Make It Last – Ep 86 – Sound Advice

January 2, 2019

Victor Medina is excited to announce that Make It Last will now be released as hour long segments and air Wednesday mornings at 11am on WCTC 1450AM radio. The hour segment is part of a featured series on WCTC Radio – Sound Advice. The featured series is where professional experts offer their knowledge on topics from financial guidance, to help with mortgages, and advice on healthy living.

This episode will be an introductory episode for the new Wednesday morning listeners. You will learn what makes Victor Medina qualified to give “sound advice” and what makes Medina Law Group and Private Client Capital Group unique.

Medina Law Group and Private Client Capital Group want to welcome all new listeners and to say thank you to all the dedicated listeners. We have a lot more to offer and hope you will stay on this educational journey with us.

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.

Click below to read the full transcript…

Victor J. Medina:  Everybody, welcome to Make It Last with Victor Medina. I can’t tell you how excited I am to welcome a brand new audience to a brand new format of a show that is going to be changing its time, its airing link.

Everything about it is brand new except for the people that are podcast listeners because you’ve been with us for 85 episodes, and yet, we’re welcoming a brand new audience to the start new year.

This is Make It Last, with Victor Medina. I’m your host Victor Medina. I want to talk a little bit about myself, to introduce this new audience, because we are brand new on a whole programming change at WCTC 1450 AM called “Sound Advice.” We’ve got a new airtime.

Those of you that are getting this on the podcasts or already downloaded onto your device, you’re like, “Well, what happened? I’m used to getting this on Saturday mornings.”

In fact, we took a couple of the weeks off preparing for the new show. We knew that on January 2nd we were going to be launching a brand new format as part of a programming shift that’s going on at the radio station.

We were one of a few number of programs that were asked to expand their programming from half an hour to one full hour. We’ve got a drive‑time programming slot at 11 o’clock in the morning on Wednesdays and re‑airing throughout the week.

One of the things I wanted to do was take a moment to welcome this brand new audience, talk a little bit about who I am, and why you should be listening to this show. Then we’ll go right back into some of the great stuff that we have been doing for the first 85 episodes of the program.

Look, there’s a brand new programming schedule going on at WCTC. If you haven’t heard the promos for it, it goes a little something like this. They have created a set of programs called Sound Advice.

The way it goes is, “There’s good advice, there’s great advice, and then there is Sound Advice. This is professional information and suggestions that really make a difference.”

Throughout the weeks ‑‑ we’re going throughout the week ‑‑ there’s local one‑hour programming designed to give people in the community knowledge, information, and guidance to help them make better decisions in their personal and professional lives.

They’ve got financial guidance and real legal guidance, which is this programming, helping with mortgages, staying healthy. There’s one on diet. There’s one on getting ahead in business. Right now there is my program called Make It Last.

I introduced myself as Victor Medina. I got to tell you a little bit about who I am and how I got here. One of the things I think that makes me unique is I am both a practicing attorney as well as a practicing financial adviser. I’ve got three businesses that are all related to helping people in retirement.

I’ve got a law practice that helps people do estate planning and asset protection planning around elder law events. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you get older and you’re worried about going into a nursing home or assisted living community or something like that.

You’re worried about making sure you have enough money to get to the end and one of those health care events doesn’t bankrupt you or bankrupt your spouse. We do a lot of legal planning in that arena.

Related to that, we do a good amount of retirement financial planning. People will come to us worried about how do they get through this third act of life? How do they get from retirement to the end of the time that they’ve got with all of their money intact, if they can do that, with leaving something behind, if they can do that as well.

We help put plans together for those individuals. Many times, people are clients of both of those entities. Really, they think about it is one single continuum. What we’re able to do is give them one set of holistic advice options by calling one number, coming to one office, speaking with one adviser team, and helping them both in the legal retirement and tax planning arena.

In order to do that, I had to get a number of certifications and qualifications. You can’t just go out there and say, “This is who I am.” You’ve got to have the goods in order to do that. One of the things that I’ve got is a Certified Elder Law Attorney designation, or a CELA. The people in the industry call it a CELA.

What it basically means is that I’ve passed an exam, demonstrated experience in a certain number of elder law matters, and have gotten peer review qualifications. Other CELAs, other attorneys would be like, “Yeah, he’s a good guy. You should go and talk to him. He knows what he’s talking about.” We’d gone ahead, submitted all that and got this designation.

Very few people have that. It absolutely is one of these things that I say, regardless if you work with us or our firm, “Anybody who is helping you with your elder law matters should absolutely be a Certified Elder Law Attorney if you want the very best advice.”

I’ve been practicing estate planning and elder law for about 15 years. It is the bulk of my entire legal career. I spent a very small amount of time clerking for a federal judge in Hartford, which was a fantastic experience.

You got to sit at the elbow of a federal district‑level judge, meaning a trial‑level judge. I spent about a year in closed chambers, me and another clerk, and the judge and his chambers team. We dealt with trial matters, we dealt with writing opinions. We just talked generally about the law.

It was a very enlightening and enriching academic experience, so intellectually stimulating to be around that. Did that for about a year.

