Recent numbers have come out putting inflation at 5% for September, and there’s a 5.9% increase to Social Security predicted for January 2022. While some are rejoicing, there is definitely a flip side to this news as well. Victor & Mark talk about what’s driving this higher inflation, how it’s related to the increase in Social Security, and how your plans are impacted.
Victor takes his own checklist challenge, and shows you how he prepares to make your perfect Make It Last Plan.
Finally, let’s talk estate planning. What are all of the documents you need in order to have a successful estate plan?
To access additional information, please visit Checklist Challenge to download your FREE Checklist
Don’t let Retirement Taxes derail your retirement! Please visit Are You Paying Too Much In Taxes In Retirement? to download your FREE Guide
Also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, & Google Podcasts
Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and Certified Elder Law Attorney (CELA) and Certified Financial Planner professional (CFP). Through his law firm and independent registered investment advisory company, Victor provides 360º Wealth Protection Strategies for individuals in or nearing retirement.
For more information, visit Medina Law Group or Palante Wealth Advisors.
Full Transcription Below
Mark Elliot: Welcome to “Make It Last” with Victor Medina. I’m Mark Elliot. Victor, of course, has two companies ‑‑ the Medina Law Group and Palante Wealth.
Victor is a practicing estate planning and certified elder law attorney. If you need estate planning, legacy planning, all that kind of stuff, the Medina Law Group can certainly help you. It’s medinalawgroup.com. To find out more, medinalawgroup.com.
Palante Wealth started because of Medina Law Group. Clients would come in and say, “Can you come help me with the rest of my retirement stuff?” “I don’t know. I guess I could take some classes and I could do that.” That brought about Palante Wealth, which is about holistic planning for your retirement.
Victor is a certified financial planner professional, registered investment advisor that can help you in the insurance world, in the investment world. palantewealth.com to find out more. palantewealth.com.
Here’s the bottom line. If you have questions about traditional estate planning, asset protection, retirement distribution, proactive income tax planning, then certainly give the team a call. They’re here to help.
There’s no cost to chat with the team about any concerns you have. They’re here to help, they just don’t know if they can till they hear your situation. 856‑506‑8300. 856‑506‑8300. We’ll give that number throughout the program.
Victor, welcome. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about some inflation numbers that are out in September. The news is out, Social Security recipients rejoicing around the country.
Victor Medina: That is interesting news. No one really expected. We had spent so much time, Mark. By the way, hello and thank you for saying hello to me. I should have said hello to you when we got started.
We spent so much time in the last few years receiving meager updates or increases to Social Security, that everyone has expected that to be what they would expect for increases for the foreseeable future.
1 percent, 1.5 percent. When they came out with news that says 5.9 percent, their celebration in the streets, it seemed. We were at [indecipherable 1:56] . It’s like a new pope had been elected when they went up 5.9 percent.
There’s a flip side to that. There’s a flip side to the fact that they’re going to be receiving these increases. We’ve heard all of this news, it’s also related to the increase in inflation. Inflation number being…We are pretty close to that.
We’ve got a 4 percent number that was reported in one particular month, and then 5 percent after that. These two things are linked together. These increases in Social Security being linked to the cost of inflation and what that’s driving in there.
The two things, they’re not working independently. Quite an interesting change to see people react to the fact that their Social Security’s going to go up by almost 6 percent.
Mark: When you think about it, you brought up the numbers. You go back to 2010, 2011 it was 0 percent cost of living adjustment for Social Security recipients. 2012, 3.6. 2013 to 2015, a range from 1 to 2 percent. 2016, back to zero. 2017, 0.3. 2018, 2 percent. 2019, 2.8. 2020, 1.6. This year’s recipients are 1.3 percent bump.
Now you get a 5.9 percent bump. It’s about 90‑95 bucks extra a month for Social Security recipients. Your average now is around 1,640, something like that, where this year’s was like 1,540‑1,550. It’s about a 90 percent bump.
The problem is part of that’s going to go to Medicare Part B because that means the premiums from Medicare Part B go up like seven percent which is actually $11. You still had 80 anyway, that’s a positive.
The challenge, though, is inflation which is what leads to cost of living adjustment. Now, Victor, I want you to break down how Social Security Administration figures cost of living adjustment because it looks at retirees’ healthcare and all of those types of things, retirees’ cost. Oh wait, it doesn’t. It looks at the 36‑year‑old urban clerical worker. I mean there is no correlation.
Victor: It really isn’t a correlation. You would think that these two things are related because Social Security exists. It was an entitlement program essentially put in place to make sure that we wouldn’t have people who’ve had worked their entire lives be impoverished in retirement.
It’s Social Security being a safety net. If you keep that in mind in terms of the way the program is set up, it seems entirely consistent that they should be pegging how much they’re paying out in Social Security benefits to what the actual costs are for the people in retirement in terms of what it costs for them to live.
Their whole idea is to provide a safety net. That net has to be strong enough to support what it is the retirees need to be spending on to not get to the poverty levels of being in retirement. But of course, it doesn’t do that, it’s not keyed that way. What we have is all of these independent vectors that are shooting off at rates that are not linked to one another.
The cost of health insurance is much, much higher. It increases at a much higher rate than the cost of living, even with the higher inflation numbers that we’re seeing.
Similarly, when we think about what people’s purchasing power is generally, the idea that the inflation is increasing relative to the way that their dollars are being grown or available for them to take out from IRA, those two things aren’t linked.
You are absolutely right, Mark, that unfortunately the way that they arrive at how much Social Security benefits you are going to be receiving and how much of an increase that you might get from year‑to‑year is not linked to what the actual costs are for people in retirement, which just drives people like me as retirement planners little nuts.
There’s just no logical consistency on how they are arriving at what number they give you at any particular time.
Mark: If you have questions, it’s 856‑506‑8300. No cost, no obligation, no pressure for this. Victor and the team would love to help. 8565‑0680‑300.
Inflation. Now we know that what there are things out in LA Harbor and Long Beach Harbor and the ports and they can’t get stuff going anywhere. Is that also maybe leading to this inflation or was that already on its way before all of this?
Victor: It’s hard to say with certainty. This idea of inflation is this concept of how much things should cost. At any point in time, we’re negotiating what we’re willing to pay for something.
The general laws of economics and supply and demand are always in play. People want to pay what they need for certain things. As stuff gets more expensive, it’ll be what the market can tolerate.
It’s hard to say with certainty that, for example, global supply chains are somehow driving the cost of inflation. The more recent use in global supply chains has come in the last two or three months in terms of reports that are coming from White House, briefings about whether or not people are going to get their Christmas gifts, like the White House can determine how trucks are driving.
