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

There are 5 fees you should NEVER pay in retirement, and we cover how to get tax credit for charitable giving.

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and 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…

Announcer:  Welcome to “Make It Last.” Helping you keep your legal ducks in a row and your nest egg secure. With your host Victor Medina, an estate planning and elder law attorney and Certified Financial Planner.

Victor J. Medina:  Everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. I am your host, Victor Medina. I’m glad you could join us this Christmas week. Airing this show, it’s December 23rd. I got to be very honest. It’s Saturday the 23rd, and you’re maybe listening live on the radio. I am not in the studio right now. We’ve pre‑recorded this show.

But we do want to tell you a little bit about what’s going to be coming up because I’m excited for this show. I’m going to cover five retirement fees you should never, ever, ever, ever pay as well as your charitable giving. It’s the season. It’s the Christmas season. We think about giving, and so, I want to make sure that you understand as much as possible about how to give in a way that doesn’t run afoul of the IRS.

Many times we do this giving to make sure we get some tax benefit out of it, and the government’s helped us out with that. But we want to make sure that we would do it the right way.

One of the things we can do is think about that. There is going to be some time for you to complete some charitable giving by the end of the year if you want it to count for this tax year. If you listen to this on the 23rd or soon afterwards I’d tell you, you can take advantage of it.

If you want to make sure that you get every single episode of Make It Last and you don’t miss on a single one, one of the things you can do is go ahead and subscribe to the iTunes or the Android feed on that. We are available on all of those platforms. If you just search for “Make It Last with Victor Medina,” you’ll see a blue square, which is our logo.

It says, Make It Last. You set the “Subscribe” button. That means that every episode would be delivered to your inbox, and so that you can listen to it at your leisure whether or not you are available on Saturday or soon afterwards. The show is available immediately after broadcast at eight o’clock in the morning on Saturday.

You’ll have it just as soon as everybody else has had it. Maybe your coffee will taste a little bit better if you slept in a little bit more. Another thing that we’re happy to announce is we are actually part of the Spotify platform now. If you’re a subscriber to Spotify, you can search on there and follow the show.

Following is their term of subscribing and what it’ll do is you can look. The moment you go to the show’s page you can see all of the prior episodes, which means you can play all of them at your leisure. Anyway, that’s available to you as well.

Listen, I wanted to talk to you first about five retirement fees you should never ever, ever, ever pay. Now some of these I’ve covered in the past. This is the first time I’m consolidating them here in this idea that these are ones that you can absolutely avoid.

Maybe you want to take a notepad and a pen and make sure that you write these down. Make sure that in your retirement life,

It’s not too late to take advantage of some year-end tax planning tips. We’ve got 7 of them for you to consider before December 31st.

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and 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 the link below to read the full transcript…

Announcer:  Welcome to “Make It Last.” Helping you keep your legal ducks in a row and your nest egg secure. With your host Victor Medina. An estate planning and elder law attorney and Certified Financial Planner.

Victor J. Medina:  Everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. I am your host, Victor Medina. I am so glad you could join us here this Saturday morning right here on WCTC 1450 AM. It’s my pleasure to be with you as we’re going to talk about some end of the year tax planning tips. I’ve got seven of them for you.

As of this recording, if you’re listening to the podcast, it’s December 16th. There’s another reason why you should be subscribed to the podcast because you can get this episode delivered to your email box or your favorite iPod podcast catcher right at 8:00 o’clock in the morning on Saturday. If you are a subscriber and you listen to this early, or you’re just with us here on the radio, it’s December 16th.

We’ve got about 14 days left in the end of the year ‑‑ 14, 15 days ‑‑ and we’ve got some time to do some end of the year tax planning.

I want to give you my seven top tips that you can put in place before the end of the year that will help with your income taxes, gift taxes ‑‑ basically anything that you’ve got in front of you ‑‑ and you might want to consider those.

In the middle of the show, if you want to go ahead and grab a pad and pencil and jot these down, they’d be great. You could really get yourself ahead of the game, not only for what you can do before the end of this year, but we’ll talk about how to set yourself up going into 2018. That can have a lot of power for you as well.

