Retirease Radio with Victor Medina CFP®, RICP®, CELA®

Sometimes it's hard to tell where we should be focusing our investments. In this episode of Make It Last, Victor talks through which retirement vehicle is right for you; focusing primarily on 401K plans and IRAs.

Like this episode? Leave a review and give a 5-star rating on the Apple Podcast app. As always, share with a friend!

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. To schedule a free consultation with us call 609-818-0068.

In this week's episode, Victor discusses the idea of being happy in retirement. What are ways people can find joy in retirement and bring down stress? Victor also spends some time giving the latest update to the Medical Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act (or the "Right to Die Act")

For a FREE report to help you in planning your income text the word INCOME to 609-554-5936.

Like this episode? Leave a review and give a 5-star rating on the Apple Podcast app. As always, share with a friend!

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. To schedule a free consultation with us call 609-818-0068.

Are retirement planning and financial planning the same thing? NO! In this episode Victor discusses the differences between them. He also talks a little about the rising nursing home costs and gives you an update in what's happening with the Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act

For a FREE guide on some top Retirement Issues, text the word RETIREMENT to 609-554-5936.

Like this episode? Leave a review and give a 5-star rating on the Apple Podcast app. As always, share with a friend!

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.

How do you retire when you have no money? Learn some tips for retirement on a shoestring budget! Then, Victor discusses The 5 Key Decisions You Have to Consider In Retirement.

For a FREE RETIREMENT CHECKLIST, text the word CHECKLIST to 609-554-5936. Make sure you're on the right track for retirement!

Like this episode? Leave a review and give a 5-star rating on the Apple Podcast app. As always, share with a friend!

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.

In this episode of Make It Last, Victor dives into both the legal and the retirement world. First, Victor discusses planning for incapacity and managing different financial accounts in that time. Then, Victor goes through the 3 different worlds of money: Banking, Insurance, and Wall Street. How are these worlds defined? How should they be integrated? How should your investments change once you hit retirement? All these questions answered in this portion of the show.

Text ABC to 609-554-5936 for a free report on the ABC's of Fixed Index Annuities!

Like this episode? Leave a review and give a 5-star rating on the Apple Podcast app. As always, share with a friend!

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and Certified Elder Law Attorney (CELA) and Certified Financial Planner professional (CFP). Through his law firm and independent registered investment advisory company, Victor provides 360º Wealth Protection Strategies for individuals in or nearing retirement.

For more information, visit Medina Law Group or Palante Wealth Advisors.

Full transcript below:

Announcer: Welcome to "Make It Last," helping you keep your legal 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. If you know, it's the only show that helps you keep your legal ducks in a row and your financial nest eggs secure, and taking you through the world of legal and financial retirement planning.

I'm your host, Victor Medina. I'm so glad you can join us for another fun and exciting episode. I'm really jazzed for today's show because I planned here to talk a little bit about some legal stuff and a little bit about some retirement stuff. I always like it when I can blend those two worlds together.

In the legal world, we're going to talk about how to plan for incapacity. We're going to go over dealing with different financial accounts and what are your alternatives in order to help somebody manage your money if something were to happen to you, if you became incapacitated.

We're going to give you some alternatives to consider as you think about how to put your plan together for that. In the retirement world, we're going to talk about the three different worlds of money and integrating those.

When we start talking about investing your hard‑earned dollars, you might get in mind some financial vehicles. That you might be using some different products, most likely, things like stocks, bonds, mutual funds, may be even real estate. There are a plethora of investments available to consumers. They come in all shapes and sizes.

The difficult part, though, is figuring out a way to make all of these investments and other financial work vehicles work together in order to put you on the path to success in your financial life.

When I think about retirement, one of the things I like to make clear is that, the same investments and financial vehicles that got you to retirement, probably are not going to be the same financial vehicles that will get you through retirement. Possibly, right. Most of the time, I find this not to be the case.

Unfortunately, I see too often pre‑retirees, and even retirees, people that are already in retirement invested in the same way in retirement that they worked through their working years. Sometimes I'll be so bold as to ask them, "You know what, how much of these have you owned or changed since you become retired, or you intend to change?"

The answer for many of them is just zero, that they continue on with what they have. Today, I'm going to talk a little bit about the three worlds of money and what they can mean to your financial portfolio. By the way, these three worlds include The Banking World, The Wall Street World, and The Insurance World.

The question is, do you have money in all three of these worlds? Do you know where your money is invested? Do you understand why it's invested there? Today, I'm going to help you better connect with these investments and other financial vehicles in your financial portfolio. Leading up to that I have, in the last week or so, really spent a lot of time with new clients, talking to them about annuities and specifically talking to them about fixed‑indexed annuities.

When I go through this education with people, normally, I lay out for them the different worlds of insurance products and the whole journey that insurance companies have gone on from their inception through the most recent iteration and why there are these different kinds of insurance products. We're going to be talking a little bit later in the show about the insurance world.

In my conversations with people in my office, new clients, I have been struck by the number of times that I've had to explain to them what a fixed‑indexed annuity is. I guess not really struck, because I do understand that it's not a common topic.

Most people don't have a lot of experience with it. Maybe it's not at all surprising that they need this explanation. I also thought, well, maybe if I'm having these conversations with people in my office, it's probably the case that you out there listening to this show have these same questions.

What I find interesting when I have conversations with people, basically about any financial product, that there is almost always a gut reaction to what's going on positive or negative. People will either evolve or hate mutual funds, love or hate ETFs, love or hate annuities, love or hate bank products.