The idea that there’s an issue there is probably a little bit more recent. We did see inflation numbers come out over the summer that were independent of the global supply chains.
[crosstalk]
Mark: That was in May, wasn’t it?
Victor: Yeah, exactly.
Mark: Wasn’t that in May where we had like 5.4 percent inflation? That was before all of this, certainly.
Victor: It was much earlier than the issues off of it. It’s one of these things which are always trying to peg what the problem is as though they can boil it down to some simplistic villain that they can put up there. It’s just this. It’s just that. It does play for the news media, but of course, global markets are more complex than that. Then consumer behavior is more complex than that.
It’s difficult to peg why we are where we are on a particular issue that we’re facing. It just happens to be whatever’s dominant on the news. I will say this. People can feel the effects of how inflation is affecting their purchasing power.
Just in the general day‑to‑day, what are we seeing? We’re seeing, for example, that if we’re going to fill up our tank, it’s more expensive than it was last year. If we’re looking at company’s behaviors, we’re seeing a pullback of them eating the cost of…shipping stuff for free. They want to drive people buying from them, but they’re no longer willing to erode into their profit margins.
For that reason, things are becoming more expensive. We are seeing the effects of inflation in a real practical sense as people go and shop with it. It’s just difficult to peg it to something particular, which by the way, doesn’t make it easy as something to solve. You can’t just come point and then be like, “We’ll get the trucks on the road,” and then inflation will disappear.
It doesn’t work that way. That’s not the way that these numbers end up affecting people’s day‑to‑day lives and how they can be [indecipherable 8:06] a better term, manipulated or fixed with some policy change or with some behavior change. It’s just not that simplistic to say just pull that lever and things will be better.
Mark: When you create your plans for your clients and it’s the Make It Last plan, income, investment, taxes, estate, you need to plan for all four of those areas.
The 100‑year average typically for inflation is around three percent. That’s historical. We’ve been lower than that. We’ve been one and two percent in the last decade. Now it’s starting to rise and that 5 percent in September, 5.4 percent back in May. Inflation is one of those moving targets.
How does that factor in to your Make It Last plan? Do they think about inflation or is it just something they deal with? How do you deal with that in your retirement plans?
Victor: You got to separate out, Mark, for people that are existing clients, for the people that we might be meeting at any particular time due off of it because our existing clients already have received in their plans a set of assumptions where inflation higher than normal.
People thought we were nuts. When we would model out our income plans, we would model two variables that they would say, “Well, I’m not sure that I’m OK with that. Is that really going to happen?”
For example, we would bring them out to age 97. Of course, life expectancy is less than that, but I would say to clients, “Hey, listen, I don’t want you moving in with me if you run out of money. We’re going to make sure that the money lasts at least until that age.”
The other thing that we would do is we would set our inflation assumption numbers three percent or higher, depending on what was going on. People say, “Inflation hasn’t been at that number for a period of time.” I say, “That’s exactly the reason why we want to model our plan on the worst case scenario, or at least in the most conservative way that we can.”
Our existing clients are actually really comfortable with this news coming out. We haven’t received a single phone call from anyone saying, “Has this negatively affected my plan?” in this year where inflation might be four or five percent. They knew that when we created the plan in the first place, we had already assumed a variable, a number associated with inflation that was higher than normal.
That meant that we could withstand this change completely without affecting what our plan had been in the beginning. We could stick with the plan. It was going to work because we already had assumed a more conservative stance on the way inflation was going to be affecting it.
Now, for people that are outside that haven’t come through our process, have not had a plan with this before, if you’re sitting listening, like, “Well, how does it affect my plan?” I would say what is your plan right now? Have you already included inflation? If you’ve included inflation at what were it previously, the last 10 years’ worth of numbers, I’m going to say it is going to affect your plan.
You probably need to have it revisited. You can certainly reach out to us to come in, review that with a set of assumptions that are a little bit more in tune with what today is going to look like and what potentially could happen.
The practical of it, by the way, is that if you have not taken a look at the way inflation has affected it, you need to do that for two essential reasons.
The first reason is, all of a sudden inflation if is higher than what you assumed when you put your plan together, it means that you’re going to need more money to live the same life that you needed before. You have to know what the effect of that is going to be.
There’s a second, though, Mark, sneaky thing that comes in that most people don’t recognize, which is that as inflation increases, so does the risk of something called bracket creep. That’s a term of art and financial professionals.
What it means is that the unintended consequences of having inflation, and even things like increases in Social Security, push your income tax bracket to the next taxable rate.
The reason why this is important for you is because if all of a sudden, the way that these numbers have changed your income tax, the fact that you might need more money to come out to stay the same or the fact that you might be awarded more social security and therefore more taxable income.
It means that the federal government is going to take a bigger percentage of the next dollar that you are taxed on than they did the year before.
That means that you’re going to have less purchasing power as well. There’s really a two‑pronged effect about why you need to pay attention to inflation. The first is because you’re going to need more money as a whole nest egg calculation.
The second is that the federal government is going to take more of your money in income taxes. Now you have to plan for having less money in your pocket to spend. Both of those are factors that do affect how long your money lasts when you put a retirement plan together.
Mark: It sounds to me like just because we’re getting a 5.9 percent increase to those social security recipients for 2022, that doesn’t mean go book your trip to the Bahamas or Hawaii is what you’re saying?
Victor: Yeah, don’t all of a sudden spend 5.9 percent more on your vacation because you’ve just gotten a pay raise from the federal government. It doesn’t work out that cleanly. It’s not that linear in terms of the calculation.
I like the idea that from the perspective of guaranteed money. That’s a lot of where people are trying to get to with their income plan. When we try to put an income plan together for you, what we’re trying to do is make sure that you can sleep well at night because every month you know that there’s a certain amount that’s going to be guaranteed.
I do like the idea that the guaranteed bucket is going up in some respect by what the Social Security is increasing, that little percentage that’s in there, that’s helpful. It’s helpful to know that we don’t have to create those guarantees from other sources. That’s great.
It also shouldn’t lead us to think that we have all of that as spendable money. All of the other factors that come into putting a plan together need to be incorporated. It’s one of the reasons why, Mark, in our Make It Last plan, we include not just the income assessment, but also looking at investments, as we were just discussing, taxes. Then with estates at the end.
Those tax components is a necessary component, what needs to be calculated and factored in. At the end of the day, we need the whole plan to work together. Not just one element on the income, but the whole plan together in order to understand that you’re going to be OK.
