Make It Last with Victor Medina - Legal & Financial Retirement Planning

This week Victor discusses the recently high number of people 65+ who are having to file for bankruptcy. As well as, a look at stock market predicting and just how unknowable the market really is.

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 Medina:  Everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. I’m your host, Victor Medina. I’m so glad you could join us this Saturday morning, but here’s the trick.

I’m not here. You’re listening on the radio if you’re live. Of course you podcast people are always getting this delayed. I’m actually on a vacation. I have pre‑recorded this show for you, which is a little fun for me. If I can go to WCTCAM.com, I can actually click the “Listen Live” button and it will play. That is not me. I’m not there. I’m on vacation.

In any event, I’m going to give you a couple of great shows coming up for the period of time that I’m going to be away.

Today, one of the things that I wanted to go through was a very alarming topic, which is that bankruptcy seems to be growing in older Americans. I’m going to go over an article that was recently published and give you some of the alarming numbers that are related to this growing trend.

I think that part of the reason why this has me so concerned is not just because the number of bankruptcy filings is growing and that in and of itself is a problem but typically bankruptcy is for people that are at the end of their rope and it’s for a very small section of the population.

If those are growing, then you might imagine that, similarly, the number of older Americans who are struggling is also growing as well. I have a different topic for the other two segments. One of the things that comes up from time to time is people who are trying to essentially predict where the market is going.

You can spend an entire day watching CNBC and listening to people tell you what they think is going to happen with the market. It could be right, it could be wrong, who knows. They are going to tell you for 24 straight hours that they know what’s going on and they know what you need to be doing.

Actually, when you come down to it, there are some numbers behind how often they have to be right in order for it to be effective for your investing. I’m going to go through that in the next couple of segments when we get there.

Let’s first gets to this topic of bankruptcy. What we need to understand is that the whole structure of law builds in these defined safety nets if something were to happen to you and you haven’t done planning in your life to avoid it, like a little social safety net around there.

If you run out of money to pay for long‑term care, there’s Medicaid. Medicaid is a safety net. Helps you pay for the care that you need. If you don’t have a power of attorney, there’s a safety net. You can go through a guardianship, and that guardianship will essentially appoint somebody, be like a power of attorney for you.

Now, we can get all into the details about why that’s not a great idea. You put your power into the hands of the judge and he can make any decision that he wants, but the safety net is there. The one for people who can’t pay their bills is bankruptcy.

What we’re seeing is that the people who are in that definition of ol...

In this episode Victor shares some important information regarding a growing number of people who are navigating retirement and aging alone. As well as an interview with Steven Senko of the Princeton Medical Institute, to raise awareness on their clinical trials.

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.

For more information about the Princeton Medical Institute’s Clinical Trials, visit this link.

Click below to read the full transcript.

Victor J. Medina:  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Make it Last. I’m your host, Victor Medina. I’m so glad that you can join us here this Saturday morning where we share with you all of the important information that I think that you ought to know about retirement and navigating you through the financial, legal, and everything like that.

In fact, I’ve got a special guest for you here today. His name is Steven Senko. He’ll be joining us in the second segment. We’re going to talk a little bit about what the Princeton Medical Institute does and how you might get involved, specifically with some of their specific trials to try to help people with certain conditions.

I want to have you join us with that segment and listen in to what Steven has to share with us. Before we get to that, I actually wanted to head into a different topic first.

There’s a growing number of people who are navigating retirement alone. There is a new group that has been formed to help with that. I came across this information recently. There’s a woman named Carol Marak.

She had helped her aging parents for about six years, frequently driving about 125 miles between her home in Dallas, Texas, and their home in West Texas, to shop, to clean, to cook, and do other tasks for them. It reminds me a lot of our guest last week, John Walsh, who was helping us learn a little bit more about when people get older, how to get their things ready to sell, and whatever else.

What it caused Carol, who’s 67, to realize is that there are so many demands that go into giving care to an older person. For Carol, she doesn’t have anybody to do that for her. She was doing it for her parents, but there’s nobody for her.

In February of 2016, she started this thing called the Elder Orphan Facebook Group, which has since grown to about 8,000 members. She works as an editor for a website called seniorcare.com.