Then I worked for a very, very large corporate firm outside of Boston and did that for a little while. Got transferred, I got another job in the Princeton, New Jersey area. I moved and I kept doing some corporate work for a team out there and then something happened in my life.

I had a family member who passed away and I was called in to help with their estate administration because at that time I was the only lawyer in the family, and they thought, “If you’ve got a law degree, you ought to be able to help us with our legal problems.”

Not understanding at all, of course that, that wasn’t my area of expertise. I mean, I could kind of fumble my way through it but it’s like medically, professionally. I went to medical school maybe I can answer some of the questions, but unless I’m a cardiologist you don’t want me handling your heart problems.

One of the things I did is said, “Look I’ll help the family member out because you need some help,” I dove in, both hands, rolled up the sleeves, really helped with that estate administration.

I discovered a number of things about the estate planning industry that opened my eyes about what we were doing to clients and lawyers in this industry, and how much better we could be doing if we put the client first.

If we thought about the entire spectrum of planning, and really reconceptualized it, completely rethought how we were going to be doing that, and took it away from what the party line had been. The idea there was really in estate planning the majority of estate planning attorneys think about their role with their clients is as people who produce documents.

A client will come and say, “I want a will, or I want a power of attorney.” It’s almost like taking an order at a sandwich place. They’re going to put a ham sandwich for you. If you want a power of attorney, here’s your power of attorney.

We’ve lost sight as attorneys from the counseling role that we were originally intended to have. Attorneys are there for advice, not necessarily just document production. Although producing documents can be an element of how we give that advice and what we do to get people better, to where they need to be.

The role is really a counseling role, and when we reconceptualized that, if somebody is concerned about estate planning, how do we counsel them to get a great result? It may not be just simply producing the document that they want. It might require a lot more than that. One of the things that we do is think about an entire continuum, spectrum or a journey of estate planning.

There is the time that you meet the client in the upfront first meeting, “What’s going on and what do you need?” Then you put some documents in place to do that, but then there’s the rest of that clients life.

It is just silly to think that documents you might have put in place 10, 15 years ago are going to somehow perfectly serve that client when they need them, when they become sick, when they become incapacitated, if they need a nursing home, when they eventually die, how to deal with their family afterwards and what they leave behind.

It’s silly to think that that one document set that you produced 15 years ago will work exactly when we need it. Conceptualizing the estate planning as a part of a journey, or a process, allows us to work with clients on a regular basis.

One of the things that makes my law firm extremely unique in the market place is that we offer a client care program that reexamines a client’s estate plan on an annual basis. Of course, in an extremely cost‑efficient manner because no one wants to pay for an estate planning every year, every year like it’s the first time that they’ve done that.

We’ve rethought that process to say, “What can we do to be able to reexamine that plan and tweak it for the moment, for that minute, to know that it will exactly work for that time period?” Then do that on an annual basis.

We’ve got to do it in a cost‑effective manner because we want people to, first of all, be able to afford it. Second, we want it to be something that they stick with because we know that there is a benefit if they always have an up‑to‑date plan.

Then we’ve got to think about that back‑end cost to, and I’ll tell you that that back‑end cost, the cost of administration actually using the plan when you need it is one of the things that is overlooked in almost every estate planning firm that I’ve ever been able to visit.

They look at the up‑front costs, they almost never look at the ongoing costs, and they definitely don’t want to talk to you about the back‑end costs, because the dirty little secret about the estate planning industry is that, that back‑end cost is where all of the money is made.

The messier you can make that last step, the more profitable it, in fact, is, for your firm. If you think about the estate planning journey as being a sum of costs all together, that should be the lowest overall cost.

You could really restructure everything, so that if you do some planning up front, and some planning in the rest of the plan, that time that you’ve got, and then you really address that back‑end planning and try to shrink that down, because that’s what’s in the client’s best interests to do.

You want to shrink that down. When you add up everything that you’ve spent on estate planning over the course of your life, it should be the lowest number. You, in fact, can get to the lowest number if you think about it that way.

Then we get back to this idea that I started with, which is that estate planning, and the provision of estate planning services, is really about putting a plan in place, giving advice and counseling, so that a family that meets with an estate planner like me, knows that they are going to get their ducks in a row, and be able to go through life’s journey with great confidence that the estate plan they put in place will work when they need it.

The last element to that, in my practice, which was a more recent addition in the 15‑year career or so, is this idea about elder law planning, because estate planning traditionally was nothing more than just getting your death documents in place.

If you were to die, get that will ready to go, or get that trust ready to go. If you happen to become incapacitated, get a great power of attorney to be able to help somebody manage that, and you can avoid a guardianship and the messiness when that happens.

That’s traditionally what has happened, but what if, in your life, what happens is that you need an assisted living facility? I know that there are clients that are with me, that meet me all the time, they say that that’s the last thing that they ever want to have happen, is to go into a nursing home or assisted living. I hope that for their life, they get exactly what they want. I hope they get to avoid that.

But the truth of the matter is that many times, we cannot control that. We cannot control what life deals us, and whether or not we are going to be in an assisted living facility or not. We can’t control whether or not our health takes a turn where we’re going to need assistance with activities of daily living, like dressing, bathing, and feeding ourselves.