To come back again, great that Social Security is increasing like that, in terms of just a general objective concept, but it’s not the end of the discussion. We need to see how it factors in with the overall plan, which is, of course, we work with a holistic view on what we’re doing taking all of these things into consideration when we put our plans together.
Mark: As we wrap up this segment, I’m going to give you a couple things you can do. If you would like to know more, you can go get the report on income for retirement. It’s 920income.com, that Victor and the team have created for you. It’s some great information, some background information.
How do we look at income in retirement? How do we do this? Where do we pull income from? How do we get it? Are there guaranteed incomes and there’s maybe income from the investment world. 920income.com. It’s free. Just go there, and you can download that. 920income.com
You can always call the team though. You’ve got questions, “Boy, there’s a lot of craziness going on in the world. I want my retirement to be based on me and the hard work I have done, not on Washington and Wall Street.” 856‑506‑8300. Everybody’s situation is different. Our hopes and dreams are different. What we want to do every day in retirement is different.
Mark: I want to play golf, Victor doesn’t. I’m not going to hold that against him though. That’s OK. 856‑506‑8300. No cost, no obligation, no judgment. All right, we’re just getting started. We’re going to come back, we’re going to talk, retirement checklists when we come back. Stay with us. This is Make It Last with Victor Medina.
Mark: Welcome back to Make It Last with Victor Medina of Medina Law Group and Palante Wealth. Victor and the team are here to help you create a plan. It’s called the Make It Last plan for your retirement. Got to have a plan and a strategy for income.
Is it going to be what‑if income because it’s all in the market or are there going to be some guaranteed income in there? Maybe you’re lucky enough to have a pension. You’ve got Social Security. You’ve created your own income pension plan through the insurance world.
Victor and the teams can help you in the insurance world and the investment world. When they help you in the investment world, they are under the fiduciary standard ‑‑ morally, legally, ethically obligated to do what is in the client’s best interest.
If you have any questions about things that maybe you got a little stress about. “I’m retiring in five years. I think I’ve done the right things, but I’m not really sure.” What a perfect reason to call the team. They’re here to help. 856‑506‑8300. 856‑506‑8300.
Victor, we’re going to get into a retirement checklist. I know you have 920checklist.com. We can go, and is that an actual checklist that we can go look at and see? Is that what it is? 920checklist.com?
Victor: Yeah. What we did, Mark, is we created a set of about 30 to 35 things that people can go through and see how they line up on what an optimal checklist would be in preparation for retirement. Here’s the way that would work.
You would go to 920checklist.com. You’d enter in your information. We would send it off. As you go through those items, I don’t want you to think, “Jeez, if I am missing some, that means it’s a complete failure.” I’ll tell you that no one goes through that and hits 100 percent.
By the way, it wouldn’t be the case. Unless you’ve retired before, you wouldn’t know that you needed to do all of these things. But if you start to go through that process and you then identify areas that you haven’t paid attention to yet, those would be a good use of that checklist to say, “Now maybe I should be focusing on this particular area to make sure that I’m ready for retirement.”
Then, of course, if you’re in a position where you look at the list that’s in there and says, “I know that I need to attend to these things but I need some help along the way.” Then, of course, we’re there to help you with that. That’s what we do for everyone all day long when we bring them with the retirement planning.
You can certainly reach out to us at, if you are interested at 856‑506‑8300 to start that process. Just downloading the checklist at 920checklist.com and entering your name and email and having us send it to you, will start the process of knowing these 30 or 35 things that you can start to focus on. See how you compare with what an optimal readiness for retirement would look like.
Mark: I think I can check 3 or 4 of the boxes, but I’m only 61. How would I know more than that at this point? It’s really interesting to see that, though. There will be things you’ve never thought of that will be in there ‑‑ 920checklist.com,
Here’s the challenge, Victor, for a lot of Americans. Certainly, I think people that call you, they’re probably not in the 44 percent who are worried they will never retire. That is the overall theme of retirees these days. Americans are not really sure if we are going to be able to retire.
44 percent of Americans are worried they will never be able to retire, which is at an all‑time high. That’s from the latest SimplyWise Retirement Confidence Index. We’re going to walk you through some of these boxes on this checklist.
Victor, when somebody comes in for first time. “Hey, we heard your radio show. We like what you saying. We’d like to learn more. How can you help us? How can you help me come up with that Make it Last plan for me and my retirement, so I have a little more confidence moving forward?” How do you help determine how prepared a new client is for retirement?
Victor: It’s a great question. That probably involves two major areas. Either one of them is good for a radio show in terms of our discussion here today. One of them is going to be depended on the person, individual, what they are, they’re tailored for that.
The two areas we focus on is their emotional readiness for retirement and, of course, their practical and financial readiness. The emotional readiness for retirement is the idea that you’re going to change the identity of who you are.
You spent 40, 50 years working. You’re now no longer going to be a working person. How are you going to handle that? How are you going to setup what your purpose is going to be?
As we get to the actual financial or practical readiness for it, what we look at is, first of all, how inline are their expectations with what their opportunities are. Somebody coming in with $10 million and expecting to spend very little of it, they’re going to be very ready for retirement. There’s a lot of stuff that they can do and still be OK.
Then, if we go on the flipside, somebody with just $100,000, but a hot, big, long list of stuff that they want to buy, probably not too ready for retirement at all. We got to educate them through that.
For most of our clients they’re in that middle slot of having a reasonable expectation of what they’re going to live life like in retirement and a good healthy amount of a nest egg ready to get going forward. Now, we have to walk them through the rest of that checklist that looks at a few key areas that we need to focus on.
Their income. How are they going to fund healthcare? Risk management. How are they going to plan for taxes and making sure that their estate planning is in place? We are going to focus on those five areas primarily to line them up with how ready they are for retirement. Are things in the right position for them?
Mark: 856‑506‑8300. If you’ve never thought of all of these different areas…A lot of people think, “My retirement plan are my investments.” Well, investments are really important to the success of your retirement, but they’re not a plan. They’re just tools in your retirement toolbox.
If you’d like to learn more about how this Make It Last plan might give you a little bit more confidence going forward, 856‑506‑8300. 856‑506‑8300. In the Make It Last plan, Victor, you do start with income.
How important is it to have a budget? If you don’t like the word budget, a spending plan. That looks at it more positively.
I think we look at a diet as negative, and a budget as negative, but both obviously can be looked at positively as well. How do you look at the income part of this? That’s where you start in the Make It Last plan.