I don't know what causes somebody to be so clear about their feelings. It's often a matter of maybe have prior experience with something or maybe just some more mainstream‑related education that they received. There's a lot of commercials out there that will tell you about why annuity stink and people will should never invest in them.

And then the people who market annuities will tell you how bad the stock market world is and why you should never be involved in that. Of course, the banking people, they're going to tell you that the other two people are wrong. You should never be in Wall Street, or the insurance world, and you should have everything in bank products.

Look, even just laying it out like that, [laughs] you start to hear how ridiculous that stuff sounds. It can't all be that's true. So, what is coloring? What are people's experience with that? Many times, it's the people who are presenting that information. What, in fact, are their motivations?

For me, I'm kind of like Switzerland here. I will take on anything that will help a client's retirement picture look better.

Sometimes that's just a function of incorporating a little bit of everything. Sometimes it's about making an independent examination of something. Say, "Look that is categorically bad." It's not because I can't provide it for my client but it's because I've look at it and even if I could provide it for my client, I'm not going to.

I'll give you a couple of examples of that by the way. We don't very often ever recommend variable annuities. They just tend to be terrible products for most people, terrible products for the majority of the world. There is a reason why. Probably too much to get into this show.

Similarly, we don't ever recommend actively traded mutual funds. They tend to not stand behind their promises of outperforming what evidence based or more, objective and passively invested are. Their fees almost never justify that either. First of all, they're wrong most of the time [indecipherable 06:34] their fees and then their fees are high, too.

There are some things that fall into that category. Everything else is kind of fair game where we're talking about whole life insurance, annuities, mutual funds, individual stocks, bank products, each of these things has a role in a client's life. It was really about kind of mixing and matching those.

To my point, I've created a report that will help explain these fixed index annuities. I've been telling you that I've a lot of meetings around that. I've had to explain it a few times. I thought, "Well, what if I created a report that I made available to all of the radio show and podcast listeners. In that way they could get this information."

I know that I'm not going to cut off having to have conversations in my office about that. I should only be so lucky that by putting up this one report it would be over. Actually, I enjoy these conversations with all of these frustrated teacher a bit. If I get the opportunity to educate somebody about that and I get their eyes to open and get them to understand what we're talking about. For me, as many times as its own and reward.

I'm not going to get to meet with everybody that's out there. Because of that, I want to provide the report. For that reason, I want to give you the information so you can download that report. It's by text message. What you got to do is you have to text the word ABC, just the letters A‑B‑C, the first three letters of the alphabet.

If you can't remember it, we got to put you into incapacity and dementia segment, coming up next. Anyway, you text the word ABC to 609‑554‑5936. That's 609‑554‑5936 ABC, text that over to that number and we will send out a report on the ABCs of FIA, Fixed Index Annuities, kind of the way that works. I want to make that available to you.

Now let's get into the first part of the show which is talking about the different options for managing accounts in the event of diminished capacity or incapacity in what we can do to help family members do that.

Now, planning for incapacity is probably one of the most important parts of a comprehensive estate plan. Whether it's a comprehensive estate plan or retirement plan, no matter what you want to think about it. When you get to adulting and you're at that point and time in which you are...you're getting to be retired and you know that it's not a matter of if or when, you're going to need an estate plan.

Planning for incapacity is one of the most important things you can do because one of the things that happens if you fail to plan is...sort of default option for how you deal with these things. The plan that you have to go through if you don't plan for it the right way is often super expensive and super inconvenient.

You have to go through guardianship. It may cost $10,000 to $12,000 and all the while somebody is not managing...you don't have any access to your money to help you. What we want to be able to do is talk about this because there is an ever increasing number of people who are going to possibly have to face this.

Most of what I'm talking about is baby boomer generation continuing to age in record numbers. I think the number that most people are comfortable with is saying that there are going to be 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 every single day between now and the year 2040. That means that there's just this growing, mushrooming number of people that could possibly face incapacity and the need to manage their assets.

While medicine has not reached the point where it can prevent these cognitive impairments, there are tools that can be used to ensure that your finances continue to be managed effectively in the event that your diminished capacity manifests itself.

What we want to do is talk about each one of these different areas. We're going to talk about four different ways that we can go through this planning.

The first one, and probably which is one of the most common ones that people do, is they simply add a name to an account. What they'll do is they'll create a convenience account.

It may not be the person's main account. They'll either create a separate account, or they'll take another account that exists. They'll make that person a co‑owner.

You might have mom's account. Mom is retitled. Mom's account is retitled to include both mom and her son.

You could also, by the way, a joint account that's owned by husband and wife, and then they add another owner. They put the son on with mom and dad.

There were already these accounts that exist that they're known as convenience accounts. They exist solely. The additional owners added purely for the sake of giving them ability to access these funds. There are, by the way, some financial institutions that identify this as a convenience account.

Those ideas, by the way, in terms of doing that, have been around for a super long time. There are a couple of reasons people consider using convenience accounts.

One of them, really and quite frankly, is to avoid the need to pay for professional legal work. What they're doing here is they're trying to shortcut the need to hire an attorney to put together an estate plan because the other ways that I'm going to talk about right now require there to be legal work to be done.

This is a quick fix. It's just a matter of filling out the paperwork at the financial institution. If you do that, then you get access to that.

There are a couple of reasons why this solution is far from ideal and, by the way, can lend itself to a number of significant other problems. They solve the problem of accessing the money, but they create problems.