It turns out that there are a lot of Americans like Carol who are preparing to age without a spouse or adult children who can help them. We can call them all kinds of things. [laughs] We can call them solo seniors or whatever else, but their ranks are growing.

About 22 percent of the people who are 65 and over are either an elder orphan or at risk of becoming one. Only 12 percent of the women who are aged 80 to 84 were childless, but that number’s going to increase in that same age range in a few years.

This group is actually an exclusive group the way that she runs it. She says that she’s turned down 10,000 requests for an entry. I’m not really sure about that. They have three basic screening questions. Then she looks at their websites.

Look, I think from the position of somebody who’s managing this, this is a very vulnerable population. If you are somebody who is growing old alone, it can be difficult to find your niche and to get ...

In this episode, Victor covers the 10 questions you should ask your financial advisor, and an interview with John Walsh of Walsh Senior Solutions, a company that specializes in helping senior and their families downsize as they get older.

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.

For more information about Walsh Senior Solutions, visit this link.

Click below to read the full transcript..

Victor Medina:  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Make It Last. I’m your host, Victor Medina. I’m so glad you can join us this Saturday morning. Last week, we talked about “Continuing Care Retirement Communities.”

If you missed that show, I’m urging you to go back and listen to it. You can find all of our shows on iTunes. You can go to Spotify, and that’s Episode 64.

I talked about Continuing Care Retirement Communities as a solution for somebody who’s getting a little older and thinking about how to make sure that their next move might be their last move, and they can stay there all the way through any health crisis that might come along.

There’s a question that comes with that. That’s what you should do with your stuff. What you’re going to be moving into, it’s going to be very different than where you came from.

Thankfully, I’ve got a guest today. His name is John Walsh and he’s the founder of Walsh Senior Solutions. He’s going to join us a little bit later in the show talking about what to do with your stuff. He’s got a lot of experience because he’s done this with his family once already.

Then he’s got a company that helps doing this. We’re going to touch on a lot of topics that may be overlooked as you deal with this transition. Maybe it’s not you that’s going to be dealing with this. Maybe it’s a family member that’s going to be helping with you, maybe a child. It’s going to be important. I think you’re really going to enjoy a lot about that particular topic when we get to it.

Before we do that, I want to spend the first segment giving you 10 questions I think you should ask your advisor. Here’s my belief. I believe that money doesn’t have to be complicated. I’m going to give you these 10 questions, but at the end of the day, anybody that you work with should be somebody on a mission to deliver trust, transparency, and accountability in any advice that you’re giving.

As a trusted advisor, when I’m working with my own clients, I’m there equipping them with the tools they need to make educated decisions regarding their financial future. I spent a lot of time breaking down what we’re going to be doing and why, so that clients aren’t just handing over this blind trust into whatever I’m recommending.

They see what’s going on. They’ve pulled it apart. They agree with what we’re going to be doing, then they’re moving forward with it. Most of our clients walk away with the ability to describe, in detail, the plan that we put together and why to their neighbor. That’s important because, again, we want them empowered by the education that we’re going to be giving them.

I came up with about 10 questions that I think are going to be important. If you’ve got a notepad and pencil,

As seniors age, one of the biggest decisions to face is whether to stay in your home or find someplace that can help you care for yourself for the rest of your days, especially if your health declines. Enter CCRCs or Continuing Care Retirement Communities. What are they? And what should you look out for if you’re shopping for one yourself? Listen to find out more.

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 Medina:  Hey, welcome back to Make It Last. I’m your host Victor Medina. I’m glad that you could join us here today. I have a great topic to share with you. I’m going to talk a little bit about Continuing Care Retirement Communities. It’s a big part of options for seniors as they get a little bit older.

What’s interesting is these facilities exist to help people transition as they get older from living on their own in a home in whatever it was their home for maybe 30 or 40 years, then, transitioning as they get older from independent living through assisted living, and eventually, if they needed nursing home stay.

I’m going to be talking a little bit about what those options are and how they might have different deal terms, like how you can buy in to them and different arrangements.