If we’re married, we don’t know that our spouse is not going to go before us, and not be there to take care of us. The idea about elder law planning, and how we fold that into estate planning, is to say, “Your life, on the rest of this journey, is going to be walking through a minefield.”

We can help identify where potential mines will come in place, and help you navigate through that so that you don’t have a big mistake later in the future.

If you need assisted living, or if you need a nursing home, we can put a plan in place that will assist you in getting the greatest number of options, the greatest amount of flexibility, saving the most money, using the best sources to pay for your long‑term care, having this plan in place that will essentially make it so that you won’t be facing these problems in the future.

That combination of estate planning and elder law planning, looking at every client through the lens of, “Well, how can we put you in a great position right now, help you navigate the rest of the time you’ve got, and make it so that when you pass away or there’s a life event, that you have a smooth transition at the lowest overall cost?”

That’s what we want for a great estate planning experience. I’ll tell you, nothing jazzes me more than the opportunity to help clients with their estate planning, because it is one of the very few areas of law where you can leave people better than where you found them.

It is incredible that you can meet somebody who’s got a life like a mess right over here, and then give them a plan and a road map, so you know with confidence that they’re going to be in a great situation afterwards.

I love that. I love that, and I love being able to share information about that with the general community. I’ve done that a couple of different ways. One of the ways that I’ve done it is I’ve actually published two books. One of them is called “Make It Last: How to Get, and Keep, Your Legal Ducks in a Row,” and the other one’s called “Make It Last: Protecting Your Family from the Costs of Aging.”

That second book was recently published in October of 2018, and the Make It Last Ducks book, How to Get Your Legal Ducks in a Row, that was first published in 2016, but has been updated for 2018 and 2019.

Both of those are available on Amazon, you can purchase them by going to Amazon, and either purchasing a hard copy of the book, or downloading the Kindle version of it. Also available on iTunes.

Another way that you can get a free copy of the book…The other ones cost money, 20 bucks or so, fair price. Fair price for great information, about 120, 130 pages that walks you through exactly what you need to know for all your estate planning needs. That first, How to Get and Keep Your Legal Ducks in a Row, is really about foundational estate planning.

All of the principles that you should be aware of, when you go and get your estate plan done. Whether it’s with my firm or anyone else, there’s a set of interview questions at the end that you can and should take to any meeting with an attorney that you’re going to be doing your estate planning with.

That’s that first book, and then that second book is really focused on the cost of aging. Because the biggest swath of our population is Baby Boomers, that are turning 65. There’s 10,000 of them doing that every day between now and the year 2040. These people are going to have to face the costs of aging and deal with that. That second book really focuses on what that picture looks like.

Both of those are available for purchase at Amazon. However, in my firm, as a gift to people who make an appointment to come and see me, we give them a copy of that book in advance of the meeting. As our gift, as our thank you for making an appointment to come and see us in the office, we send a free copy of that book.

If you’re at all interested in exploring estate planning, and exploring elder law asset protection planning, and you are not already working with another attorney, you can contact us at 609‑818‑0068, schedule an appointment to come in, and we will mail you out a free copy of the book.

In addition to that, if you want a book, you can read the book, and you can read it on the Kindle, or you can order it up. That’s one way that we educate the community. The second way that we educate the community is that we host seminars and workshops on a fairly regular basis. We happen to have a set of seminars coming up in February.

This show is debuting on January 2nd, live on the radio, and it is being dropped in a podcast, so this is going to be Episode 86 for you podcast subscribers.

What you can do is look at your calendar and see if you’re free either Thursday, February 7th at 1:00 PM or Tuesday, February 12th at 6:00 PM. Either 1:00 PM in the middle of the day on the 7th, or if you need something in the evening, the February 12th at 6:00.

Both of those workshops are going to be held in our offices. We have an educational center here that hosts between about 35 to 40 people at a time. Of course, space is limited. If you’re interested in coming into one of those workshops, you can absolutely do that. All you have to do is contact our office. Again, it’s 609‑818‑0068.

Let us know that you’re interested in registering for the free workshop and then you can come in. If you come in and you listen to the workshop. By the way, no obligation, no sales presentation. These are just workshops that we give for the community as something that we do to raise the education level and the information level about estate planning.

As I mentioned before, what we do in the estate planning world is so unique, we really can’t service everybody. The more people that are aware about what great estate planning looks like, the better there’s a chance that they will have great estate planning in their life as well whether they do it with our firm or anyone else.

If you’re interested in exploring these topics, check your calendar now for either February 7th at 1:00 PM or February 12th at 6:00 PM. Again, here in our offices in Pennington, New Jersey. We are right off of Route 31. All you have to do is call the office at 609‑818‑0068. Go ahead and tell the office staff that you’re interested in attending our workshop and we will put you down on the calendar.

[background music]

Victor:  When we come back from this quick break, I’m going to talk a little bit more about the financial side of what we’re doing and why this show is going to be great for those people that are entering retirement that need to know how to keep their money secure and make sure that it lasts as long as they do. Stick with us, we’ll be right back after this quick break.