Before I get started, though, I am happy to announce that on December 11th, I was featured in “The Wall Street Journal” print edition. The article came out a little bit earlier in the month ‑‑ I think December fourth or fifth ‑‑ but what it was focusing on was the kind of planning that you should have in place if your children start to turn 18 and become adults.

This is really geared at parents who have got their kids turning 18 and wanting to know what are the right legal documents to have in place.

I was interviewed by a reporter named Cheryl Monk, and she puts together an article for The Wall Street Journal featuring these. I had probably three or four quotes in there. She was happy that I went on background with her, getting her to understand what was important, and I think I crafted some of that story speaking with her just to make sure that we covered all the bases.

It obviously couldn’t feature me the entire time, but I think a lot of the direction of what to talk about and how to talk about it came as a result of some of the additional phone calls that she and I had, just understanding what the information was and how we should present it to the general public that were reading these.

If you are interested in reading the article itself, you can go to Wall Street Journal, and you can take a look on their site for documents you need when a child turns 18. The 18 is just the number there. That actually is the title of it.

BitCoin is going crazy. But, what is it, and should you be invested in it? Also, new laws might increase how much you have to pay in Medicare premiums next year. Learn all about it in this episode.

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and 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 the read the full transcript…

Announcer:  Welcome to “Make It Last,” helping you keep your legal ducks in a row and your nest egg secure, with your host Victor Medina, an estate planning and elder law attorney, and certified financial planner.

Victor J. Medina:  Hey, everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. I am your host Victor Medina. I am so glad you could join us here this Saturday morning.

I am excited to be here for this show. I’m going to be talking about a brand‑new concept called Bitcoin. You might be hearing a lot about it in the news. I’m going to tell you what it’s all about, give you the skinny on that.

We are going to be covering some new rules about Medicare contribution rates because they could be going up next year. Depending on how much you make, that determines how much you’re going to be paying in Medicare. It’s a good one to listen to. Before we get started, I did want to talk a little bit about some recent news that had come out.

Now, you faithful listeners of the Make It Last show know how much I harp on the concept of having a fiduciary be the person that helps you with all of your investment advice and how you do your financial planning, because those are the only people that are looking out for your best interests.

If you work with somebody that’s one of the big wire houses, they are just brokers. By definition, their loyalty is to the company. They are registered representatives of the company. They represent the company. They do not represent you.

You want to be working with somebody who is a fiduciary. Now, on June 9th of this year, 2017, the Department of Labor had a set of rules go in effect that would essentially make it, or required, that someone be a fiduciary if they’re advising you on your retirement account.

Again, this is old news for all those people who have been listening from the very beginning. If you’re just joining us, hey, that’s what the law is right now. When we passed that law in June, or the regulations from the Department of Labor in June, they came with a ramp‑up period between June and January.

They were going to have one set of rules before they had the final set of rules. The final set of rules, essentially, made it a lot harder for people to sell you something that was conflicted advice, that something wasn’t in your best interest.

More importantly, it was a lot harder for them to sell you something where they got paid more to sell you that versus another investment. We thought, “Well, we’re going to sit tight between June and January. After that, we’ll have the good rules in place.”

At least, the people who are having their retirement money will have some avenue of re‑course if they get hosed on this. They could sue under class action. Anyway, we’re going to have the right rules come into place. Wouldn’t you know it? In fact, we have a delay of the rules.

That’s the new news. That what we have today, from June 9th, that was supposed to end in January has now been extended another 18 months. Another year‑and‑a‑half before the final rules are deemed to be the ones that were...

Last week at Thanksgiving dinner, I got peppered by family members wondering what the best short-term investments are. I answered them once and for all in this episode, so all I have to do in future family gatherings is to tell them to download this episode and call me with any questions.

I also covered 7 common holes in retirement plans. Do you need to fill any of these holes?

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and 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…

Announcer:  Welcome to “Make It Last,” helping you keep your legal ducks in a row and your nest egg secure, with your host Victor Medina, an estate planning and elder law attorney, and certified financial planner.

Victor J. Medina:  Hey, everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. Thank you for joining us for another episode. I am your host Victor Medina. I am joined this morning by a strong cup of coffee and some mood lighting, I don’t know. [laughs] Having the lights down low as I record this episode.

For some reason, I do like the atmosphere that’s created when we take off the office lights, and we just put on something soothing to record the episode of Make It Last.

