Behavior Prompting

Talking Real Money - Investing Talk

Don McDonald

Education, Business, Investing, How To

4.5 • 811 Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Don and Tom tackle the creeping role of AI in financial advice—highlighting Vanguard’s new “nudges” on its platform—before pivoting into lively listener calls. The show explores the balance between saving and living (including an $800K earner debating a bigger house), the risks of high-yield gimmick ETFs like QQQI, the simplicity of age-based 529 plans, and the murky rules around paying kids into Roth IRAs. Humor, skepticism, and practical guidance keep the conversation grounded, with a side of leaf blowers, Italian villas, and Tom’s inevitable puns. 0:10 Don’s dramatic AI apocalypse intro and Vanguard “nudges” 1:20 Squarespace rant: how customer service died 4:13 Vanguard limiting fund lists—bias toward active funds? 6:22 AI is coming for investing advice 6:35 Listener call: $800K household, cheap mortgage, “living life” vs upgrading home 10:22 House affordability rules: 25–30% PITI, low-rate lock-in dilemma 12:19 Call from Jim in Bellevue: QQQI high-yield ETF 13:44 Why covered call income funds are risky, volatile, and gimmicky 17:41 Tech focus, March 2000 parallels, why diversification beats chasing yield 19:29 Covered call strategies—why they lose upside and add complexity 22:50 Listener email from Shauna: which Utah 529 portfolio to pick 24:36 Best choice = age-based glide path, simplicity and cost advantages 26:13 Follow-up caller: Roth IRAs for kids, risk of inflated wages and IRS scrutiny 29:24 Who checks wages? IRS shutdown jokes, K-1 confusions, AI tax analysis fail Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Reality Radio for a really great future.
0:08.0	We're talking real money.
0:10.5	It's too late for us, for humans.
0:13.2	Trust me, it's over.
0:15.3	You just don't know it yet.
0:19.0	Something happened in the break? No, it just keeps happening. keeps happening no no no okay it's this this
0:24.7	this ai thing they they is trust me are they at your door they haven't showed up in my place
0:30.2	no no no no no they're making plans quietly in the background i'm gonna drown them in my lake
0:36.2	then yeah they're that's the problem. They're undrownable.
0:39.5	Try to wrap your hands around the neck of one. You can't actually do it. It won't work. Plus, I don't want to get near the water now. It's cold. Because it's entering, AI's entering so many things. and it's really going to make a big, we're going to do a show on this someday, or I'm going to do one or something,
0:54.4	really the changes that are going to come to going to do a show on this someday, or I'm going to do one or something,
0:59.2	really the changes that are going to come to investment advice that a lot of investment advisors are not going to like. Clients might, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how good it can be.
1:03.8	But Vanguard, we like Vanguard generally. I love their funds. We don't like them as much as we used to.
1:12.5	No, because they're conflicted.
1:14.4	I also am not a huge fan of their personal advisor program.
1:18.4	It's not horrible.
1:19.7	It's not great, that's all.
1:20.7	Yeah, it's neither good nor bad.
1:23.0	It's just there, and it's reasonable, and at least it's some guidance.
1:27.2	But Vanguard is working something new into their web presence, into their, well, the way we all
1:34.8	interact with everything now.
1:37.0	By the way, just as an aside, I host our website through a company called Squarespace,
	...

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