Announcer:  Just about every working American stays focused on the ultimate goal, retirement, but planning forward can come with a lot of uncertainty. Do I have adequate savings? Have I invested enough? Have I invested too much? What’s the right thing to do?

If you’re one of the millions of Americans asking these questions, let financial expert Victor Medina help you make sense of it all. Victor is a certified financial planner and retirement income specialist who can help you set the strategy with a unique planning process that centers on you.

By taking an in‑depth look at your retirement timeline, goals you want to achieve, and what you have saved, Victor and his staff can help you figure out how to get the most out of retirement. Retirement is the biggest financial decision you will make. Putting the right plan in place and sticking to it is the smartest decision anyone can ever make.

To learn more, visit Private Client Capital Group online at privateclientcapitalgroup.com and start down the path of securing your total wealth today.

[background music]

Victor:  Everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. If you’re just joining us off the commercial break, this is a brand new show with a brand new…It’s none of those things, actually. This show’s been going on for 85 episodes, but we’ve got a brand new audience on a brand new time slot at WCTC 1450 AM. We are part of their Sound Advice programming schedule.

We are in midday, 11:00 AM to 12:00 noon. If you’re joining us live on the radio, welcome to this show. I spent the first segment talking a little bit about our estate planning background, what the firm has been doing, and why this show is going to be well‑positioned to educate you about estate planning matters.

Now I’m going to talk a little bit about the other side of our business, which works hand in hand with that, which is that we are certified financial planners, Retirement Income Certified Professionals, or RICPs and insurance‑licensed and investment‑licensed.

What that really does for our clients is gives them the opportunity to bring under one umbrella the services that they need throughout retirement. They come in for their estate planning, they get their ducks in a row with a great estate plan that puts documents in place today, has a care plan in place going into the future.

Then helps them in the estate transition process either when somebody becomes sick or when they die.

What you might think about estate planning is the creation of an incredible castle to help you protect your assets. Whether you get sick or not, the estate plan is a little construction project that is going to create this castle that helps you protect everything.

Now, what we need to do is make sure that we fill that castle with stuff that’s worth protecting. Because it would be such a tremendous shame if what we did was create this castle and then fill it with crap. That is so often what I experienced in my practice before we started offering financial services and retirement planning to our clients.

What was happening is, we would put these great plans in place. We would go ahead and create castles and we would do all this stuff. Then, they would be working with their junky financial advisor who would be filling it with crap that paid them more than it helped their client.

I’d visit with them afterwards and I would say, “Why do you have this? Why do you own this investment? Why did you buy this annuity? Why did you own the CD? What is this inside of your plan?” They can’t tell me, because their planner didn’t educate them about that and at the same time, really didn’t give them the best advice.

About six years ago, I resolved to fix that for my clients, because I realized that if I truly cared about my clients, if I was going to be held up to the highest standard for what I was doing for clients, I needed to be able to provide for them a whole set of services that took care of them at every turn.

It didn’t limit how well I was preparing them for the future. When I was just an estate planning attorney with no ability to help them on the financial services side, what was happening was that we would do this limited amount of planning and I’d have to put a stop sign at the end of that and say, “Look, I can’t help you anymore.”

“If you’re going to need help with these financial matters, you’re going to have to go to somebody else and my commitment to you ends and I can’t help you any longer.” That was a really terrible way to have a relationship with clients, because they were putting trust in me and my firm that we would be taking care of them for the rest of their lives.

I was compelled to add financial services in a way that would be seamless for all of what they needed in the rest of their life that they had. It would be seamless on that, would be held to the highest standard possible for that type of service and really work to my client’s benefit.

I couldn’t just hang a proverbial shingle in that area. We needed to get educated and prepared to do that. What did I go and do? Went out and got an insurance license. It’s probably about the easiest thing somebody can do. Study for about 40 hours, take a test, in and out.

You can have a license, but we needed to add to that. We couldn’t just be one trick ponies offering insurance solutions like life insurance, long‑term care and annuities. We offer all of those three, but we couldn’t only offer those three, not if we were working in our client’s best interest. We needed to be independent, and we needed to be holistic.

We needed to be able to offer everything so that we knew that we were never going to be conflicted about what we are recommending, because at the end of the day, it didn’t matter to us. All that mattered was that we were doing the right thing for the client, and that was really the goal.

After the insurance license, had to go over and get an investment license, a securities license. The one that I got is called a Series 65. You may have heard of it if you ever watched “Wall Street” or any of these investments, “The Wolf of Wall Street.” You might have heard of a Series 7, a Series 66.

The Series 7 is really a sales license. What it allows people to do is receive commissions for selling securities like stocks, bonds and mutual funds. That set of licenses was never going to work in my practice.

What I wanted to do was stay away from commissionable products on the whole investment side. I wanted to be on the investment side, a fee‑only adviser. It means that I wanted to recommend investments for my clients and be paid a fee for that, regardless of the investments that we chose.

In my practice, it does not matter if you buy mutual fund A or mutual fund B, because I don’t get paid any more for which one you buy. You pay me directly as a fee that’s taken out of your account for the investment management, the financial planning and the tax planning, everything I do.

