Retirement Reality Check

Talking Real Money - Investing Talk

Don McDonald

Education, Investing, Business, How To

4.5 • 811 Ratings

🗓️ 15 December 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you’re nearing retirement and uneasy about the math, you’re not alone. Don and Tom tackle the uncomfortable reality that most near-retirees haven’t actually run the numbers—and many won’t like what they see when they do. Drawing on Vanguard data and real-world client experience, they break down three practical ways to shrink a retirement gap: working longer (but not necessarily full-time), thoughtfully tapping home equity, and spending less before and during retirement. 0:06 Opening and the retirement gap problem 0:52 Podcast platforms, Apple vs Spotify, and Don’s short-story empire 4:08 How TRM ranks among investing podcasts and why that still feels surreal 5:24 Vanguard data: only 40% of near-retirees are on track 6:51 Kids, money, and why retirement math gets uncomfortable fast 7:51 Strategy #1: Working longer (and why part-time can be powerful) 9:41 Purpose, boredom, and the underrated psychology of retirement 10:00 Strategy #2: Home equity as a retirement resource 11:12 Downsizing, renting, HELOCs, and reverse mortgage trade-offs 13:05 Strategy #3: Spending less—before and during retirement 14:29 Reverse mortgage costs, limits, and real-world implications 17:01 Social Security timing and when immediate annuities actually help 18:40 Inflation risk, fixed income streams, and practical trade-offs 19:02 Listener Q: AVGE vs DFAW and understanding underlying holdings 21:48 Listener Q: Aggressive Roth portfolios intended for heirs 25:30 Listener Q: Washington 529 plans and GET vs traditional 529s 27:32 Listener Q: Quantum computing (short answer: no) 28:59 Sector investing, AI hype, and why diversification wins Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Think about cheese.
0:02.0	Make your thoughts cheesier.
0:04.2	Now add 100% chicken breast fillet,
0:06.3	Chipotle sauce and Amadea cheese melt.
0:08.3	And it's giving the new cheesy chicken stack at McDonald's.
0:12.3	Did we mention it's cheesy?
0:13.9	Cheese.
0:15.8	Availments with the 4th of Jan, 2026 from 11am.
0:18.1	Plus and participation may vary.
0:19.2	Subjects availability.
0:27.7	Reality radio for a really great future.
0:29.7	We're talking real money.
0:30.5	Okay.
0:32.0	Here's the deal.
0:34.9	You're nearing retirement.
0:45.7	You're looking at your money and you're going, hmm, I don't know if I'm going to be able to have the kind of retirement I really, really want.
0:49.0	So what can you do?
0:50.7	Well, that's what we're going to talk about.
1:00.0	Some quick and easy, down and dirty, get right down to it ideas to help you, quote, close the retirement gap.
1:49.0	I'm Don McDonald talking real money along with Thomas Charles Koch, the World War II model military aircraft enthusiast. My daughter, my daughter did a Zoom call with a, we have a family connection. And so she got to do a Zoom call with a president of a college. And she did it in my office with all the planes. So she had to explain the planes. Oh, did she do it with all the planes? And she said, I tried to tell them, you know, why they were there and stuff. Because I was like, what, what's that all about? So anyway. She should have said, I, you know, I am passionate about aviation history. And together with my father, we've spent many an enjoyable Sunday afternoon building model military. We should have one of those little plugs in her ear when she gets up. be your producer exactly okay ask them about this that would have been good so no didn't happen anyway so welcome to our little get together we call it a podcast yeah why do we
1:54.2	call it a podcast because apple said let's call these things where people talk on our iPods podcast
2:00.1	yeah really smart of them.
	...

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