Victor: I think, by the way, you have made a distinction that is really helpful for people, Mark. There is a difference between what kind of a budget, which I think is restrictive, versus a spending plan which is a little bit more liberal about how they’re going to enjoy or get into retirement.
I think it’s very important, by the way, for people to have thought through what their spending plan is going to look like. What is it that they’re going to need money for? There’s the component of it that are necessary expenses. Stuff that keeps a roof over their head and keeps their food on the plates, and things like that.
There’s also a aspirational element of it. What do they want to do in retirement, their travel budget, going to see their family and maybe even helping to support grandkids through college? Something like that.
They have the desire off of it. It’s important for you to think through that. You need to know what that looks like. We can’t answer any questions for you about whether or not you’re going to be OK until we understand a little bit more about what you want to be OK about.
If that includes living a particular life, if you haven’t gone through the process of understanding what that life is going to look like, it’s going to be difficult for us to answer the question for you. One of the things that we do is we walk people through that process.
In fact, when we meet with them for the first time, we spend a lot of time with you. If you are going to come in to talk about what are you trying to do in retirement, what is it that your goals are? What do you expect retirement to look like for you?
By the way, that would be the case, whether or not you are gearing up for retirement in 5 or 10 years, or if you’re there already. How have you been living retirement and how’s it been working out?
That element about where your money is going, what does that spending plan look like? Both in the near‑term, this year, next year, as well as in the long‑term, about what legacy you want to live behind, or how are you going to fund your own long‑term care if you needed it.
Those answers to questions like that help us contextualize what that plan needs to look like for you to be successful, as we look at what the chess pieces on the board are and how do we might have to arrange them for you to have better chance of success.
Mark: 856‑506‑8300 is the number. 856‑506‑8300. Of course, you can always get the white paper at 920checklist.com. 920checklist.com.
When we think about all of this, and Social Security, hey, 5.9 percent bump for those in 2022 and we can go to Hawaii. That’s all good now.
There are so many moving parts to this retirement puzzle. All these other areas you talked about ‑‑ income, healthcare, risk management, tax efficient strategies, estate legacy planning, all these moving parts. We need to know about how the income that we are creating, how is that also going to figure into how are we going to be taxed.
Wait, Social Security in 1935, FDR said, “We’re never going to tax it.” 1983 they said, “No, we changed our mind. We are going to start taxing it.” 1993 they said, “Hey, we are going to tax you up to a 90 or 85 percent of your Social Security.” How does all this factor in when you put income and all that, when you put it in with taxes?
Victor: It’s funny because that taxes, the one that comes and bites you into April, after the year that you earned all that money. Sometimes there’s a big tax bill that is due, that you didn’t expect. You hope to do some planning, so you don’t have to handle it in the future.
Of course, Mark, we know that there’s going to be, at least currently on the laws a change of the tax rates in 2026 that’s going to affect the way that our plan needs to be put together. We help navigate around that land mine.
Taxes are the big thing. I tell people, Mark, all the time that you are unheralded, unwelcomed partner in retirement as the IRS.
When you retire, you got a business partner in your retirement. That is the IRS. The problem with that is that business partner gets to rewrite your operating agreement any time he or she wants to do that. When IRS says, “We are going to take more of your money as part of the profits that we are distributing,” they just come and take it.
The sooner and the earlier we can get them out of it, the more we can limit the damage that they can do, the better that we are going to be in terms of retirement. Taxes are a big thing off of it. They are a big part of the planning that we need to do.
In terms of the entire spectrum of what retirement looks like, it’s not just how we can handle taxes in this year. We think, for example, for a married couple how taxes are going to change when one spouse dies. Your filing status moves from married filing jointly down to single, which, of course, means that your taxes are going to increase as those brackets shrink.
We have to think about how we’re going to get people to keep more of their money in that kind of planning. The trick about it, Mark, by the way, is that most people think about their taxes as a reactive matter. They look at what taxes they have to pay for this year and then, they go complete their tax preparation and pay it.
We think about taxes as a proactive matter. We do a lot of tax planning for our clients when the year begins. For clients that come in, if you were to come in, we would say, “Hey, listen, we want to look at your taxes January for this year and help you navigate, for the next year or so, what your tax profile is going to be, so that April’s not a surprise.”
Not just this April, but every April after this doesn’t come as a surprise. The more proactive that we can be with your tax planning, the better off you are going to be in retirement, because, of course, the more money that you are going to put and keep in your pocket.
I would say, Mark, that the taxes is probably one of the most important and probably underrepresented areas of planning that people should consider when they put a plan together and as they go through their checklist in terms of writing this for retirement, because taxes are a sneaky little guy that comes and takes money from you, when you least can afford to have them do that.
Mark: Which is why it’s part of the Make It Last plan. Income, investments, taxes, and estate planning. That’s what Victor and the team will create in conjunction with you. Remember, it’s your retirement. It’s your hopes and dreams. What are you going to do? You’re the CEO.
Look at Victor’s teams at Medina Law Group and Palante Wealth as your CFO, if you will. Your chief financial officer to help guide you along the way.
At the end of the day, it’s your decision. Maybe it’ll come down to a couple options and you make the decision. Victor is not going to tell you have to do this, or you’re never going to have any success in retirement.
There might be some hard things that he’s got to say to you. Or he might say, “I don’t even know why you came in,” or “You’ve already won the game, retire, go have a great time.” Most of us don’t know where we need to be.
That’s why this is so important. It’s putting a plan together. 856‑506‑8300
Last thing for this segment, because it’s part of certainly retirement planning, is we do have to look at debt. We do have to look at, “Hey, Victor, I owe 75,000 on my house. I got 500 grand in my IRA. I just want to pay the house off.”
That’s sounds easy, but there’s tax implications in that. If you’re pulling it from the IRA that’s never been taxed, that 75 is not going to be 75.
There are debts that are good. There are debts that are bad. How do you…That’s a part of this plan, ain’t it?
Victor: It has to be a part of the plan, Mark, because, at any point in time, people are going to walk in with their picture of what they owe the rest of the world. Some of it is as straightforward as you mentioned in terms of mortgages.
There are other people who might come in with some consumer debt. Of course, we’ve got some philosophies about that. I think people shouldn’t have consumer debt going into retirement, try to retire that, because of the interest rates that are associated with how that is serviced. You owe more on interest than even the principal would be if you paid that off just on the minimum.
At the end of the day, we want to look at your overall debt picture. The debt picture affects the overall success chances because of the amount of income that we have to generate for that. People have to remember that if you come into retirement, you are manufacturing your own paycheck in retirement. There’s nobody paying you any longer.