First thing that I want to talk about, if you retitle an account to include another owner, it means it's not just the original owner's assets any longer. If you create a joint account, there is joint ownership, which means that the owner that's added to the account will have full access to the funds because now it's their money, too.

While doing this can enable a healthy child to have access to funds to pay for some of the medical bills, well, it also gives that same healthy child the same access to the same funds to, well, I don't know, pay off their mortgage, or transfer the funds to another account.

It places these funds at risk. It eliminates any checks and balances that there might otherwise be.

I don't want to bury the lede. When we go talk about the other options in our planning, the ones that require legal work to do, one of the benefits of those is that you create these checks and balances, these different fiduciary obligations.

By the way, even if a bank manager, an advisor, or a custodian suspects that there's something wrong going on in that account or a requested transaction, generally their hands are tied. They have to process the transaction according to those instructions because instructions come from an owner.

If you create this joint account, this convenience account, and there is somebody that walks in there and says, "Well, I want to do something. I want to empty out this account. I want to leave it with zero dollars in there."

The bank manager could look, and then say, "Look, I've had this account with Jim and Jane for a really long time. They've never emptied this out before. I'm getting these instructions from the son. The son wants to empty it out."

"I don't really feel right about it. I feel like there's something wrong. Perhaps, I should try to step in and take some of the precautions that exist when I think that there's elder abuse or financial fraud."

In a scenario where somebody has added a name to an account, you don't have that opportunity. They have to end up listening to those instructions and following the instructions.

There may be some recourse on this. You generally have to prove that the joint account relationship was merely established for convenience, and then there was a fiduciary duty that was owed.

Look what I did there. I lined up a whole legal action to go into that. One where I have to submit all of these proofs rather than already being in a scenario where somebody had to act as a fiduciary.

What I did was trade the need to do legal planning up front and pay legal dollars for the risk that I have to pay a lot more legal dollars with a much harder journey in front of us to prove that. That doesn't make a lot of sense.

A couple of other issues, by the way. If you add a joint owner, you can subject to those assets to additional creditors. One of the most troubling aspects of using a joint account means that someone else, a family member, is going to have those assets subject to their creditors.

It exposes the account to the overseer's creditors and their financial problems as well. If you can get to that money, or if someone can get to the money, so can their creditors.

Establish that, if you've got a joint account and you have access to the money in the account, so would the creditors. If you end up adding your son to a million dollar brokerage account to help manage the investments, one day, on the radio, the son comes home from work. He hears that one of the companies was acquired. The stock prices jumped.

He's excited about it. He knows that it's in mom's account. He whips out his phone. He looks up the price of the stock. He's driving. He causes an accident.

That accident's Johnny's fault. The resulting lawsuit, he's sued for everything that he's worth, including his recently established joint account. Mom, who put him on there, could be out that million dollars.

It's really hard to protect that against claims. It is important to make sure that we go ahead, try to protect them, and avoid that.

By the way, this approach where you think to yourself, "Jeez, I'm going to add a joint owner to the account," isn't available for all assets. That's the third point I wanted to get to here.

In fact, even if you were willing to disregard all of the risks and potential issues that I've been outlining so far, it's limited because there are kinds of accounts that you can't ever create joint accounts around.

For instance, IRAs, and Roth IRAs or other kinds of retirement accounts, like 401(k)s. They can't be converted to joint ownership. There's no such thing as a joint IRA.

The I stands for individual. Therefore, only an individual can be the owner. The only way to get the IRA into a joint account is to distribute them out of the IRA, which causes all those taxes. You're not going to ever do that. There are three downsides to having things owned by a joint account or try to use that planning.

One, there's risk that, that money can be walked off with. There's a risk that, that money is subject to creditors. Then there's a downside that you can't use this planning for all of your assets.

[background music]

Victor: I want to take a break right now because I'm going to leave that taste in your mouth. Say, "OK. That's not what I want to do."

When we come back, we'll talk about the other options that you can use to help people manage their fears. Incapacity is not something you can control, whether or not you're going to go through five. Having a great plan in order to navigate that, entirely is something you can control over. I'll talk about how to do that when we come back from this quick break.

Announcer: Life is better when you have your legal ducks in a row. One area attorney can help you get your financial ducks in a row as well. Victor J. Medina fills dual fiduciary roles, an estate planning and certified elder law attorney. Also a credentialed certified financial planner professional.

Through his law practice at Independent Registered Investment Advisory Company, Mr. Medina serves high wealth individuals seeking conservative advice and a professionally‑managed approach to retirement wealth management. Learn more about Victor's 360‑degree wealth protection strategies. Call 609‑818‑0068.

That's 609‑818‑0068, or listen to the newest episode of Make It Last radio, Wednesday mornings at 11:00 on 1450 Talk Radio. Investment advisory services offered through Palante wealth advisors, LLC, a New Jersey and Pennsylvania Registered Investment Advisor.

Victor: Everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. We've been talking about ways that use legal planning to help a family member manage your account if you become incapacitated in the future. We talked, in the first segment, about what not to do.

One of the things that is an option that we totally don't recommend is adding somebody on to an account as a joint owner, whether it's a convenience account, whatever you want to call it. It's just to help them get access to it. Remember the reason why we don't want to do that is because we give them access to 100 percent of the money.

We possibly make that money subject to creditors and also where we can't use that planning, as planning for 100 percent of the assets. It is not the best option. We do have another option and this option has been around for a super long time. That is, that we can use a power of attorney.