More and more I’ve got clients coming in asking me on the legal side to review some of that and then on the financial side to help them figure out whether or not it’s something they can afford and whether it’s a good option for them. There is some real practical advice that I can give you about Continuing Care Retirement Communities or CCRCs.

I, actually, wanted to spend the first part of this segment talking about a bill that is in front of the governor to sign, something that has been proposed as legislation. It really relates to some problems that have occurred with Continuing Care Retirement Communities, not so much during the time that somebody’s living in there, but after they pass away.

About a year or so ago there was a little mini exposÈ that was done and that was published in various newspapers around the state, whether it’s the “New Jersey Times” or a bunch of them around there, “Trenton Times.” This was talked about a situation where, well, somebody had felt wronged. It had to do with money that was held by a CCRC.

Let’s first start generally and say CCRCs are attractive to seniors because they offer a place to live without having to worry about moving for health reasons. It is a continuing care. It gives you the spectrum from beginning to end.

There are about 25 of those in New Jersey. They house about 10,000 seniors. That’s according to an Organization of Resident Associations of New Jersey or ORANJ, O‑R‑A‑N‑J. It’s a stat from them.

It’s a group that supports CCRC residents. It’s on the side of the residents. Typically, when seniors move into a CCRC they often pay a large entrance fee which could be several hundred thousand dollars.

In a couple more segments over the course of the show I’ll talk to you about different options the way that’s become constituted. It’s not always the case that they do that but often they do that, and the contracts will say that a percentage of the fee will be returned to the estate when the person dies but not until the unit is reoccupied by a new resid...

Buzz Aldrin is in the middle of a battle with his family over the alleged misuse of his money. How could a revocable living trust have helped protect him? Learn about that this week.

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 Medina:  Everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. I’m your host, Victor Medina. I’m so glad you could join us this Saturday morning. I am excited to share with you the information on today’s show.

Although, it’s linked to not a great fun topic, it’s actually important for you to get ahead of this. We’re going to learn a little bit more about the lessons that are being taught with Buzz Aldrin, his two children, and the craziness that’s happening over there. You’re going to listen to this show. You’re going to learn stuff from that so that you don’t get involved in the same scenario.

It’s related to trusts again and why trust‑based planning is so important. It gets me excited. Of course, that’s all I like to talk about as an estate planning attorney. Let’s talk about more and more trusts.

Before I get to that, I want to spend the first part of this show going over a couple of different things. The first is this is the last week for you to register for an upcoming seminar that we have on legal planning.

What we’re doing is we’re hosting a workshop at the College of New Jersey on July 18th. We’ve got two sessions. We’ve got a session at 12:30. We have a session at 5:30. They’re absolutely free.

What they’ll do is help you understand a little bit more about what essential core estate planning looks like. Specifically, how to make sure that you protect assets if you’re in a situation in which you might need long‑term care in the future.

If you’re somebody that is in retirement, nearing retirement, you want to make sure that your ducks are in a row. You want to make sure, if something were to happen to you, if you happen to be sick, if you need long‑term care, need to go into a nursing home, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, something like that, that you have the proper planning in place.

This free workshop will help you do that. No obligation, no sales pressure, no nothing. Just education in the community. It is going to be at the College of New Jersey. It’s going to be at two times 12:30, 5:30 on July 18th. You do need to pre‑register. We have limited space in the rooms. We are starting to fill up. Only a few days left with this. I would like to see you there.

If you are interested in going, I need you to contact my law firm by sending an email to [email protected] or calling our number at 609‑818‑0068. Call the number and let us know that you’re interested in the seminar. Somebody on my team will make sure that you get there. Something you don’t want to miss.

We do them, I don’t know, every so often. I don’t want to say it’s once a month. I don’t have anything really on the calendar for August. This is something you want to take advantage in the low parts of the summer, get out of the summer heat, sit in a nice air‑conditioned college room, you can do that and learn about something important at the same time.

I promise you it is an educational and fun, interactive workshop. It is not just sitting and listening to a boring lawyer.

The IRS has released a draft version of a new Form 1040 for your taxes. What are the changes and how does it impact you. Also, you’re retired – why is goal planning still important as you live in retirement?