There’s going to be some portion of that that might be guaranteed, maybe from Social Security if you’re lucky enough to have a pension.
The rest of that has got to be generated by the nest egg that you’ve saved. When you’re in that situation, if you put a lot of stresses on the paycheck that has to be created because of the debt that you’re carrying, it affects the rest of your planning.
All of these things are interwoven with one another where your investments have to perform a certain way in order to generate enough income to service this debt. When we look at it, we just want to make sure that as you enter into retirement, you have the best chance for it.
Let me give you a good example about where the rubber really meets the road on this, which is that, I have a client that is looking to do some home repairs right now. When she does that, she’s looking at either taking more money out of her IRA or creating some debt in a home equity line of credit.
We walked through the actual numbers about where she was going to be best. It turns out that if she borrowed some money on her home equity line of credit, and then slowly pay that off over two years, she was going to be better off because of the way the income taxes were going to be higher if she took all of that money out of the IRA to pay for these home improvements.
We need to look at the entire picture. We do that for all of our clients. If you’re coming to this process, we would look at the debt that you have and the relationship with you over the years of the debt that you might need to create, in order for you to live the life that you want into retirement and just to make sure that you’re going to be OK at the end.
Mark: Here’s a stat from you from Modern Wealth Survey. It was Charles Schwab that did this. It says only 33 percent of Americans have a written financial plan, which means almost 70 percent of us do not. That is certainly what Victor and the team at Palante Wealth can create for you. This plan, a written income plan, a written Make It Last plan ‑‑ income, investment, taxes, and estate.
You actually know where you are, what to look forward to, what may be challenges you have or the successes you’ve had, and maybe you’re good to go. Everybody’s situation is a little bit different. That’s why it starts with a phone call, 856‑506‑8300.
You can get the checklist, 920checklist.com. No cost for any of this. 920checklist.com or give the team a call. Come in and chat with them. You can do a phone call, a Zoom meeting in person. Your choice. 856‑506‑8300. We’re going to continue with our retirement checklist right after this. This is Make It Last with Victor Medina.
Mark: Glad you’re with us today for Make It Last with Victor Medina, Medina Law Group and Palante Wealth. Victor has been featured on national television, the “Wall Street Journal,” “The Huffington Post,” “US News,” and “World Report.”
Of course, he is the local director of an a capella group. If you’d like to hire them, the price is, right now. During the holiday season in the fourth quarter, it will be very extravagant. There’s going to be a lot of money you’re going to have to pay to see the a capella group led by Victor Medina. You can call him and ask. 856‑506‑8300.
We’re talking about the retirement checklist. Victor and the team have put together a checklist that you can just go download. 920checklist.com. You can see all these different parts of retirement planning.
Where are we? Can we check a lot of these boxes? They’re 30 to 34 boxes. I think 30‑35 boxes. If you can check like 28 of those, you’re way ahead of the game would be my guess. If you can get to half of them, that’s probably good. If you can check them all, you probably should have retired a few years ago.
It’s a good idea to look through this. Things that you maybe have never thought about because you’ve never retire before. 920checklist.com.
The Make It Last plan starts with income. Then it goes into the investment world. It heads into the tax world, and it’s not your CPA looking back a year in April to try to figure out what did you win or lose the game? No, it’s looking ahead 5 years, 10 years. How do we factor in taxes down the road?
We all think taxes are going up. We know that Trump tax law ends at the end of 2025. January 1st of 2026, we revert back to the 17 brackets and rates if the Biden administration does not do anything. We know they are going to do something is what they’re saying. We think taxes are going up.
Of course, the last phase of the Make It Last plan is an estate plan ‑‑ your wills, your trust, and all of that. We’re talking about some of these retirement topics. What are the challenges?
I would think for somebody like me, Victor, I came from the sports world, not the financial world. I have a great time doing the show with you because I’ve gained so much insight and knowledge.
I would have no idea. I’ve got 401(k). I’ve got an IRA. I’ve got ROTHs in both of those worlds as well, but I wouldn’t know what to pull from first. Do I have a plan for year 1, 0 through 5, and 6 through 10, and 11 through 15? How do we figure all of that out? Where do we pull from? How do we do it? That’s a big question, I would think that a lot of people have.
Victor: That’s probably the number one question of people that come in because even as they try to generate their income, and when they retire, they generate their paycheck, they are pulling from certain accounts, and they want to know that they’re doing it the right way.
That probably is the number one question is how do we position these assets? What bucket do I take from first? That’s probably one of the best ways that we can help you gain peace of mind is to get that plan together for you. This is where we’re going to take these accounts.
We’re going to take money from [indecipherable 35:33] these accounts. By the way, it also includes perhaps for a lot of people repositioning those accounts so that we have the best chance of success going forward.
When we think about where we’re going to be pulling money from, there’s any number of factors that go into that. For example, from the taxability of the accounts to the time horizon, about when we need that money, to eventually what we need that money to do for us.
In other words, when we pull it out, where’s it getting spent. Where it gets spent sometimes affects which account we pull it from. Those factors jumbled together helps us create a plan for how these investments need to be set up in order for you to really have the best chance for retirement.
If you’re in a position where you don’t know what that looks like, if you just think for example, that you got to drop the bucket down the well and pull up $4,000 anytime that you need $4,000 for that month, and keep doing that, you probably could benefit from coming into see us and getting a second opinion about where to take that money from or how to position those assets.
By the way, we do that 100 percent for free for folks. You just reach out to us, and you give us a call at 856‑506‑8300. What we’ll be able to do is walk you through what our Make it Last plan would look like. If it’s something that you love, then maybe we can do that for you.
If it’s something that you’ve already got setup and we look at you and say, “Hey, you’re good to go,” and we don’t do anything after that, but it costs nothing to get started, and probably is a good way of being able to sleep a little better at night.
When we get to the way things need to be setup in which accounts, as I mentioned, taxability becomes one of those elements. I think some people might have some inkling on that. You were talking a little bit earlier about how you have 401(k)s and IRAs.
When you set those up, people let you know when you do that, “Hey, this is tax free going in, maybe even tax deductible on your account, but when you go to take this money out, it’s going to be taxable.” We need to think about the taxes on that.
I tell you, one of the ones that is a little bit more sneaky for folks is the time horizon. When we put plans together, what we look at is the time horizon for money because our investment strategy is going to shift.
Whether we need that money immediately, 1 year from now, the next 2 to 7 years or 7 or 10 years after that, because it’s going to affect our investment strategy. When we need that money starts to dictate what that money needs to be invested in, in order to do the things that we need that money to do, when we need it to do it.