I don’t get paid differently based on the product that you buy for the investments that we offer, from mutual funds, so on and so forth.

That’s really important, because the Series 65 compels me to have a registered investment advisory firm, or an RIA. That’s very, very different in the world than what most people think about as a financial adviser. Most people think of their financial adviser as somebody that works with a Merrill Lynch, a UBS, a Morgan Stanley or an Edward Jones.

Those are all brokered dealers. Brokered dealers are in a sales business. That means that they do not have to be held to the highest standard possible. The highest standard possible is a fiduciary. A fiduciary is what a lawyer is to his client. A fiduciary is somebody that has to put the client’s interest above their own. That’s a great standard to live by.

That’s the one that you should want as a client and by the way, that’s the one that I want as an adviser. I want to be held to the highest standard possible, because, first of all, I know that that’s easy to meet. I’m always thinking about how to help my clients above and beyond what it does for me.

At the same time, being in the structure of an RIA requires me to do that so that there is no question that the activities that we’re providing are all on the basis of being fiduciaries for our clients.

Unfortunately, the whole financial services world does a really poor job about educating people on this. By the way, there’s a reason for that. If they highly educated the consumer base about what standard typically applies and what standard should apply, they’d lose all of their clients.

If you knew going into there, if the general public was already aware that people could be held to a lower standard for what they were doing and sell something that paid their adviser more, but wasn’t necessarily in the client’s best interest, clients would revolt. We’d be grabbing pitchforks and we’d be storming the buildings with the bulls on the outside of it saying, “What are you doing? This is not right.”

What we’ve done is say, “Look. We’re going to educate people about the fiduciary standard.” The fiduciary standard by the way, if we don’t want to be really mean about it, just think about it like the difference between a butcher and a dietitian.

If you go to the butcher and you ask him what you should eat, he’s not going to sell you bad meat, but you better believe he’s going to sell you meat. He’s never going to make a recommendation that you should be eating salad and be part of a well‑balanced diet and by the way, you should exercise.

That’s not the butcher’s job. The butcher gets paid on one thing only, and that is whether or not you buy meat that day.

If you go to a dietitian and you say, “What should I eat?” She’s going to tell you what you should be eating, because she doesn’t get paid based on what you buy to eat. She gets paid on the basis of the fact that you eat well and her advice works. She’s there giving you great advice because her best interests are served by you eating correctly and her advice being the right advice.

That’s exactly the same thing. The difference between a fiduciary adviser and somebody that works for a broker‑dealer. As I seen, the majority of people work already with a broker‑dealer.

My job is the easiest job in the world when I meet somebody who’s looking for financial advice and is working with one of those other ones, because all I can say is at the end of the day those people who work for those other companies they are all beholden to one boss and that’s not you.

You, the client are not their boss. Their boss is that big agency above them that’s telling them what to recommend. Proprietary products, things that are on the grid. If you get sale more of this and get clients into that, we’ll send you on a trip to Hawaii. That’s how they’re getting motivated.

All I have to do with that client say, “Look, you came here to have us do your estate planning because you trusted that we were going to do the right thing by you, give you the absolute best place.” That’s what lawyers do. Do you want that same relationship in your financial world? Because you’re not getting it right now.

By law, they’re not allowed to put your best interests first. It’s even worse than what I said. Not only are they not required it to, by law they’re not allowed to. By law, their agency relationship, the people that they are beholden to is the boss. That company that employs them. That’s their highest obligation.

I’ve been saying by the way for talking about investment people or insurance people. You work with one of these insurance agencies ‑‑ New York Life, Northwestern Mutual, Pacific Life, Prudential ‑‑ if that’s the boss, if they’re working for one of those agencies, if they’re not independent, then look at the end of the day they’ve got to do whatever their boss says and tells them to do.

What we’re really looking for is a relationship where what you’re doing is working with people that are looking out for your best interests in doing the things that they need to be doing regardless of how it pays them at the end. That’s why we needed to structure our financial services in a way that we were always putting our client’s best interests first.

In addition to the insurance license and the securities license, I went out and got a CFP that is the gold standard designation for financial advisers. It means that you’re not only demonstrated a certain amount of experience and skill in creating financial plans for people but you passed a very rigorous exam in six subject matters including estate planning.

I kind of ace that one. The investment management, insurance, taxes, education planning, retirement planning, ethics. You need to pass all of that stuff and then you’re able to use the CFP designation. You might think about the CFP designation like a general medical degree it’s the bare minimum to enter into the industry and be a qualified financial adviser.

On top of that, I went and I specialized. I got an additional designation called an RICP which stands for a Retirement Income Certified Professional.

That RICP helped me focus our planning on retirement really get knee‑deep in, get it roll up the sleeves, and get really granular on how to create great retirement plans because that’s most the people that we were seeing on the estate planning side.

We were seeing people that required estate planning because they were facing retirement either they were about to go into retirement or they just retired. The financial services that we were going to be providing for them. How we were going to fill the castle for them? What we were going to put inside? All of that stuff was all about retirement.

