Investing Reality Check

Talking Real Money - Investing Talk

Don McDonald

Education, Investing, Business, How To

4.5 • 811 Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A classic TRM episode that starts with Tom’s ill-fated attempt to cross a flooded Snoqualmie River (spoiler: no walking on water) and turns into a timely lesson on market returns, diversification, and why comparing your portfolio to headline numbers is usually a mistake. Don and Tom unpack eye-popping 2025 performance across U.S., international, bonds, and small-cap value, warn against recency bias and overpriced active funds, and take several listener calls on Roth conversions, bad custodians, debt forgiveness taxes, and rollover mechanics. The show wraps with Don’s well-earned victory lap for Seasons Readings, now rubbing shoulders with Julie Andrews and Hugh Bonneville in Apple’s fiction charts. 0:04 Tom gets stranded by flooding after a questionable river-crossing idea 1:40 Flood damage reality check and sympathy for displaced homeowners 2:22 Market year-end context and “Dave Ramsey average” returns 3:32 Bond funds surprise with strong year-to-date performance 4:05 International and global funds crush expectations 5:46 Why your return may lag headlines: allocation, costs, and recency bias 6:20 Apples-to-apples portfolio comparisons matter 9:26 Active funds underperforming despite a strong market year 10:47 Global diversification pays off big in 2025 12:04 January prerecorded show tease and holiday logistics 13:25 Seasons Readings featured by Apple Podcasts—downloads explode 15:18 Fiction chart brag: sandwiched between Julie Andrews and Hugh Bonneville 16:25 Listener call: John Hancock IRA, forced conversions, and bad advice 19:06 Why liquidating inside an IRA is not a taxable event 20:17 Exposing high-cost, loaded funds and custodian nonsense 23:35 Listener question: Roth conversions, pensions, and IRMAA timing 26:36 Why “top tax bracket forever” is usually a myth 27:31 Listener call: debt settlement and taxable forgiveness income 30:13 When a 1099-C is a good deal anyway 31:56 Flood-era investment scams and terrible ideas 35:55 Clarifying direct rollovers vs. taking possession of funds 38:13 Roth IRAs for young earners—yes, even pizza money 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.
0:10.1	Wow, that was close.
0:11.8	Darn it.
0:12.3	Wow.
0:13.5	We just, we got a tragedy here on talking real money because on Friday Tom was gone a little crazy being
0:22.3	cut off from Duval Island and he decided that he was going to wade across the snow
0:27.9	qualmy.
0:28.9	There's a video of this.
0:30.4	Literally, he decided he was going to try and wade across the floodplain to get the
0:35.1	to the Deval Bridge and to poor And to, poor judgment. A lot of enthusiasm, though. But maybe a little too much water there. It was, it was like five feet deep. It wouldn't have, it wouldn't have turned out. This is not a joke. No, you do not go walking across flooded rivers. All right? And it turns out I cannot walk on water either.
0:56.1	I tried that.
0:56.7	I could have told you that if you just called and asked.
1:01.5	He did finally find a way home, though, through Fall City.
1:04.7	I did.
1:05.4	Thank you, Fall City, for having your bridge open.
1:07.4	And wow, you know, driving along there, looking there looking at the first of all the amount of
1:12.3	water is to i mean the whole snow qualmany valley where i am yeah filled yeah it's like a lake now
1:17.7	part two all the there's little barns and stuff that are like in the middle now the middle of
1:22.8	the lake it's very weird these little isolated little barn islands and then the tragedy is you drive by on Highway 203 and you see these homes where people have taken everything out of the home because it was all completely soaked and wrecked already.
1:36.5	It's tough.
1:38.0	Not easy to see.
	...

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