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 Media:  Hey, welcome back to Make It Last. I’m your host, Victor Medina. I’m so glad you could join us this Saturday morning. I hope you had a wonderful 4th of July. I did, it was well spent with my family. I have to tell you though, this heat is driving me crazy. I’m glad that it’s scheduled to break.

Before I get into the content for today’s show, I actually do have something of an announcement. One of the things we do is we run seminars for people, workshops, client education workshops and we do them on a semi‑regular basis. We have one coming up on July 18th at the College of New Jersey and we have two different times that are set up.

They are set up for 12:30 in the afternoon and 5:30 in the afternoon. These are essentially by invitation on Facebook or if you know about the link because you are listening to the show. We’re not advertising to the general public beyond a core set of people on those two different areas.

If you’re interested in attending that, because you need to learn more not only about traditional estate planning but you also want to know a little bit about what it takes to protect assets if you have a long‑term care of it. If you have to go into a nursing home or maybe if you need assisted living. If you’re worried about losing a home in those scenarios or saving assets, this is the seminar for you.

If you’re interested in attending that, we need you to preregister. It’s not just something you can show up to. We have a limited number of seats in the room that we’ve been given at the College of New Jersey. Only seats about 30 people per session. It is a limited seminar that we are offering and we need you to preregister.

If you’re listening to this show and you’d like to attend that or you know of someone that would like to attend, the best thing that you can do is actually email the law firm at info, that’s I‑N‑F‑O @medinalawgroup.com and make a reference in the subject line that you’d like to be invited and we will coordinate that with you to get you invited.

You’re welcome to bring up to one or two guests. Many times we have people that come concerned about the care of a loved one like a parent. What they want to do is, they want to have all three siblings there, to hear the education at the same time.

That’s a good way to attend the seminar. As we’ve said, it’s absolutely 100 percent free. It is no pressure, no obligation if you attend pure education. In fact, if you attend, you have the opportunity to get a free copy of the book that I’ve written.

That’s also an incentive to come to the seminar. Again, that’s July 18th, 2018 at the College of New Jersey in Ewing. That’s right off of Route 31 now exit 72 on I‑95. It’s right down the street from the exit. We’ll be in the business building. Reach out to us if you are interested in attending that seminar.

I wanted to start the show with actually an interesting piece of news. We touch on the legal retirement in TaxWorld.

There’s an upcoming Supreme Court vacancy – what does that mean for the future? Also, technology is advancing at a breakneck speed. What can you do to make sure your estate plan is keeping pace?

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and certified elder law attorney and Certified Financial Planner™. 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 Private Client Capital Group.

Click below to read the full transcript..

Victor Medina:  Everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. I’m your host Victor Medina. I’m glad you can join us this Saturday morning.

I have spent the last few episodes focusing on retirement planning, specifically, on financial planning. We went through our short, mid, and long‑term buckets. We talked about what should be in your mid‑term bucket.

I realized I neglected the legal side of these two hats that I wear. I figure I’d spend some time this episode covering some more of the legal issues that have come up in a most recent set of months or so since we’ve covered it.

We actually have two big things that I want to cover today. I want to cover the announced vacancy from the Supreme Court. Anthony Kennedy has announced his retirement. I want to talk a little bit about how that’s going to impact the legal world, generally speaking.

Then we’re going to talk a little bit about how to plan around digital assets and where we are in the 21st century of planning and what that means because it’s something very different that I think it might have even been 10 years ago.

Let’s first start with the personal stuff that I’ve had going on because I know a number of you have asked about that. I want to bring you up to date because we’ve got some really promising news and I do want to share a little bit about that.

I had somebody who’s very close to me be diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. If you ever experienced that in your life you know that of course, that’s a world changing diagnosis. When that happens, the world stops, and the entire family is now dealing with it.

Even one person has been diagnosed, the entire family essentially gets diagnosed with his lung cancer. It’s been quite a journey. It’s been over the last six weeks or so. I’m, first of all, very thankful to the people back in my office that have kept the business running while I have been pulled out to help deal with the family matters around this.

On the other hand, I’ve also been incredibly blessed to have the opportunity to help this family member along the way. I just have never really thought much about what it would take to be in that position and now that I was pulled in, I reflect on it as though it is an incredible honor, which it is, an incredible honor to be able to help.

