The Right Time to Retire

Talking Real Money - Investing Talk

Don McDonald

Education, Business, Investing, How To

4.5 • 811 Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Don and Tom run through a Wall Street Journal list of “subtle signs it might be time to retire,” reacting to each one with their usual mix of disbelief, personal anecdotes, and gentle ribbing. The episode wanders into tech reluctance, job promotions nobody wants, Sunday dread, obsessive 401(k) checking, volunteering guilt, missing peers, feeling left out of friends’ retirements, boss-related misery, and aging knees. They also answer listener questions about Schwab Intelligent Portfolios and their high cash allocations, discuss the shrinking role of physical cash, explain the real value of pre-1964 silver quarters, and handle calls on Social Security math. Tom repeatedly tracks his daughter’s high-school soccer match on-air, providing live updates as the drama unfolds. 1:06 WSJ list of “subtle signs it’s time to retire” begins 1:40 Sign #1: Feeling numb arriving at work 2:11 Why neither host relates to workplace numbness 2:59 Sign #2: Shrinking from new tech tools (Tom jokes incoming) 3:40 Don embraces AI, Tom… less so 4:21 Sign #3: Avoiding promotions; why neither wants a bigger job 5:16 Sign #4: The “Sunday scaries” 5:50 Sign #5: Constantly checking your 401(k) balance 6:26 Mid-list recap before the break 7:42 Second half of the list introduced 8:57 Sign #6: Wanting to volunteer more 9:40 Sign #7: Realizing all your peers have retired 10:11 Don jokes about dying at his desk 11:34 Sign #8: Feeling left out as friends enjoy retirement trips 12:40 Sign #9: Hating your boss (and why that’s not a retirement issue) 12:56 Sign #10: Achy knees and “retire before you can’t enjoy things” 13:35 Doctors, guarantees, and aging joints 14:43 Call for listener questions 15:04 Call: Schwab Intelligent Portfolios’ big cash allocations 16:28 How Schwab makes money on the spread 18:20 Transparency vs. hidden fees 20:20 Back from break — Wednesday podcast explanation 21:31 Don hates change (the coin kind and the life kind) 22:30 Historical buying power of coins 22:56 Pre-1964 silver quarter value 24:15 Odds of finding one in circulation 25:10 What amount of money makes you bend over and pick it up? 25:47 Cleaning out the garage vs. hunting silver coins 27:36 Halftime soccer update: the comeback begins 29:02 Caller: misunderstanding “8% interest” from Social Security discussion 30:26 Caller Paul on cash vs. cashless society 31:51 Coca-Cola prices through time 32:57 Only 12–18% of payments today are cash 34:02 Holiday well-wishes and generational shifts 35:34 Bewitched, credit checks, and pre-internet detective work 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.
0:07.8	We're talking real money.
0:10.2	All righty.
0:11.0	Welcome back to the show.
0:12.6	I'm Don McDonald.
0:13.9	This is Talking Real Money.
0:15.7	We're so glad you joined us.
0:17.7	And let me get the phone number out of the way because we've only had a couple of calls and we could use some more. We could use a lot more. A lot more. 8559. 9. Is 855935. You know the number? Talk. Yeah, what are the numbers after that? I don't know. I have no idea. 8255. Okay. That's how you spell talk on a phone. Okay.
0:40.2	So I got that out of the way. Now, one of the things that we spend a lot of time talking about on
0:45.4	talking real money is the, what we believe, is the biggest thing you're going to do with your money,
0:50.5	and that is retire. Right? Save it to spend it when you don't have regular income.
0:55.0	Right.
0:55.3	Correct.
0:55.8	Yeah.
0:55.9	But we don't talk much about how you figure out when to retire.
1:00.8	I know I have, I'm challenged by this because my thinking is I don't want to retire.
1:08.8	I don't know what I do, But Bruce Horowitz, who's a freelance writer in the Wall Street Journal, came up with 10 really powerful questions.
1:22.7	Settled, subtle, subtle signs.
1:25.2	They're signs, though, and they're really kind of cool.
1:28.6	They don't, I don't, you know, I want to, I want to run these by Tom because I went through all 10 and none of them applied to me. Really? Well, because you don't really go to work. A lot of these are about going to work. I went through every one of my went, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, okay. Maybe 10, but I sit down most of the time.
1:45.9	So, yeah, what's the first one?
1:47.5	Well, the, no. Okay, maybe 10, but I sit down most of the time.
	...

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