The power of attorney is a much better way to allow somebody to gain access to managing an account. Let me talk to you about what that is. Let's be clear, this is going to require some legal planning to do right because while there are powers of attorney that are downloadable from the Internet, I'm going to make a case for why we don't recommend using them.

Let's talk about what a power of attorney is. A power of attorney is a legal document that grants an individual or if you want, multiple individuals, the right or the power to act on behalf of another person.

It creates a fiduciary relationship between the person who creates the document or what we call the principal, and the person who takes on the responsibility either called an attorney‑in‑fact or an agent.

The idea that they're called an agent tells us everything that we need to know about that relationship because agency, an agency relationship under the law is the highest level of responsibility for another person. It means that the person who is the agent has the legal obligation to act on behalf of that principle.

They owe them a duty of loyalty to do things like, not use the money for themselves and not waste the money. They're held to a higher standard. Now, there is a practical challenge to using a power of attorney, and it's this.

While the power of attorney is a legal document that confers a legal obligation for somebody to work on behalf of another person and in fact, gives them the authority to do that, there is no repository of powers of attorney where you can register this.

There is no method of a verification that the power of attorney is in fact, a valid power of attorney. In fact, one of the things that we have to do is we have to provide a copy or an original of that document at each and every financial institution that holds money in order to be authorized to use this power of attorney for another person.

The reason why this becomes a limiting portion of the planning is because each financial institution can review and conclude a different thing about that power of attorney. They're going to have an internal process for evaluating that power of attorney to try to determine whether or not it is still effective.

They're going to have policies in there that are going to set forward things like, how old can the power of attorney be? What kind of provisions must it contain? Again, there is no centralized way of saying, if only it has these certain provisions and under this certain age, then we know it will automatically be accepted. There's no central way of doing that.

Even the document itself might have limiting provisions in there saying it's only good for the next 3 years or 10 years, or if I'm incapacitated, or if the sun is in line with gamma, whatever. It doesn't have a way of self‑proving. That creates this risk that when we go to use the power of attorney, it may not be deemed effective by this financial institution.

Even if we were going to get a positive result in one financial institution, it doesn't mean that we'll get a positive result for every financial institution. Those are important things to consider, but the power of attorney is really a good document to have.

It's a necessary document to have because the absence of the power of attorney means essentially that you're going to have to go through this guardianship kind of thing, and that's not anything that you want to have to go through.

There are different kinds of powers of attorney. You can get a general durable power of attorney. You can get a limited power of attorney. General durable power of attorney is going to be broader in that sense. A limited power of attorney is going to be limited.

It's going to be limited by time or by scope, those kinds of things. The general durable power of attorney, by the way, is usually juxtaposed with a springing power of attorney. A springing power of attorney is one that is only effective when somebody becomes incapacitated.

Whereas, a durable power of attorney is often immediate and survives their incapacity. What does that mean, by the way? It means that the durable immediate power of attorney is effective from the day that you sign it. You can continue to use it even if somebody becomes incapacitated.

The springing power of attorney requires there to be a showing of incapacity before it's deemed effective. What's right and what's wrong off of that, it really depends on the client, and what their circumstances are. I'll give you some general things that work in the greatest number of cases.

One of them is that most people who are married end up creating immediate powers of attorney that include their spouse as the agent off of that first. That seems to make a lot of sense. Most people are already comfortable with their spouses managing their affairs for them. That ends up working pretty well.

There are a lot of single people that are uncomfortable with immediate power of attorney, and they go with a springing power of attorney instead. The idea there between the two is that, why should you do one if you're single versus if you're married, springing versus not or what works.

For me, I tell people, if you're going to go with a springing power of attorney because you're nervous about somebody having this authority, just remember that when you go to use this, you're going to place an additional obstacle over this becoming effective.

Namely, you're going to put yourself in a position where the financial institution is going to have to review the power of attorney, see that it requires this incapacity, and then review the evidence that you're showing for incapacity.

You just give them another chance to reject it. If living through that is more tolerable to you than having somebody have authority over your stuff, then you can make that decision. Understand that you're doing that.

One other downside to the power of attorney, and it's really...I don't know, not really being fair to our topic because we're talking about how to manage assets if you are incapacitated. That power of attorney terminates when you do. [laughs] When you die, the power of attorney goes away.

We have to remember that it doesn't give authority to continue to manage assets at death. We're going to have to if you're going to keep that asset owned in your individual name versus the last option we're going to talk about here. If you end up doing that, then you're going to run the risk that you're going to have to go through a probate in order to gain access to that asset.

We're going to talk about that last option that actually will solve some of that. Here's the thing. That even in a case where a power of attorney ends when you do, it's an important document to have. The power of attorney is the only document that will allow somebody access to individually‑owned assets that can't be jointly owned or transferred.

We're back to talking about IRAs, 401(k)s, Roth IRAs. You're not going to be able to do anything with those. Whether put them inside of a jointly held account, or put them inside of something like a trust. You're not going to be able to do that with that.

You're going to need a power of attorney in order to manage those accounts, and even do things like enter into a contract, to stand into somebody's shoes. This is not even just managing assets.

If you want to be able to essentially contract business, do things for somebody, put them into a nursing home, and manage the relationship with a nursing home, and sign a contract, you're still going to need a power of attorney to do that. It's important to have even as we talk about our third option.

Our third option is to create a revocable living trust, and to name a family member either as a successor trustee, somebody that comes in to manage that trust after you do, or a co‑trustee. You might be on the cusp of losing your capacity.