In any event, we’re just getting back from Thanksgiving. While it was a great time with my family, I got an opportunity to eat way too much as we tend to do on that day. Watched plenty of football, which is my second favorite thing to do. My first favorite thing to do, of course, is to watch the parade in the morning.

I was happy to see that my high school marching band was featured. If you watched the Trumbull High School marching band from Trumbull, Connecticut, I was actually not only a student of that high school but I was a member of that marching band, the Golden Eagle Marching Band. I was absolutely a band geek growing up.

Although I did not get to march in the Macy’s Day Parade, they did that once when I was not a member, I was happy to see them out there.

I know how much time it takes to prepare for that. It’s really a special event when you get to go to the Macy’s Day Parade, because you have to hit the marks at certain times, and there’s a whole show that you put on. Anyway, it was really nice to catch them and see a little bit of nostalgia on the screen.

Anyway, I love the parade, and then I go right into about half an hour of the dog show before [laughs] I have to switch over to football. I was joined by a bunch of my family members.

I happened to have a lot of them as clients managing the money for them. A few of them showed up that were not clients of mine, which is OK, but they always like to pepper me with questions. [laughs]

One of the questions came up, “I’ve got about $60,000. I don’t want to invest it in the market. What’s something good I can do? What’s something good in the short term?”

That, actually, makes for a great podcast episode, a radio show episode. We’re going to cover today six fantastic short‑term investments. I’m going to give you six things that you can do with your money in the short term.

We’re going to discuss the pros and cons of that, what’s going to be risks that are involved. We’re going to try to keep them as risk free as possible. It may not be completely possible in all of those cases, but I will talk to you a little bit about what you can do with that money.

Recently some allegations have been raised against one of the largest financial services companies on the planet, TIAA-CREF. For years, TIAA-CREF (now just TIAA) has operated as a non-profit helping to manage the retirements of teachers and other school-related employees. Now, however, TIAA operates as a for-profit organization and is under investigation by the state of New York for sales activities that aren’t what you’d expect from a company trying to win the hearts of teachers.

In this episode, we will explore what the allegations are, and how you can protect yourself from any predatory practices. This is an episode especially for teachers and retired teachers (including other school personnel). If you know someone that might be affected by this, you should send them the link to the show.

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and 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.

Announcer:  Welcome to “Make It Last,” helping you keep your legal ducks in a row and your nest egg secure, with your host Victor Medina, an estate planning and elder law attorney, and certified financial planner.

Victor Medina:  Hey, everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. I am your host Victor Medina, and I am happy to be joining you this Saturday morning.

I have got a show that I am really excited about because it’s all about teachers, and it’s for teachers in retirement. I can’t wait to tell you a little bit more about my family and how many people are involved in the education system over where I’m at.

Listen, if you’re just joining us for the first time, I want to welcome you to the show. This is a show where we explore a lot about retirement, both from a legal, financial, and tax perspectives. I try to go through as much of the knowledge that I have to share with you so you walk away with something educational and actionable when you’re done at the end.

Now, if you have been listening for a while, and you like the show, one of the things you can do to make sure that you’re not up so early in the morning, listening to it is you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or on your Android device. You can do that by going to makeitlastradio.com.

There are many number of ways that you can subscribe to that, or you can search for Make It Last with Victor Medina on iTunes and hit the subscriber button. You’ll know you’re at the right page when there’s a big blue box saying Make It Last in the subscribe button. Every episode will be delivered automatically to your listening device.

We broadcast this on Saturday mornings. I tell you, about a week and a half ago, I took a trip with my wife away, our first trip in any number of years. We’ve got kids. [laughs] It’s not a practical thing to do to go away as often. I was really fortunate to have my parents watch the kids.

The reason why we were able to go away in the middle of November is that, if you weren’t aware, the state of New Jersey basically closes down for the Thursday and Friday in November following Election Day. It’s across the state. Disney calls it Jersey Week.

One of the reasons why it does that is because the Educators Association, the union that represents teachers, is negotiated these two days where holds its annual conference down in Atlantic City as days that are off the schedule on the calendar.