I know that doesn’t give a lot of hard answers in terms and investments. The truth of the matter is it is going to change from person to person, based on the time horizon that they have and the nest egg that they’re starting. In principle, this is what’s important is that you need to have a strategy around when you’re going to be using this money and then allocate your investments to that strategy.
If you haven’t gone through that process yet, then it is worthwhile coming in and having us let you know what our strategy would be if we were in your shoes. Then, you can take that and either going to run with it with us, or you can run away from us if you don’t like us. [laughs]
The idea would at least you get a second opinion on how you need to have this stuff positioned in order to have the best chance for your retirement.
Mark: The biggest fear amongst retirees is still the fear of outliving their money, where Victor said, ”We make our plans, the Make It Last plan out to the age of 97.” I’m not going to live that long. What if you decide most of my families live to the early 80s? Just make it go to 83. What if you lived to 84 or 85? Then, what happens?
Victor says you can’t live with him. You need to plan for all of this. That’s the idea. You sit down with somebody that has helped other families retire successfully. We all have challenges. There’s no question about it. How do we handle those?
The first thing is to get a plan. That Make It Last plan that Victor and the team can create for you is about you. It’s all about you. What do you want? What are you going to do? How are you going to spend your time? Do you need to get a new car in the first three years of retirement? Are you going to take the family to Hawaii? What are you going to do?
856‑506‑8300. We need a plan. 856‑506‑8300 is the number. When you go to your Make It Last plan, we start it with the income, then we go to the investments. Do you buy that a lot of people think their investments are their retirement plan?
Victor: They think that. A lot of folks come in with the junk drawer of their investments, that junk where you’ve got in your kitchen or in your house. It [indecipherable 39:29] your Chinese food menus, your chip clips, your pair of scissors, and the adapter to the air compressor to blow up the basketball in your house. At least that’s what’s in mine.
People look at that drawer and just say, “Well, it’s in there.” They’re going to open the drawer. They can drag it out. If you have one of those junk drawers in terms of your investment, you know that there’s a benefit to organizing that and making sure that you have what you need when you need it. It’s put in the best position for you.
I do think that most people come in thinking that their investments are their retirement without having gone through that extra step of how they’re going to use it. When we walk people through our Make It Last plan, one of the things that we look at, Mark, is we look at what’s in good order.
We also looked at what needs addressing. That’s one of the elements of each of the panels of income, investments, tax, and estate. We look at what needs addressing, and then we give our recommendations on how to address it. If you’re in a situation where you could benefit from a second opinion and be like, “OK, I know that I have my investments, but how am I going to use them in retirement?”
We might come up with a set of recommendations of what needs addressing about, “Look, you don’t have these things positioned to use them correctly. These are the areas that needs addressing.” Then you come in the next panel and you get our recommendations from that.
You could benefit a lot from that document itself, where he’s like, “Oh, I see now how it’s more than just what my investments are, but really about how we use them in order that we have the best chance for success and have these things positioned the right way.”
It is the marriage of the two, the idea of getting idea what needs to be addressed and also what their recommendations are to solve the problem that makes the Make It Last plan so beneficial for people that are entering retirement.
Mark: Again, if you like this checklist, just go to 920checklist.com. You can get that right there. 920checklist.com. You want to sit down and talk to the teams about where you are. It is the perfect time to do this, probably five to eight years out. It’s not a week out, not that Victor and the team can’t help you.
They can, probably, but they can certainly do more if you give him a little more time to help you get more ready for retirement. They can even help you after you’ve retired, but it just makes more sense to go as soon as you…When you start thinking about retirement, go talk to somebody that works in the retirement planning world.
It’s different that the brokerage world where it’s about sales and all of that. Retirement planning is about you. What do you need? What do you want? How do we help you create a plan? That’s 856‑506‑8300. Again, there’s no cost for this.
Another challenge for retirees, we’re not going to spend a lot of time on this, but that would be healthcare. We know Medicare is an issue. Once when I get 65, I would never have to worry about healthcare ever again, but anybody that’s been on Medicare knows that’s not exactly the case.
That doesn’t handle long‑term care. The rule of Medicare is basically if you are going to get better, Medicare will help. If you are not going to get better, Medicare is not a part of it any more. Good luck to you.
There’s a lot of moving parts. I think a lot of people think once I hit 65, Medicare will take care of everything. That’s not really the case, is it?
Victor: It’s not the case. I think people go through our Medicare counseling process where we look at their healthcare, and then finally recommend for them, for example, that they purchase a Medicare supplement, and it can’t be surprise to folks.
I know people want a good healthcare going in there, but lot of people do believe that Medicare will be 100 percent of what they need without having spent any more money other than what they take our of your Social Security. When we see this, we actually recommend a supplement.
Here’s the reasons why, based on the way you’re going to use it. It could be a little eye opening for folks that are going to fund some level of their healthcare going forward. It is a way for controlling what your copays are going to be, what those things that are going to be out‑of‑pocket and making sure that you get a comfortable set of healthcare benefits once you’re in retirement.
As you mentioned, Mark, beyond that, there’s also funding for what your long‑term care is going to look like. As you mentioned, it’s not a part of your healthcare that’s covered by Medicare. If it looks like you are not going to get better, you’re going to need persistent care.
If you’re in that situation, a lot of people don’t want to be there and we don’t want to be there either, but the reality is that you might come down with a form of dementia, or you might have Parkinson’s, or you might have something that’s going to require consistent and persistent care in order for you just maintain your same quality of life.
Getting home healthcare aides in or maybe paying for an assisted‑living facility. What is that going to do to your retirement plan? What is it going to do to the retirement plan of your spouse? How’s it going to affect their quality of life?
Geez, if you haven’t taken a look at that and if you haven’t had a plan put together, this is, by the way, where one of the benefits, the unique areas where we can both do the legal and the financial planning for folks, comes to really help clients out. Where we can take a look and say, “Listen, there’s these financial strategies to help you get ready for retirement.”
There are also these legal planning strategies that will help safeguard things like your home and help safeguard a nest egg for you if you happen to need long‑term care in the future, where clients really benefit.
If you haven’t gone through a process of preparing for retirement where you know and have gotten some certainty around the idea that you have both put in place legal and financial planning to help you navigate retirement, I think it’s certainly worth a chance to talk to us, reach out to us. Give us a call at 856‑506‑8300.
Reach out to us and get second opinion about what that plan looks like. I will tell you there’s so many folks that don’t look at this, bury their heads in the sand. When this thing lands on them, just get devastated by their lack of planning. We don’t want that to be you.