It became crucial that we specialize on. I got the general medical degree and then I specialized as cardiologists. I went back and did a fellowship. That’s why I did the financial side. I got that RICP.

What we’ve done is really focus in creating outstanding financial retirement planning around the estate plan that we did so that we knew that what we were putting in place would work every step of the way. That we had thought through each one of these different life events. In one of the things that really sets us apart, it’s in the world of the elder law planning that a whole world of financial services doesn’t exist.

I get more work and referrals from other elder law attorneys that want me to do the financial part of their planning, because they recognize that my specific expertise in the elder law sector married with the financial services really helps their clients put in place the right financial products and the right financial strategies.

It’s one of the selfishly proudest things that goes on is that my colleagues in the elder law field come to me and ask me to do the financial component of it for their clients. That is a great little feather in the cap.

It puts a little pep in my step knowing that among my respected colleagues, other elder law attorneys, other CELAs, they’re pointing to me and say that’s the guy that’s going to be able to get you the rest of the way in that. That is a tremendous source of pride. By the way on the client side, great for the client as well.

If you think about both of those things, the estate planning, and the financial planning, really combining retirement planning skills for our clients, that’s what we’re going to be doing on this show.

We’re going to be spending time in this hour really thinking about how to get people through retirement so that they are very clear about…they’ve got a great plan and it works when they need it. Brand new year, brand new length of the show, brand new thinking about everything means that there’s going to be some changes.

For those of you that are podcast listeners, you should be prepared for little change up about what we do. We might have some co‑hosts along the way. I might bring in some additional people to help go through the program and go through that hour and change it up.

I’m not sure you want to listen to me every week but just my voice over and over again. We’re going to continue to bring in guests, we’re going to bring in co‑hosts, we’re going to be doing things differently off of that. You’ve heard me mention podcasting before.

If you’re listening live on the radio, what I want to let you know is that this show is actually produced in addition to being live on the radio at 11 o’clock in the morning on Wednesdays. It’s also produced as a podcast that is downloadable to your mobile device.

What you can do whether it’s an Android phone or an iPhone or anywhere between, you can go over to Make It Last radio. It’s makeitlastradio.com. Go to Make It Last radio. On there, you can stream episodes by hitting the play button. You can subscribe to the download link off of that.

If you have access to iTunes, you can go to iTunes and subscribe to the podcast. Then the last way is we’re actually available in a service called Spotify. If you don’t know, Spotify is one of these services that you can get every piece of music that’s ever existed for free.

If you want to pay for the service, they’ll do things like that but you use it when you don’t have a mobile connection and download stuff. It gets paid tiers. There is a free tier on there.

That way you can listen to this show for free. If you want in the future, you can go to the Spotify Make It Last page, you type in the search Make It Last, Victor Medina. It’s M‑E‑D‑I‑N‑A. What will come up is our playlist where every episode is there as part of a playlist. It just gets added week after week after week.

What this allows you to do? If you happen to miss a show in particular week, if you’re not there for Wednesday at 11 o’clock or the rebroadcast, or if you’re not there for the half an hour synopsis on Saturday mornings. If you’re going to, which by the way it’s another thing that we’re doing, so you’ll listen live 11 o’clock.

We’re also rebroadcasting a 30‑minute cut of this on Saturday mornings back in our original slot at 7:30. If you miss all of that and you just want to have this on your device you can go ahead and subscribe to the podcast. What it will do is it will download the latest episode to your device automatically. Boom, there it is. It gets dropped at 12:00 noon on Wednesday after the show has aired.

Then you can listen to it however you want. The thing that’s great about the podcast especially for our new listeners joining us in our new time is that you can go back to prior episodes and listen to stuff that I’ve done in the past shows because every one of these shows is going to have a different kind of theme.

I might be talking about IRAs. I might be talking about guests who were talking about Alzheimer’s or assisted living, or I might be talking about Roth IRAs, or I might be talking about annuities, or I might be talking about trusts. I might be talking about Medicaid planning.

You might want to go back and pull out one of those shows and listen to them in the podcast. The subscription that allows you to do that. You can either go to makeitlastradio.com and scroll back to the past 85 shows. This is show number 86, or you can subscribe to the podcasts.

That will give you access to, or you can go to Spotify and see the playlist of all the 85 shows. You go back and play one of those as well. We’re trying to do is give you as many opportunities to listen to the show as we possibly can.

If you’re interested in learning more about what it is that we do in addition to doing the free podcast shows, we actually run two sets of seminars. We do workshops all the time but we have two coming up in February that I want to let you know about because you might be interested in attending those if you want more information about this retirement planning world, specifically starting with estate planning.

We’re going to be hosting a workshop at 1:00 PM on February 7th. Just the middle of the day February 7th at our educational center and our offices in West Delaware Avenue on Pennington. If you go to Pennington, it’s right off of Route 31.

When you’re coming in from Hunterdon or Somerville 206, or coming up to 95 really easy to get to. You just shoot down 31, take a quick left West Delaware and there you are at our offices. We can host about 35 to 40 people in our educational center.

If you’re interested in doing that on the 7th, you just contact the office at 609‑818‑0068 and tell the nice lady that you’re talking to, “Hey, I want to be registered for the upcoming February seminar.”