Maybe there was a diagnosis of Alzheimer's or something where you're going to in the future be unable to manage their accounts, and you're comfortable with somebody having access now. The right thing to do is to name them as a co‑trustee.

Most of the time, in a revocable living trust, people believe that those only for rich folks. It's really not the case. With the revocable trust, we're using that planning strategy to add convenience to somebody's estate plan. One of the ways is what we're talking about now, which is essentially gaining access to manage financial affairs while you're incapacitated.

There are other benefits to that, too. Being able to avoid probate, and being able to manage assets throughout death immediately afterwards, and not having to get qualified as an executor or somebody different in that role, death versus during alive. There are benefits to that in terms of convenience.

The revocable living trust, by definition, this legal entity that's created when you sign this trust document that provides a relationship between the person that creates the document, and the person who is the trustee.

Unlike a power of attorney, most people when they create a trust, name the same person in both of those roles. They are the person that creates the document, and they are also the person that is in charge as the trustee versus the power of attorney.

We have somebody else as the agent. You're going to trust, most of the time, somebody creates a trust where they are the trustee over their own trust. That makes a lot of sense when they're alive and well, healthy, because they want to be able to manage that.

By the way, whole idea about revocable is this idea that they can change the terms to anything, whenever they want, however they want. That's the idea about revocable.

What you can do in the revocable living trust is you can name people to be in charge after you in circumstances where you might become incapacitated or when you might pass away. That would be a successor trustee. You're also able to name somebody to serve alongside you. That's essentially a co‑trustee.

The revocable living trust offers advantages when compared to a power of attorney. One of them is the revocable living trust is far less likely to be rejected by a financial institution, because this living trust is its own legal entity. There is no determination about whether or not the document itself is valid.

If it's taking legal title to a property, then by definition, the trust is act and controlling with respect to that property, which means the financial institution doesn't have to scrutinize it. You might have to check to make sure that the person that you're saying is in charge of there is, in fact, in charge of it by the documents itself, if there is that.

These authorities say that the trust is valid or not. It is a legal entity. I call this mini company, if the company is owning these assets. Therefore, if the president, you, become incapacitated, it's very natural that there's a vice‑president to take over with that. It's very streamlined in that sense.

It offers advantages because we don't have to worry about there being a failure of that document later in the future. It also offers other advantages in the way that it continues on after somebody's death.

We talked about this idea that the power of attorney ends when somebody's life ends. The trust continues on until the trust says that it ends. The trust might say that it doesn't end until the assets that are in your name become distributed to your kids on your passing.

There is a continuity to the trust that doesn't necessarily exist with the power of attorney. I know that power of attorney ends when somebody's death. It continues on. Therefore, the revocable living trust can just bypass probate. It can do all of these things that the power of attorney can't. It's a super power of attorney. It's probably the best thing that you can create.

Remember, I did say that you want a power of attorney to manage the other things that are going on. The revocable trust has an Achilles' heel. You remember Achilles' heel? That's the thing that we deep them in the river. All of them was protected except for this one area. Here's the one area where the revocable living trust is vulnerable.

That is that the assets that you want to manage in the trust must be retitled in the name of the trust before you are incapacitated. We call that funding or we call it asset integration, the idea that you take the things that you own, and you retitle them in the name of the trust.

I want you to consider that the trust is a form of a castle, and it's affording you all of these protection. Here's the thing. If you don't put your stuff in the castle, the castle can't work. It can't protect anything. That's what we're talking about in terms of retitling your assets. We want to be able to transfer the title into the trust. That way, the trust protections can become realized.

The best of all worlds in your planning is to not only have a revocable living trust, but to also have a power of attorney and using them in combination. I don't really see a big benefits to having joint ownership. I think that you should avoid that.

When it comes down to getting specific advice in your scenario, always, always work with an established, confident estate planning attorney. You don't want to go to somebody that has multiple different practice areas. You want to go to somebody that is in fact, a hundred percent in the world of estate planning.

By the way, if you're looking for somebody to do that with, one of the best credentials you can check out is being a certified elder law attorney or a CELA. You can go to "nelf.org." It's N‑E‑L‑F dot O‑R‑G. You can look up certified elder law attorneys in your area.

Those certified elder law attorneys are really the expert level, expertise level, specialty level, in estate planning, and specifically elder law planning. It means that an objective outside agency has reviewed all of their credentials, including peer recommendations.

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Victor: They need to be recommended by their peers in order to be somebody who's allowed in as a certified elder law attorney. If you do those things, you can find somebody that's going to be able to put this stuff together for you. I hope that's been helpful. What we're going to end up doing here now, by the way, is taking a quick break.

When we come back, we're going to talk about the three worlds of money. We're going to be fast on this one because not a lot of time left in the show. Strap and we'll be right back after this quick break.

Announcer: Imagine, if the attorney you trust to protect your legal interests could also be trusted to protect your retirement, well. One trusted advisor, dual fiduciary roles, Victor J. Medina. Mr. Medina is an estate planning and certified elder law attorney with a national reputation.

He is also a certified financial planner professional through his law firm and Independent Registered Investment Advisory Company. Mr. Medina provides 360‑degree wealth protection strategies for individuals in or nearing retirement. His unique approach offers advantages to high‑wealth individuals seeking conservative advice and a professionally‑managed approach to their retirement wealth.