We want to get you in the best position possible, but that can only be done if we do planning before the need gets there which is reason why we want to reach out as soon as possible.
Mark: Every year, more than half a million Americans file for bankruptcy due to medical bills. You need a plan. 856‑506‑8300 is the number to chat with the team. Victor and the team are there. They’d love to help. They just don’t know if they can until they hear your situation. 856‑506‑8300.
We are going to our final segment of today’s program. We are going to go into estate planning and the wills. What do we need? What are all those legal things that we need? That’s where we’re headed in our final segment. This is Make It Last with Victor Medina of Medina Law Group and Palante Wealth.
Mark: Glad you’re with us today for Make It Last with Victor Medina of Medina Law Group and Palante Wealth. Medina Law Group, that’s your estate planning certified elder law action right there Medinalawgroup.com.
Palante Wealth, that’s holistic planning for your retirement. Palantewealth.com. Of course, these companies are Victor’s companies, they work together.
The Make It Last retirement plan that you’re going, “Hmm, I don’t really have a plan. I think I’m doing OK. I think I’ll be OK when I get to retirement, but I don’t really know for sure.” What a great time to call and say, “Hey, I think I’m doing well,” or “I’m not really sure where I am. Victor, I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to retire.”
That’s what 44 percent of Americans think. They’ll never going to be able to retire because they don’t know. Why not call and find out. 856‑506‑8300.
Are there areas that you need to shore up? Are there areas you’ve already won the game? Maybe you’ve already won the game. You could have retired five years ago. Who knows? Until you talk with the team. 856‑506‑8300.
All right, Victor, for most of the show, you’ve had your holistic planning hat on, your certified financial planner professional hat on. Now I want you to take that hat off and slide it over and pull up your estate planning and your certified elder law attorney hat, and put it on because now we’re going to talk about…
We’re talking about a retirement checklist. You can get the checklist, 920checklist.com. 920checklist.com. A lot of [indecipherable 47:41] , 30‑34 boxes you need to check and good luck if you can. If you can check them all, my hat is off to you. Enjoy your retirement.
There’s a lot of areas that are moving here, but the one ‑‑ the estate and elder law stuff ‑‑ what do we need? Powers of attorney and all of that. There’s a lot of stuff here, ain’t there?
Victor: Yeah, there is a lot. It’s funny. You should mention the benefit of going through this process and not knowing if you’re going to be OK and how many people feel that way. I remember there was somebody that became a client recently, and was referred to us from somebody else that was already working with us.
They reflected back to the person that sent us our way. I was so happy that I gave him a call because I was able to sleep well at night, knowing that I would be OK. One of the best pieces of news that we can give folks is that they’re going to be OK. If they follow our plan, they’ve got their best chances for retirement.
As we were talking about, this last panel that we have is an estate planning. By the way, my hat for estate planning is a much more serious hat, much more serious looking hat, of course, if I’m going to be a lawyer. It’s going to have dark colors, and it’s going to be very stark. It’s going to be very, very impressive hat.
I’ve got my estate planning hat on or my elder law hat on. By the way, I think there’s a lot of people that think about elder law like, “Well, that’s not me yet.” They do want to be an elder. I don’t want them to be an elder either, but I do think that there is a necessary element of your planning that has to consider what happens when you get older.
If you plan to get older…If you want to die young, maybe you don’t need to think about elder law, but if you want to get older, you probably need to think about elder law planning as a function of your overall planning. These ducks that you have to get in a row are things that are going to come in into your life, whether or not you choose for them to happen.
You’re going to die at some point in time. You’re going to get old. You’re going to need a plan and make that happen. Unfortunately, I think that what has happened is most people believe that estate planning is just the function of getting two or three forms, and they’re just mimeographed or Xeroxed off of something and they just replace the name and they sign them.
Even that is not a plan. An estate plan is almost like a mini‑plan inside of your entire retirement plan. We need to think about what would happen if you became incapacitated, when you think about what happen when one spouse dies, when you think about what happens when you leave this money behind to your beneficiaries, and do we want a divorce and creditor proof.
All of these elements that come into making a cohesive plan so that when somebody becomes sick or when they die, you get the result that you want is a necessary component to an overall retirement plan.
You get, like those clients that I was talking about, which is that you get in position you’re sleeping well at night saying, “You know what? I don’t want anything bad to happen, but if something does, we’re going to be OK . We thought all this stuff through, and we put in place what we need to be all right.”
Mark: I think a lot of people still go, “Victor, come on. I don’t have that much. I’m not rich and wealthy. All the rich people have this.” Well, there are certainly examples in the recent past. Aretha Franklin, about a $60 million estate, didn’t have any of this. Prince was over a $200 million estate had none of this.
Let’s go back even a little farther, Walt Disney. Come on, Walt Disney. You got all this stuff going on. He had none of this stuff put in place.
Here’s my theory on this, if you hate your family, do none of this planning, because you’re just going to leave a mess. It’s going to cause them a lot of issues, but if you love your family, take the time to put this stuff together.
What are the things that we really need? Some people need a trust, a lot of people a will would work, I suppose. There’s powers of attorney and all those kinds of things. Even somebody that supports a radio guy like me, what do we need? The basics, and then as it gets deeper?
Victor: Yeah, definitely. I think that there are probably four documents that are part of the basic level of planning we talk to people…By the way, when we tell people that it costs the same in legal fees one way or the other, because I think a lot of people are afraid of getting more complicated with their plan because they think it costs more.
The truth of the matter is to have an inefficient plan, to have something that doesn’t work when you need it, it will actually be more expensive than paying for some of the stuff upfront. Let’s assume for a second that is exactly the same cost.
We really have four areas of documents that are probably most important for people to have in place to make sure that they’re going to be OK from the estate planning world.
The first by the way, they’re probably the easiest one is to think about some healthcare documents to make sure that you’ve got something in place. If you lose capacity, if you lose the ability to make decisions on your own, that you have the results that you want, if you had an healthcare event.
We think about this, like the advanced healthcare directive. What would happen if you became incapacitated, a terminal condition? Are you going to have CPR? Are you going to have a feeding tube? There’s those elements. We also want to make sure that we think about other things like what kind of intervention you want.
In the COVID world, we started updating our advanced healthcare directive to talk about intubation and being on a respirator or a ventilator, because it was going to be something that might hack folks, and they want to make sure that their wishes were documented in the plan that they have.
The second document that people want to have is a financial power of attorney. By the way, this is not a short document. If you have a financial power of attorney that’s only three or four pages long, I would challenge that you probably don’t have an effective, durable power of attorney when you need it.