It’s been in there for ever and ever and ever. It gives us the opportunity, at least as a family,

This week, the House of Representatives passed a new proposed tax bill. I’ll cover what the new bill changes about taxes, as well as covering some new rule changes to reverse mortgages and why you probably shouldn’t consider using a reverse mortgage as part of your retirement planning.

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and 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…

 

Bert:  Welcome to “Make It Last,” helping you keep your legal ducks in a row and your nest egg secure, with your host, Victor Medina, an estate planning and elder law attorney and certified financial planner.

Victor J. Medina:  Hey, everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. I am your host, Victor Medina. I am so glad you’re enjoying this Saturday morning. It’s bright and early if you’re listening on the radio, but as you know, we also simulcast this as a podcast.

If you’re interested in listening to this show at any time that isn’t Saturday morning, you can go ahead and subscribe on iTunes or Android and just look for Make It Last with Victor Medina.

You search for that, you see a little blue box. Hit the subscribe button, and you will get this show automatically delivered to your device every week as soon as it’s done being broadcast on the air.

I’m excited for today’s show. We are going to cover three subjects. A little different formats today than the way we normally do. Normally we’d cover one small topic in the first segment and then take a larger topic over segments two and three. We teach you a little bit about it and then what’s practical.

This week, we’re actually going to hit three different subjects. The three different subjects are, we’re going to cover the new GOP tax proposal. It’s a couple of weeks old now. We’re going to talk a little bit about what it means because there are some important provisions in there. A lot of things that affect retirees.

Then, in the next segment, we’re going to cover a new law about reverse mortgages. Now, on the show, I haven’t really gone into reverse mortgages. In large part because I don’t believe that they should factor into a retirement for reasons that I’ll discuss in that second segment, but I am going to cover the new law and how it might affect you if you are considering a reverse mortgage.

Then, finally, in the last segment I’m going to cover the question about should you hire a financial advisor. Many people are questioning whether or not they should have a financial advisor in their lives, specifically in retirement. We’re going to give you two good reasons about why you should consider hiring a financial advisor, especially in retirement as you make that transition.

Because we have so much to cover today, let’s jump right in and talk a little bit about the new tax proposal. The Republicans in the House essentially proposed a bill that they said is a reformation of the tax code. There are provisions in there that change the income tax rates. Inside of there, you’ll find that they have consolidated seven tax brackets down to four.

They have consolidated the 10 and the 15 percent bracket which affects a lot of people in retirement. They’ve made that 12 percent bracket. The brackets, I guess, that can be used [laughs] in the same word there, but the brackets are basically down to 12, 25, 30, and 35.

”Retirement” used to mean one thing – the leisure time that comes after decades of work. But, with the advent of new technology and more research about the psychology of retirement, the definition of retirement can mean something else. This episode we will explore 3 types of retirement as well as looking at 5 signs you may need in-home care.

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and 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 watch the full transcript…

Announcer:  Welcome to “Make it Last,” helping you keep your legal ducks in a row and your nest egg secure, with your host Victor Medina, an estate planning and elder law attorney, and certified financial planner.

Victor J. Medina:  Everybody, welcome back to Make it Last. I am your host Victor Medina. I’m excited to be here with you today. If you’re listening live, it’s Saturday morning at 7:30 AM.

If you are a podcast subscriber, it could be at any time that you’re listening to this show. Regardless of when you’re listening, I want to say thank you. Thank you for being a loyal follower of the Make it Last radio show.

I’m excited to do these shows. By the response, it seems like you’re all excited to hear them as well. If this is something that you enjoy, that you sit as part your regular schedule, one of the nicest things that you can do is go ahead and share that information with somebody you like and care about.

Give them the opportunity to learn from this as well. It’s something that we do as a little gift to the community. It’s something we do to help educate everybody. It’s not my day job, but I do enjoy the opportunity to share a little bit of my knowledge wider with a greater group of people than I could ever see in my practice or in my businesses. It is a great pleasure to serve you.

I’m excited for this week’s show, because we’re going to cover two topics. One is I’m going to cover three different kinds of retirement. Most people think about retirement as this monolithic thing, and it just is, but we’re going to go a little deep into what covers those, what it actually means, the different kinds of retirement.

I’m also going to cover five signs that it might be time for in‑home care. I don’t know how long the first segment’s going to take. If this goes too long, maybe we’ll push that other segment off to the next show. For the most part, I really did want to focus on three different kinds of retirement.