To learn more, call 609‑818‑0068. That's 609‑818‑0068. Or listen to the newest episode of Make It Last Radio, Wednesday mornings at 11:00, on 1450 Talk Radio. Investment Advisory Service is offered through Palante Wealth Advisors LLC, a New Jersey and Pennsylvania registered investment advisor.

Victor: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Make It Last. I'm going to transition here a little bit because we were talking about ways to handle incapacity planning. Now I want to talk about the three worlds of money. I'm going to introduce this topic because I think we're going to hit on this a couple of weeks in a row just to make sure that we've got everything covered on it.

The idea here, by the way, is I want to talk about different kinds of financial vehicles and how they should be integrated with your retirement planning. The way that you might want to think about that is that when it comes to creating a blueprint on something to follow, there are going to be different elements there together, maybe different specialties.

You can't build it all out of just one of the specialties that are in there. You can't just have a builder versus a plumber, versus an electrician. All three of those things need to work together in order to have a house that works the way that you need it.

If for instance, you don't have the electricity set right, it won't set the air conditioning running. If your insulation isn't right, then you'll be kind of throwing stuff out of the window.

So, you need three of these things to be working together. When I talk about the three worlds of money, I'm really talking about the difference between the banking world, the insurance world and the Wall Street world. The idea is that all of these things work together.

The first question to ask is what you want your money to do for you. Because we all want our money to grow, never lose any value, and be able to write a check on instantly. We want those three things. We want growth, we want security, and we want liquidity.

I'm here to tell you some good news and some bad news. The good news is you can get growth, safety, and liquidity from different financial vehicles. You can, in fact, get what you want. But the bad news is, there's not one single financial vehicle that will do all of those three things at the same time.

With that, I draw this out for clients to help them understand as I create circles that overlap onto one another. Sort of a Venn diagram. Take one circle on the top right‑hand side and another circle on the top left‑hand side. Kind of look like ears but there is a little overlap. I put a head overneath there and then some overlap in that as well.

If you did that, if you wrote that out and you put growth, safety, and liquidity in each one of those boxes, what you'll find is that there's some overlap on two of those.

There's no product that's going to give you the overlap where you have all three of them. What do I mean by that? If you want something to be safe and liquid, those are products that are inside of the banking world, so a checking and a savings account are safe and liquid. They're 100 percent available to you. They're never going to lose any value.

Instead, if what you want is growth and liquidity, so they'll be able to write a check on something and have it grow a lot, then that's the stock market or The Wall Street world. You could sell a stock anytime you want. It may be for a loss but you can sell it whenever you want and you can get money whenever you want.

The last one is, if you want growth and safety, then we're talking about products in the insurance world. Those are ways of achieving some of those goals. Like I said, you are not going to be able to get one financial vehicle or product that will get you all of these things at once.

There are some steps that you need to go through to try to figure out where your assets need to be allocated so we need to start with a plan. I know that it stresses a lot but income, a cash flow, learning where your check is going to be coming from, is really, really important in today's retirement.

So much so by the way, that it is the first thing that I think people should start from is understanding where they're going to get income in retirement and leave things that are related for growth, legacy, and other stuff to the next level. What we're trying to do is trying to create security in and around that.

We've spoken in other shows how to do that. You're going to be looking at your social security, any pensions that you have, looking at your budget and your expenses. There are a lot of ways of getting there but the point is that we want to see what your needs are. Once we understand that, now we can start to allocate assets across that.

Remember, no financial vehicle's going to do all three things at once. You probably need three things in your life so how do we allocate that around it? Going back to the banking world, remember, the banking world is safe and liquid off of that.

We know that interest rates being as low as they have been, or for quite some time they still are, we know that we're not going to get a lot of growth in a bank or a credit union. Some of the accounts that you can access at a bank or credit union include things like checking and savings, money market accounts, or certificates of deposits.

Now, what's nice is that many banks are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or what you all recognize as FDIC. That's an independent agency of the US government. The FDIC will insure up to $250,000 per depositor, per member institution. That means that you can have $250,000 in a bank account and if the bank fails, the FDIC covers your losses.

So much the FDIC, a credit union account can be insured up to $250,000 as well, if the credit union is a member of the National Credit Union Administration or NCUA. That one doesn't quite roll off the tongue the same way as FDIC insurance but what's important here is to understand the banking world is just a piece of the puzzle.

It's probably not going to have all of your money because in my opinion, you're going to lose money due to inflation. If your money doesn't grow at least to keep pace with inflation, then $20 that you spend at the grocery store today will not go as far as when you spend it 5 or 10 years from now. You can't neglect it because we need safety and liquidity.

When we talk about growth potential and safety, that's the stuff in the insurance world. Look, the insurance industry gets a bad rap a lot but it can serve several purposes when it comes to your dollars. That growth safety also can translate as to income and a legacy. However, what we have to understand is that there's always one thing missing.

I talked to you about the fact that bank products tend to have missing in their growth. Insurance products are going to have missing in their liquidity. It's really important to educate yourself about what you're putting your money into.

One of the main products that are recommended in retirement ‑‑ I hear about them all the time in terms of the way that they're recommended improperly. I hear the good and the bad on them ‑‑ but one of the things that we talked about here is the annuity.

Remember, I am putting together for you the ABCs of fixed indexed annuities which is a form of an annuity. If you want that, what you do is you text ABC to 609‑554‑5936. Take out your phones, type in the phone number fields, 609‑554‑5936, and then just type the letters, ABC, and send. We'll get you that free report talking about fixed index annuities.