Ours are almost 26 pages long. It’s not because the more pages are more impressive. It’s really because when you’re in the condition where you need a financial power of attorney and you’re incapacitated, it’s better to be over inclusive in the provisions because you cannot, by definition, sign a new one.
If you are missing a provision, it’s too late. Then we have this thing fail. We want as broad a power of attorney as we can put together. The other thing on those two documents is disability planning documents like your advance healthcare directive and your financial power of attorney, would you want them updated on a regular basis?
We think three years is a good time to review them. Certainly, if yours is 10 years or older, it’s absolutely time to get them updated and reviewed. The rules have changed so much in the last 10 years that there’s no way that that old document can capture everything that we have or need in place today.
We’re in that situation where we’re putting in those disability planning documents. Those are two of them. The other two, by the way, we do have a particular philosophy on this, Mark, because we think that everybody needs a will and we do believe that everyone needs a trust.
Now, as you were saying before, a lot of people look at a situation say, “Well, I’m not wealthy.” Trust is for Trust Fund babies. Those are for people that have a lot of money, but it’s really not the case at all. The trust is just an organizational tool.
We got this unfortunate byproduct where people think trust means rich people, and it doesn’t. It really is a tool that helps you organize your estate. For example, in New Jersey we still have an inheritance tax. When you die, the state freezes you accounts unless you have them owned by a trust.
I say to people, “Do you want your family to get the immediate access to your money when you die or do you want them to wait 18 months?” “I want them to have immediate access.” Well, you need a trust for that. “But I don’t have a lot of money.” The state doesn’t care.
The state doesn’t care whether you have a lot of money. They just want to make sure that they’re paid, which is why they freeze your assets. The only way to bypass that is to have a trust in place.
It becomes almost a reflexive part of the planning when we have people who are New Jersey residents, to go ahead and put a trust in place to make sure that they have that smooth flexibility of making the money available to their family and be able to manage that.
When we get to other elements of why a trust might be important, for example, if you own property in different states, or if you might move, or you might have a vacation home or things like that.
If you want privacy, or if you want to make sure that divorce protection is in place for your beneficiaries, your daughter, your son, you don’t want them to go to the in‑laws, those are all elements to put a trust in place as well.
If we think about those four documents, the advanced healthcare directive, the power of attorney, the will, and the trust, if you walk in with those four, you’re in a pretty good situation in terms of getting your ducks in a row as you enter retirement.
Mark: There’s so many moving parts in retirement. Think about it. We need income, where’s it going to come from when we get to retirement? Healthcare, how are we going to handle that? Medicare doesn’t handle long‑term care.
We didn’t even touch on the fact, what if you want to retire at 58 or 60 and now you’re five to seven years out away from Medicare, how are you going to handle healthcare during that interim time period?
That’s a big question for people. We’re seeing more and more people retire younger all the time. What about risk management? What about tax‑efficient strategies? Estate and legacy planning. There are so many moving parts.
That’s why Victor put together the checklist. 920checklist.com. 920checklist.com. Go see the 30, 34 boxes there and how many can you check off.
If you have any questions about any of that, it’s a perfect time to call 856‑506‑8300. 856‑506‑8300.
Remember, the Medina Law Group and Palante Wealth serve the Pennington, greater Mercer County area as well as Bucks County. Clients are in New Jersey and in Pennsylvania for the Medina Law Group and Palante Wealth. They’re here to help. It’s 856‑506‑8300.
Victor, we’ve got about a minute left. We covered a ton of ground today but we did not get into the price to hire the local a capella group. Do you have…?
Victor: [laughs]
Mark: Anything we need to cover here?
Victor: This is a great time to do that.
Mark: [laughs]
Victor: It’s a great time to do that. We should end with that. By the way, we are getting prepped to do holiday concerts.
We’re going to be over to Peddler’s Village over in Pennsylvania, in Bucks County, which is this, if you’ve never been there before, a really quaint area where you have these little shops. They do this whole holiday thing, and there was “Make it Snow” on command.
If you have a chance to go and do that, we’re actually getting booked to sing there early in the weekends in November 4. We do some holiday singing.
If you are interested, Jersey Transit, which is the name of the a capella group, is available for holiday singing, and, by the way, are good on the whole assisted‑living nursing home library circuit. There’s a place that we can come and sing, we would love to be able to do that. It only costs between 350 to 500 dollars depending how long of a set that you want.
I would tell you it’s a lot of fun. I think people like and enjoy the music that we come and do. This is certainly a lot of fun for us to perform for folks.
We don’t often have an opportunity to go and perform for people we love, the opportunity to come out. If you figure you’re going to get 12 to 13 singers out for like 500 bucks. It’s a bargain on a per‑singer basis to have it come out there.
Mark: Jersey Transit. There you go. We’re doing it all for you today. Remember, if you want the checklist, 920checklist.com. You want to sit down and chat with the team or you want to do a zoom call, or you just want to do a phone call.
[background music]
Mark: Here’s where I am. What do you think? 856‑506‑8300. The Jersey Transit, if you need the a capella.
Victor, I enjoyed it. We covered a lot of ground today. Enjoy the rest of the weekend. Have a great week. We’ll do it again next week.
Victor: Catch you soon, Mark. Bye‑bye.
Announcer: Taxes are just a fact of life. You can’t avoid it even in retirement, but what if I told you there are ways to minimize what you pay in taxes? Victor Medina and his team can help. To learn more, visit 920taxes.com to get your free copy of Victor Medina’s tax guide, 920taxes.com. That’s the numbers, 920taxes.com.
Mark: Palante Wealth Advisors are an independent financial services firm that utilizes a variety of investment and insurance products. Medina Law Group is an independent estate planning and elder law firm. Investment advisory services offered through Palante Wealth Advisors, LLC in New Jersey and Pennsylvania registered investment advisor.
Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Investing involves risk including the potential loss of principal. Any references to protection, safety, or lifetime income generally refer to fixed insurance products, never securities or investments.
Insurance guarantees are backed by the financial strength and claims paying ability of the issuing carrier.
This radio show is intended for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be used as a sole basis for financial decisions nor should it be construed as advice designed to meet the particular needs of an individual situation.
Medina Law Group and Palante Wealth Advisors are not permitted to offer, and no statement made during the show shall constitute tax or legal advice. Our firm is not affiliated with or endorsed by the US government or any governmental agency.
The information and opinions contained herein provided by third parties have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed by Medina Law Group and Palante Wealth Advisors.
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