ABOUT LANDON B. McDONALD
Landon B. McDonald, CFA — thirty years pricing risk, one retirement spent on this.
Who wrote this
Landon B. McDonald holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation from the CFA Institute and an MBA in investments and finance from the Rutgers Graduate School of Business. His career ran through Continental Insurance, Loeb Rhoades, and Kidder Peabody as an investment securities analyst on both the buy side and the sell side; a stint at the U.S. Treasury doing capital markets research; the financial-planning and retirement-planning practices he built at Madison Financial Group and, later, at his own firm, McDonald & Associates; and 403(b) retirement-plan advising for MetLife Resources. He is a member of Mensa and Intertel.
He is retired, has no current professional involvement with the investment industry, and invests pro bono for family and friends. He built this site for one reason: the math bothered him, and nobody with his background had put it in front of the public in a form anyone could check by hand.
Landon B. McDonald, CFA
Landon McDonald, with a framed historical market-returns chart — the kind of chart this whole site is an argument about.
Why I built this
He is not selling anything. He is retired, drawing no income from this site, and he built it the same way he spent thirty years building research notes for other people’s money: start from the published data, show every assumption, and let the reader check the arithmetic themselves. The gap between what Social Security could have earned invested in the whole market and what pay-as-you-go actually delivers isn’t a hunch to him — it is the same kind of long-run compounding chart he spent a career explaining to clients, applied to the one program that never got to use it.
He calls this “the road not taken” because that is exactly what it is: a fork the country could have taken in 1935 or any year since, and didn’t. The fable that gives this site its title tells that story in full, using his own birth year as the example — read it, then run your own.
On the record since 1999
This argument isn’t new. Landon McDonald first argued it publicly in a 1999 Star-Ledger op-ed, “Designing a Better Retirement System for All,” and has kept making it since — including to a Central New Jersey Mensa audience whose patience produced several of the underlying charts on this site. The proposal has been refined over more than two decades; the arithmetic hasn’t changed.
What is striking, reading it now, is how little the architecture has moved. In 1999 he proposed pooling FICA into a corporate-type pension that would “buy and hold an index of virtually all U.S. stocks” under a fully funded, defined-benefit plan — an entire-economy index chosen precisely so that the holdings could not be steered toward political favorites. He argued against individual accounts then for the same reason this site argues against them now: most people would end up worse off running the money themselves. Twenty-seven years of refinement changed the funding mechanism, the size of the floor, and the weight of evidence behind both. They did not change the shape.
What this site will never ask of you
No donations. No investment products. No financial advice. No account numbers — ever. One optional email field, used only to send the plan. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the U.S. Social Security Administration or any federal government agency.