We’ve got to set this up. We’ve got to set it up the right way because, as I said, most people think about retirement as this big one concept, defined only one way. They’ve been defining in their head that way since they were at working age, that retirement meant something. That’s odd, right?

For most of human history, work was something that you did to survive as long as you were capable. With the advent of the Industrial Age, the Modern Era, we instituted a process of schooling the young to help train them for more sophisticated work to do for the rest of their lives.

While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being a farmer and farming your land to get food to survive or building your home and renovating it and keeping it in good shape in order to have shelter, with the industrial age in the modern era, people trained to do jobs.

Part of that meant that the longer that people live ‑‑ in part to all of the advances in medical science, and just better taking care of yourself ‑‑ the more likely it is t...

Crooks are getting more creative with how to part you from your money. One of the biggest growing areas is in “affinity fraud”. Learn what it is and how to avoid it.

Also, Victor discusses top 401k mistakes, including introducing one investment option that might interest people looking for tax-free growth and tax-free distributions.

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and 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…

Announcer:  Welcome to “Make It Last.” Helping you keep your little ducks in a row, and your nest eggs secure. With your host, Victor Medina, an estate planning and elder law attorney, and certified financial planner.

Victor J. Medina:  Everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. I am your host, Victor Medina. Jeez, that music always gets me excited to talk to you. I am just thrilled.

This is the fall season. The fall season is my favorite season. If you’re listening to this in a podcast way, way later, it’s like November. It is a nice cool crisp November. I love this season. I love getting ready for Thanksgiving, and I love to host Thanksgiving.

One of my favorite things to do is to cook about five, six of the dishes. Here’s the one dish I don’t cook, which is the turkey. I’m no good at the turkey. I leave the turkey to somebody else, but all the side dishes I’m pretty good at, and I like cooking though.

I’m in negotiations now with my wife to try to figure out if we’re going to host or if we’re going to go to somebody else’s house. But I hope we get to host because I love staying home, I love watching the parade, I love cooking for most of the day, I love having family over and then last, but not least, I like watching football. Anyway, it’s a good season for me.

This is going to be a good show for you. I’ve got two topics I want to cover. One is a concept called affinity fraud and a lot of people are familiar with identity fraud but this is affinity fraud and we’re going to cover that today. The other thing I want to talk to you about is top 401(k) mistakes.

More and more people are making mistakes when it comes to their 401(k) ‑‑ how much they invest, when they invest, what they invest in, when they come out of it, why they might come out of it. I’m going to introduce a novel concept about why your retirement vehicles may want to include things beyond your 401(k).

We’re going to through that and talk about some taxes, so put on your thinking caps and stay with me as we go over that.

The first segment I want to go over with you is affinity fraud. Affinity fraud, if you look up the definition, it’s basically referring to investment scams that prey upon members of identifiable groups. You could be part of a religious or an ethnic community, you could be part of the elderly, that’s part of the affinity fraud or the kinds of professional groups.

The people who perpetrate this often are members of the groups. It’s one of the ways to get in with them and get all the confidence that you need in order to scam people out of stuff.

I remember the first time I was exposed to this, I was pretty young. I was in the middle of law school and I was a teaching assistant to new law school students. It was probably my second or third year, and I was meeting with one of the members of my team that I was teaching.

Obviously,

Medicare Open Enrollment is from October 15th until December 7th. There are things you can do to optimize your choices for the next year. This week, Victor goes over the best Medicare Enrollment tips that you can use.

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and 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…

Announcer:  Welcome to “Make It Last,” helping you keep your legal ducks in a row and your nest egg secure, with your host Victor Medina, an estate planning, and elder law attorney, and certified financial planner.

Victor J. Medina:  Everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. I’m so happy you can join us here on what’s going to be a pretty exciting show. We’re going to focus on two things today.

I’m going to talk a little bit about a new study that was released by Genworth who basically sells long‑term care insurance policies. They do some academics research in long‑term care generally with a need for that is. We’re going to go over some of their findings.

The second thing is Medicare Open Enrollment. That’s usually from October 15th to December 7th. I’m going to spend the rest of the show talking to you a little about what that means and what your options are, different tools that would be available for you to look in to getting better or more optimized Medicare coverage.