I want to open your mind for a second and, hopefully, make you think about an annuity in a different way because we believe that there is a place for those in people's retirement accounts. It's a little different than I think the way that most people approach it, most financial advisors approach it.

They either think that a hundred percent of your money should be in there or zero percent of your money. I think the answer is probably somewhere in between, and not right in the middle. I want to talk to you about why.

If you want to think about annuity in a different way...Let me see if I can take you on this journey. I want you to think about whether or not you like restaurants. If I were to ask you if you like restaurants, you're like, "Yes, I like restaurants." I'm sure that you have a favorite restaurant nearby that you enjoy going to.

I know that when my wife and I get a rare chance to be out without kids, we want a reliable product at the end. We want something that we're going to have a great experience with them. We're going to go to that restaurant. On the other hand, there are some restaurants that we're not too fond of. Probably, this is the same way for you.

I want you to think about annuities that they're like restaurants. There's a wide variety of them. You just have to figure out which one fits you. An annuity is a contract between you and an insurance company in which the company promises to make some payments to you, starting either immediately or sometime in the future.

You buy their annuity either with a single payment or a series of payments. Those are called premiums. There are different kinds of annuities. You can get one that's immediate or deferred. Deferred annuities can be fixed indexed or variable.

All of a sudden, just in those last 15 seconds of describing them, I probably got your eyes to roll in the back of your head because of the complexity in here. It is important to work with an advisor that not only understands them, has a particular philosophy about how to use them, but spends the time to educate you about which ones are going to be right for you.

Here's the thing about those annuities, every one of them. There is a growth potential in there. There is safety in there. However, there is the chance that they may not be as liquid as you need them to be. There is one exception to that. A variable annuity tends not to have as much of the safety function of that.

Which is why, as I said in the earlier part of the show, tends not to be on our recommended list. If you're going to go into the insurance world and get the benefits of that, being the growth and the safety, and lose something called liquidity, by gosh, you better get both of the growth and the safety components of it. Don't be in a product that doesn't give you those options.

When we talk about insurance, by the way, there are also other products related to things in a life insurance. You can get all kinds in there like term, whole life variable, universal, indexed universal, variable universal, long‑term care insurance. There's a lot of them.

Here's the thing, just like the banking world, the insurance world is meant to help you solve another piece of the problem. If you're not fortunate enough to receive a pension, and you want a lifetime income stream, you can purchase a form of a fixed immediate annuity that does that.

If you want to leave a legacy when your loved ones pass away, form of life insurance is going to give you an opportunity to do that. If you want to protect yourself, if you get sick or ill, or from depleting your nest egg, long‑term care insurance might do that. You have to understand that insurance is also a great place for some of your money, but not all of your money.

Do keep in mind, while annuities offer many benefits, they can be subject to fee‑surrender charges, holding periods, which vary from company to company and product to product. They are designed for retirement or other mid to long‑term needs.

Life insurance and annuity guarantees, they're all backed by the financial strength and the claims‑paying ability of the issuing insurance carrier. There is no FDIC insurance for annuities or other insurance products.

The final world is the one that people are probably most familiar with, most popular, exciting, and that's the Wall Street world. They offer growth potential and liquidity, but it is limited in their safety. I know that people are going to argue with me, and tell me that the Wall Street world offers some safe places like at bonds.

I challenge them to look at bond performances in 2008, or any time when the stock market had a large drop. Not only that. Remember that bonds have an inverse relationship with interest rates. Meaning, that as interest rates go up, bond values go down. We know how low interest rates are right now.

Interest rates likely only have one way to go up from here, and that is up. This in return, by the way, will lower the value of the bonds if the future interest rates rise. The safety related to those bonds, probably lower than what you expect off of it. I want to stress this idea that I do not believe, I do not believe that Wall Street has any safe investments off of them.

They have a number of places to invest your money including stocks, bonds, mutual funds, exchange‑traded funds or ETF, REITs or Real Estate Investment Trust, commodities, futures, ADRs. Most of these investments are meant to grow your money, and are liquid if you decide to sell them. Remember, it's not safe.

It's a great place when you're young and looking to grow it. The Wall Street world is not meant for all of your money. That's a big problem that I see in my office. I'll sit down with a prospective client, and find that most or all of their money is still sitting somewhere in the stock market.

When I ask them how they feel about loss and whether or not they want to lose money, it's very common that they don't want to lose money. That's very common occurrence because people have been very successful with what they had in the past.

When you get close to retirement, I believe you need to start thinking about reducing the risk in your financial portfolio and making some changes. It's OK to have some money in the stock market for growth and liquidity, but it may not be necessary to have all of your money there.

The reason why I want you to consider all of these three worlds is that I want to open your mind, and understand the importance having money in all three of those worlds because each world serves a different purpose. Whether it's the banking world, the insurance world, or the Wall Street world, it's important to understand that your exact financial circumstance has specific needs.

You can address those needs by having money in each of those worlds, and you need to build a plan based around those needs. It's no easy task but I'm here to help. It's my job to help, to work with people like you. If you're interested in having a consultation with us about your retirement planning, we can do that with you.

We are available at 609‑818‑0068. Call us at 609‑818‑0068, or visit us at www.palantewealth.com. It's P‑A‑L A‑N‑T‑E wealth dot com. We can give you more information as well as opportunities to learn what you need in your specific retirement circumstance. Sped through all of that, we may hit it again in the future.