They’ll put you on the list. If you cannot make the February 7th time at 1:00 PM, if you’re working still then what we’re doing is we’re hosting an evening seminar the next Tuesday, on February 12th at 6:00 PM, we will be hosting a seminar in our office again same topic generally about retirement planning starting with the estate plan topics that we normally go through.

It’s absolutely free. Something that we do for the community. I urge you to attend if you are questioning whether or not you’ve got great estate planning in place or not. Come into that. Again same thing, you call 609‑818‑0068, tell them that you want to register for the February 12th 6:00 PM seminar.

Again, those are going to be held in our offices. Light refreshments are going to be served for both of those in our educational center. That’s our service to you. I encourage you to register if you just want some more information. Your eyes will be opened about this stuff.

I guarantee that this will be great new information that you haven’t heard yet and totally going to be worth your time. Again, either February 7th at 1:00 PM or February 12th at 6:00 PM. Just call 609‑818‑0068 and join us for an upcoming seminar.

[background music]

Victor:  That’s our free gift to you. When we come back from this break, I’ll wrap up the show for our first show. Stick with us. We’ll be right back after this quick message.

Announcer:  As you get older, there are so many decisions to make around your legal, financial and tax planning needs. Searching for the right people who you can trust and getting them all on the same page can be frustrating and exhausting.

Turns out, now there’s a better way. Medina Law Group is the only place where you can secure your total wealth with a one‑stop‑shop for your estate, retirement and tax planning needs. With over 15 years of experience and more financial credentials than you can shake a stick at, Victor Medina and his team offer a way to cover all of your planning needs under one roof.

Whether you’re concerned about getting your ducks in a row or securing your nest egg, or both, Medina Law Group can give you the peace of mind you deserve to make sure you have all the angles covered with best‑in‑class planning.

Call the experienced professionals at Medina Law Group at 609‑818‑0068 to learn more, including your chance to schedule a free consultation. You can also visit medinalawgroup.com to learn more about protecting your assets and the Medina Law Group team. For peace of mind and a solid foundation, contact Medina Law Group today.

[background music]

Victor:  Everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. This is our inaugural episode on the Sound Advice programming schedule update. Brand new for the people that were listening midday on WCTC 1415 AM. For those of you that are podcast subscribers, guess what, you got an extra half an hour for free.

I’m looking at the time stamp on this. We’re into about 45 minutes and you’re thinking yourself, “When is Medina going to wrap it up?” You’re just, “This is like 30 minutes and I’m out.” We’re going to do a little bit longer on the shows now. We’re going up to 55 minutes worth of programming. That’s free for you podcast people.

You don’t have to pay a dime more for it. Look, I really think that it’s important. I listen to a lot of podcasts. They’re on my machine.

One of the things that gives me pause that anytime I’ve got to go longer than an hour if I see the time stamp on there and it’s an hour and 45 minutes, I’m like, “What are you talking about for an hour and 45 minutes?”

It better be the most damn entertaining thing that I’ve ever listened to, to go that far. Look, we’re going to go the hour length. We’re going to go the 55 minutes. My commitment to you, if you’re podcast subscribers, that you’re going to enjoy the additional time.

The programming changes that we’re going to be making, the way we’re going to shake up the show a little bit. The co‑hosting and guests is going to be totally worth your while. Those additional 25 minutes are going speed along. It will be like, “Hey, I want more.” Then I’m going to say to you, “No, you only get 55 minutes.”

Here we are on the last segment on our very first‑hour long show where we’re introducing a brand new audience to the Make It Last world. We’ve been doing this show for about 85 episodes so far. This is episode number 86. The goal of the show is generally to bring really sound advice regarding a legal financial retirement tax planning.

So many people who are on the last act of life are searching for additional information, the best information that they possibly can get so that as they enter this phase, they don’t make any mistakes. They limit the number of mistakes they’re capable of making.

The reason why it’s so important to do that is that when we face retirement or enter into retirement, we are now at the point where the hand’s been dealt, the chess pieces are set. We are playing with what we’ve got left.

It is very difficult to add anything else to it. Once you enter retirement, we don’t have the buffer of continuing to work to correct any financial mistake. You make a financial mistake when you’re 20. No big deal. You’ve got to keep working because the salary that you get really funds your life.

You might make a stupid decision once or twice, but the fact that you keep working means that you can rebound from that pretty quickly. When you start entering retirement this is the point where it gets…we’re playing without the safety net any longer.

You make a mistake about buying the wrong investment product with the wrong investment strategy, purchasing an annuity not the wrong kind of annuity, having somebody put in an estate plan that fails when you need it costing you a guardianship or needing to lose everything when you go into an assisted living facility or a nursing home.

You make a mistake like that, it is extremely difficult to come back from it. That’s why it’s so important to seek out and follow the best in class advice that you can get about retirement planning. It’s so much better if you can bring that together under one house where the right hand knows what the left hand is doing.

I know those of you out in the world that have served as a translator between your professional advice people, you know what I’m talking about, where you got to go between your financial adviser and your tax preparer. Then you’ve got to go between them and your attorney. You have to serve as a translator between all of that. How badly does that stink?