There’s good news from that. One of the pieces of good news from that is, we’ve been able to discover a way of treating this that isn’t as hurtful or harmful as traditional chemotherapy.

We’re going to be able to use a pill and that pill is going have a very high degree confidence, likelihood of helping. This family member is very encouraged by that and will be able to focus on living with the lung cancer as opposed to suffering from it, which is great. We’re thinking about this in terms of buying us time and buying time for the future.

I will suggest to the purpose of sharing it with the show is not only is everything OK here at least in the short‑term, but what you do on how you reframe the things that are going on in your life is so im...

This episode is continuation of a discussion from episode 59 where Victor discusses different retirement distribution strategies, including using short-term, mid-term, and long-term investment buckets. This show unveils how you should invest your mid-term bucket.

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and certified elder law attorney and Certified Financial Planner™. 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 Private Client Capital Group.

Click below to read the full transcript..

Victor Medina:  Everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. I am your host, Victor Medina. I’m so glad you could join us here this Saturday morning at 7:30 AM. It is June 23rd, and I’m excited to be here because this is part two of a show that I started last week.

Now, if you didn’t listen to part one and you are listening to this show as a podcast, I want you to hit pause. I want you to go back to last week’s show. That’s episode 59. Listen to that show and then kind of catch up with us.

But if you’re listening live on the radio, you don’t have the opportunity to do that and you’re trying to figure out, “Should I keep listening?” and the answer is yes. Because I’m going to recap a little bit of what we did last week so that this week is exciting for you and entertaining and informative, and all the things that you need in order for this to be a great show.

What did we talk about last week? Last week, we talked a little bit about why just pulling out a set amount from your retirement every year was such a bad idea. Last week, I covered what the news media has often told you you should be doing in retirement, which is taking out four percent every year.

Taking out four percent, four percent, four percent. Now, the reason why they did that is actually based off of a study a long time ago that said that if you did that over a certain market performance, then you couldn’t run out of money. It presupposed a bunch of stuff that isn’t really the case these days.

What we showed last week is that your money is at risk in retirement to a sequence of returns. When you look at how the market might perform in retirement, there’s really only three things that it can do. It can go up, it can go down, or it can stay the same.

We don’t know what your money’s going to be doing at any particular time. In other words, in your retirement, when you finally pull the trigger and you say, “That’s it. I’m done working. I now have my nest egg from which I am going to live,” when you do that, you don’t know what the market’s going to be doing next.

You know generally that markets go in cycles, but you don’t know this year, this month whether the market’s going to be up or down or stay the same. Because you can’t predict what’s going to be going on, you are at risk to having a bad sequence of market returns.

That’s like a term of art. When we, as advisers, talk about sequence of returns, we know what we’re talking about. We know that we’re talking about a sequence of market returns. We understand the shorthand about what that means for how it affects your retirement portfolio.

Now, with people with tons and tons of money, they may not have to worry about this as much because they’ve got always some that’s going to be able to be sold if they need the money.

If you have a limited retirement, if you are looking at what you’ve got and say, “This is all that I have and I’m not sure i...

The news outlets like to tell you that you can take 4% a year from your retirement portfolio and not run out of money, but is that true? This week shares with you why taking 4% every year might destroy your retirement.

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and certified elder law attorney and Certified Financial Planner™. 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 Private Client Capital Group.

Click below to read the full transcript..

Victor Medina:  Everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. I’m your host Victor Medina. I’m so glad you can join us. Today, by my calendar, it is going to be June 16th. It’s such a lovely, lovely weekend going on.

I have a really exciting show where people talk about retirement all the time. I ask them, “How much can you safely take out in retirement?” and they will tell me that it is four percent per year. I’m just going to share with you some information on this show that will sort of challenge that belief and make you think a little bit more about whether or not that’s what you can do.

Before I get to that topic for today, I did want to let you know about a couple of things that are coming up. One of them has to do with something personal that I want to invite you to. The other thing is a notice that the IRS has given us that I want to share with you about upcoming tax scams.