Let me set this up by letting you know that every year Genworth, basically, does a survey across the country. They’ve been doing this since about 2004. They’ve been doing it just about 13 or 14 years now.

It’s important to get an idea of what the cost of care is from different areas. It can help inform where you’re going to live and whether you need to help plan for that care by getting any financial stuff in order, getting long‑term care insurance or doing some Medicaid planning. My goodness, I almost never make that mistake.

Anyway, so this helps with that. If you go to genworth.com and search for their long‑term care study from 2017, let’s say Genworth 2017 Cost of Care Study. There’s all kinds of links there. You can pull it apart. There’s survey methodology, how they got to where they got.

The thing that most people will dive into is selecting the cost of care and researching it by area, by your region. The first thing you do is you slide down and you check out your state. You can look at the median for the state. This is basically for the entire state. Now, if you look at New Jersey, the cost of care for the median is higher than it is for the central area.

They took a look at five areas. You’ll have to figure out whether or not they’re representative to your area. They looked at Atlantic City. They looked at Northern New Jersey. They looked at Ocean City, Trenton, and the Vineland area.

There’s not a lot of representation in the middle of the state. There’s no survey that focused on, let’s say, New Brunswick area. There’s almost nothing in the Northwestern part of the state, more in the mountain region towards the top of Pennsylvania and New York.

That’s not really represented at all. We’ve got to take that into consideration, but the numbers aren’t too far off.

I mean I do a lot of Medicaid‑based planning and long‑term care planning in our area, which is just outside of Trenton, which does include Middlesex County, Monmouth County, and Somerset County.

The numbers that I get for what the cost of long‑term care are not too far off from that.

This week, Victor discusses four things missing from your estate plan and 1 investment that you probably have in your portfolio (especially if you’re working with one of those large investment firms.

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and 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…

Announcer:  Welcome to “Make It Last,” helping you keep your legal ducks in a row and your nest egg secure, with your host Victor Medina, an estate planning and elder law attorney, and certified financial planner.

Victor Medina:  Everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. I am your host Victor Medina. Welcome back to another episode. I am excited to be with you today. I’ve got a great show lined up for you. I hope you are going to learn a lot from it.

I’m going to talk to you a little bit today about some things that may be missing from your estate plan, four things we’ve come across that are often missing from the estate plan. Basically, giving opportunity to review that and make sure that that’s not happening to you.

The other thing that I wanted to talk about was some proprietary investment issues. I am going to cover both of those things today. A lot of people that come in, they’ve got a review of their portfolio and it turns out that they’ve got some proprietary investments. I’m going to illustrate how and why that’s not great and what you should do about it.

I will share with you a little personal information. I just got back from celebrating my brother’s wedding. My brother got married to a wonderful woman named Beth Hanson.

They’re on their honeymoon in Italy right now. They had a fantastic wedding on the beach just outside of Charleston, South Carolina, where he lives. I’ll tell you something I really loved about that, two things really, my son, who is 14 and really into photography and stuff, was asked to be a videographer.

He ended up being the videographer for the wedding. I’m interested to see what that footage looks like. He ended up renting a lens and everything for it. More than anything else, he took it seriously and my brother paid him. He was like, “Welcome to adulthood.”

I let him know immediately how he should be investing that and told him a little bit about taxes, which he didn’t appreciate, but I did have him as a captive audience for the 14 hours that we drove back from Charleston back home in New Jersey. The second thing was just the food.

The food was out of this world. I don’t know if you ever get a chance to go down to Charleston. I’ve talked a lot about my brother who is down there working for this hospitality group called 82 Queen.

They run a few restaurants and whatnot. Two of the ones that they run, which were fantastic, one is 82 Queen Street and we had some high‑end fish, just outstanding.

That was at the rehearsal dinner. Someone who has known my brother for a while and I’ve gotten to meet personally, Anthony runs the Swig & Swine, which is a barbecue place. I just went to town on the brisket. It’s a good thing that I was on the beach and I could walk some of it off because I tell you…too much, too much.

Anyway, happy to celebrate my brother’s wedding, looking forward to great things with him and his new wife. Hoping they start a family soon because as it turns out, there are only boys that we’ve had in our family.

I’ve got three, my sister’s going to have her second,