Are you tired of it? I don’t know. I know. These are my clients. They come in and breathing a sigh of relief saying, “Thank goodness there’s only one Batphone I’ve got to pick up when there’s something wrong.”

If you remember the old Batman TV station, which by the way my six‑year‑old was watching this morning. He got into it. With the POW and the Kazaam. He’ll be six so he’s starting to read. He’s reading those big words on there. He was watching it. If you remember, Commissioner Gordon had won that phone.

It didn’t matter if the Joker, the Riddler, whoever was coming in, no matter what a threat that was coming in your life was, you picked up that one Batphone to say, “What do I do now?” Batman swoops in.

I actually like that metaphor, because the car that I drive right now it’s black, it’s got black wheels on it, kind of looks like the Batmobile. It’s slick, so I got a little Batman figure that is supposed to symbolize the fact I got this car. I got it from a buddy of mine, anyway.

Yes, one Batphone. You want to make sure that you can pick that one Batphone up and know that you have your stuff taken care of. This has happened for me and my clients so many times.

They just know they can reach out and make sure that that thing’s taking care of and that it’s all integrated because it’s really important as I was saying and this last act that you’ve got that we don’t have those mistakes that can plague somebody that’s entering retirement.

We know about the horror stories, about somebody that have taken with bad financial advice and their life is miserable afterwards. They feel terrible about that, or the people that went in thinking they got great estate planning.

When they go to use the estate plan like my family member that got me into estate planning, because they died and then I had to go and help. They’re family. They were so upset that they thought they had great estate planning and it didn’t work when they needed. Why? Because the philosophy was all wrong. What they needed was different.

They needed to think differently about what they were doing. That’s what we do. That’s what this show is going to attack and address. We’re going to be challenging you to think differently about retirement so that you are prepared for anything that life deals you.

You have the information to make great decisions about the professionals that you’re going to engage, whether we’re talking about lawyers or financial advisers, tax preparers, whether you’re not going to go into a nursing home, thinking about sort of Medicare. Whatever it is.

We’re going to empower you to make great decisions about this last phase that you’ve got and who you’re going to be working with, and really educate you to know that you’ve got the right plan and the great plan in place.

I want you ‑‑ listening to this show or working with us as advisers or doing whatever you’re doing in retirement ‑‑ to be in a position where you are resting comfortably knowing that you’ve got it covered. That’s what we’re really going to be doing.

We’ve got multiple ways of being able to do that. On the show, we’re going to spread this information. I urge you to listen to us at 11 o’clock if you’re on drive time on WCTC 1450 AM, Voice of Central Jersey.

In addition to that, there’s going to be rebroadcast of the show later in the day on Wednesday. There will be rebroadcast on Saturday morning, or you can subscribe to the podcast, go to Make It Last radio, visit iTunes, visit Spotify. These are all free places for you to get this show. Go back in the library and listen to past shows.

If you’re tired of doing that and you want more, remember we’ve got three books that we publish. I didn’t talk about the third one. We’ve got two books that are available in estate planning. Make It Last: How To Get, and Keep, Your Legal Ducks in a Row, Make It Last: Protecting Your Family From the Costs of Aging.

Those are the two legal books. Then we have a financial book. The financial book is “Make It Last: Ensuring Your Nest Egg Is Around As Long As You Are.” It’s a great book for people who are entering retirement. All three of those books are available on Amazon and they are available to download to your Kindle.

They’re available on iBooks in the iBookStore. You could purchase them. They’re all about 20 bucks full. Great value for the 20 bucks. In addition to that, we are hosting workshops. If you want to learn more and you want to attend a workshop, specifically we’re going to start on the estate planning side.

What we’re going to do is we’re going to host those February 7th at 1:00 PM or February 12th at 6:00 PM here in our main office in Pennington. It’s an absolutely free, no obligation workshop. Nothing will be sold there.

What you’ll do is you just call 609‑818‑0068 and tell whoever answers the phone, “I want to register for Victor’s workshop.” Either on February 7th at 1:00 PM or if you’re working, you want to come in the evening, February 12th at 6:00 PM.

Those are limited space. It’s in our educational center in our office. We can’t host more than 35 to 40 people. Even cramming people in, obviously, we’ve got to do it on a first‑come, first‑serve basis. If you’re interested in doing that, it’s about a month away. Check your calendar now, call us now, get registered for this seminar now.

We will send you out materials. We will welcome you in. Light refreshments are going to be served, but that’s it. I’m not paying for dinner. [laughs] You get cookies, coffee and great education.

I urge you to come and do that, because you will find out information there that you can’t find anywhere else. It’s going to be a great workshop. Then if none of those things work, join us next week. We’re going to have even more of these coming in. We are so happy to welcome our newest audience at 11 o’clock for this new format, longer show.

Stick with us for this ride. It’s going to be a lot of fun. New co‑hosts, new guests. I’m excited about what the future brings. Until we see you next week, this has been Make it Last, where we help you keep your legal ducks in a row and your financial nest egg secure. Catch you next Wednesday at 11 o’clock. Bye‑bye.

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