Let me tell you first the personal thing. Some of you know that I like to sing. [laughs] The thing that I like to sing is a cappella music. What I do is, I will sing with a local a cappella group that has been together for the last 30 or so years.

It’s been around for a very long time. In fact, just in this last May, if you’ve been a long‑time listener you know that I’ve invited you to join us at a concert that we put on in Kingston with other a cappella groups. We kind of put this together.

If you heard that show and you’re interested in coming but you weren’t able to make it, in fact, I’ve got another invitation for you. We are going to be at the Lawrenceville Library, the Lawrenceville Library on July 2nd at seven o’clock. A free concert. It’s about an hour long.

If you’d like some great a cappella music and listen to that, we’re a very high‑quality group. I do invite you to come and see it. The people that are members of the group often have degrees from music institutions. They’ve got a bunch of stuff that they’ve done professionally in the music world.

I’m proud to say that I’m the musical director so I lend a little bit at least to how good that they sound. We’re going to be there doing a wide array of music. It’s about an hour long. Absolutely free. You should think about coming if you’re in fact interested. That’s a big personal thing.

I’ll remind you next week on the 23rd, and maybe even on the 30th before we go. You’ve got three reminders off of that. We also do have an upcoming seminar that we’re going to be hosting on July 11th. If you’re interested in coming to that, I’m going to go pretty deep in the whole topic of asset protection planning and estate planning.

It’s going to be a good survey course, like a 101 course for estate planning and eligible asset protection planning.

If you’ve ever been curious about how you might be able to protect assets if you became sick sometime in the future, if you had to go to a nursing home, or how you make sure that your spouse isn’t someone that becomes impoverished because...

There is a little-known VA benefit available to wartime vets, and their surviving spouses, that can help pay for long-term care. What is it, and how do you get it? Learn that, and more….

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and certified elder law attorney and Certified Financial Planner™. 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 Private Client Capital Group.

Click below to read the full transcript..

Victor Medina:  Everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. I’m your host Victor Medina. I’m so glad that you could join us here today. I’m happy to report that it’s actually my birthday today. Happy birthday to me, and as well to you if it’s your birthday. We celebrate a birthday. Welcome.

Anyway, I wanted to talk today a little bit about a little‑known veterans’ benefit that is available to help you pay for long‑term care. You have to meet certain qualifications for it, and I’m going to teach you what those are today.

Before I get into that, for those of you that are still tracking what’s going on in my personal life, I’ve got still that family member who is struggling with a health crisis. It had me thinking about a few different things.

The first was having to go on this journey them, I guess, is its own exercise because this family member is in retirement and is younger in retirement with a long way to go.

The news that we’re dealing with can be framed a couple of different ways. One of them can be looking at it from the perspective of “Why did this happen?” or using it as a feeling of really being depressed and down about it.

One of the things that I’ve been working on and is a direct result of meditation practice that I have been doing for the last couple of years is really focusing on staying present. Not leaving my mind to go in and engage in these discussions that really aren’t fruitful. Just stay where we are here, but also reframing things that are happening as gifts.

The reason why I’m thinking about this in the context of doing this show is because there’re so many people who as they get into retirement overlook some skills that are necessary for them just to have fun. To do the things that they need to do to enjoy what’s going on.

I know that there is a recent article in “Wall Street Journal” that addressed this. I think it’s an important topic because how we frame where we are in our lives and what’s happening to us has a direct result on our mental wellbeing, our health generally.

We can be looking at retirement and getting older or getting sick as these things that are happening to us rather than things that are happening for us, things that are being done for our benefit.

When you start to reframe it that way, you can get a lot more out of life. One of the things that came up in The Wall Street Journal article was there’s this new company called Age Wave that was a consulting company specializing in age‑related issues. It was searching out. They would have all things in ethics, social welfare, grief, and geriatric health, all that kind of stuff.

They were looking for somebody that might be an expert in fun. They couldn’t find any. They couldn’t find any. One of the reasons why it’s important of course is that in retirement your opportunity to have fun grows almost by double.

One of the research studies that happened in Merrill Lynch was that they looked at the amount of time that adults have for fun. When you are in the beginning of your working li...