partnering with Vanguard, which will supply anonymized data on the participants’ conduct of their accounts.

Separately, the Bogle Center reached an agreement with the University of Chicago that will spare the Bogle Center from having to make payments to the individual program participants. The Center, which has a volunteer board and no employees, will make donations to the university, and the university will then use a third-party payment platform to make and track what are likely to be hundreds of payments over time.

Bigger plans ahead
It’s still early in the implementation of the Clements Initiative, which was announced in May 2025, four months before Jonathan’s death. And the successful summer 2026 rollout in Boston is just one step along the way.
The J-PAL team is hoping to expand the program geometrically in 2027 and is talking with potential partners in multiple states to make that happen.

The Bogle Center and our partners are grateful to have substantial funding for the Clements Initiative. Jonathan donated the royalties from The Best of Jonathan Clements, a collection of his Wall Street Journal columns, to the Bogle Center to use in the Clements Initiative. The Center, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, has also proudly accepted donations for this project, both before and after Jonathan’s death in September 2025.

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If there are 50 participants in the treatment group and 50 in the control group for this year, that would add up to expenditures of $55,000 from the dollars held by the Bogle Center for the Clements Initiative. And the Bogle Center would have more than $400,000 remaining in those funds to support an expanded program in future years.

The Bogle Center and our partners continue to be extremely proud of this undertaking and its ability to change lives. But as noted above, given the outpouring of contributions and the time needed to build out the program, the Bogle Center isn’t seeking additional funds for the Clements Initiative at this time.

Statistics: Posted by Bogle Center — Thu Oct 01, 2026 5:29 pm