There's a lot of stuff in that insurance world that I have not yet talked to you about, and I want to be able to do that. What you have to do, though, is stay a listener of the show.

Check us out at 11 o'clock in the morning every Wednesday on WCTC 1450 AM. Or, if you don't want to be married to the radio, you can subscribe to our podcast.

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Victor: Our podcast is available everywhere where podcasts are available, whether it's Apple, Android, Spotify, you name it. Search for Make It Last. You will find the podcast link, subscribe to it. Every episode will be automatically delivered to your inbox.

Hope this has been good for you. This has been great for me. I'm really excited for today's show. Otherwise, we'll catch you next week on Make It Last, where we help you keep your legal ducks in a row, and your financial nest eggs secure. Catch you next time. Bye‑bye.

Announcer: Investing involves risk, including the potential loss of principal. Any references to protection, safety or lifetime income, generally refer to fixed insurance products, never securities or investments. Insurance guarantees are backed by the financial strength and claims‑paying abilities of the issuing carrier.

This radio show is intended for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be used as the sole basis for financial decisions nor should it be construed as advice designed to meet the particular needs of an individual situation. The host of this show is not affiliated with or endorsed by the US government or any governmental agency.

The information and opinions contained herein provided by third parties have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable but accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed.

How do you know if you are ready to retire? In today's episode, Victor goes through some signs to help you identify if you are ready for retirement or, if you should wait. Text the word INCOME to 609-554-5936 for a free report on the income bridge to make sure you have enough income to last your entire life.

Like this episode? Leave a review and give a 5-star rating on the Apple Podcast app. As always, share with a friend!

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.

See below for 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, the only show that takes you on a fun and exciting journey through the world of legal and financial retirement planning. I'm your host, Victor Medina, and I'm really glad you can join us here today. I'm excited for today's show, as I am for many of the shows.

More and more I've been interested in the soft part of retirement, less about the numbers and whether or not you've done the right calculations. More about signs that you're ready to retire or the emotional components around that.

In today's show, I'm going to be attacking how to evaluate or see if you contain any of the signs that you aren't yet ready to retire. Like, how are you going to know when you're ready to call it a career. The thing about it is that, retirement is such a big decision. It shouldn't be taken lightly. For most people, the decision itself to retire doesn't come easy, it is full of all kinds of emotional input on there.

A lot of people are defined by what it is that they do. Even if they're not consciously aware, or that it's defined that way. They are by how they spend their time up until that point in time, in which they retire.

They get up and work, five days out of the week for most people. That means that the majority of time that they spend, even the majority of those days in which they're working, they spend doing something that defines their existence.

I'm of a mind that people should take their time and consider all of their options and make the best decision for them and their family, both financially and emotionally. How does one really know that they're ready for retirement? How much money is enough? How can you prepare for the social and emotional side of the equation?

Today's show is all about being prepared, or to the contrary I guess, how to know when you aren't quite ready. There are some signs that you can catch on to that could indicate that the timing isn't quite right. I'm here to help you identify some of those signs that say that you're not quite ready to retire.

I'll tell you there are all kinds of things that are going to factor into making that decision. What I want to do is try to help you get some of the information to understand whether or not you're ready. I have created a number of different reports that are out there, that are available for you to download. They're 100 percent free.

I want you to have these so that you can have the best information about retirement and getting ready for that.

One of the ones that I want to help you understand more about is called the income bridge. There is the need for people to understand how they're going to live on a day to day basis.

For that reason, we want the opportunity to know that they're going to have enough income to last their entire life. For that reason, I want to give that report. If you're looking for it, what you need to do is text the word "income" I‑N‑C‑O‑M‑E to 609‑554‑5936. That's the word "income" to 609‑554 5936.

If you do that, we will send out to you by email, our report on the income bridge. It's a really important part about making a retirement decision.

Today I'm going to talk about a question that, I am sure many of my listeners have asked themselves or their advisor. That question is, how do you know when you're ready to retire? Of course, the question itself is pretty subjective.

I mean, it could mean a lot of different things to different people. Like, are you financially ready? Are you emotionally ready? Are you socially ready? What are you unsure of? You might be thinking that it comes down to a financial decision and to a certain extent, you're right. I mean, that is kind of what we do here when we crunch numbers and help people understand can they make the decision to retire.

Many times, it's just around the numbers discussion, but there's much more to it than that. I'm going to examine today some signs that may point to the fact that you might not be ready to retire. My goal here is to help you identify some of the warning signs and I guess, on the other side of it, help you re‑install your confidence, either way, in your retirement decision.

In this, I'm thinking about a very particular client, who has been wrestling with the decision to retire. I'm not aiming this show at that client, whatsoever, should they happen to be listening. I have been struck with the difference that different people will evaluate making that decision.

Some of my greatest inspiration in and around retirement comes from evaluating my parents. My parents were ready to retire for a few really good financial reasons. They were both school teachers, and had put in the minimum number of years that it took to get the maximum amount of pension for the rest of their lives, and be able to secure health insurance.

From everything on the outside, it was a really great financial picture that they were making a decision that says, "Look, I'm ready to retire." The social and emotional side of it, I think that they wanted to get away from doing their job but to doing what, was still very much influx.

They spent some time living in Florida and living the golf retirement life. That had its own schedule, its own routine, and only lasted for a period of time before there was time to do something else. Was their decision to retire the wrong decision because they didn't stick with the life that they set out to have as a moment that they had retirement?

Probably not. It's not a big deal to change. In fact, there's probably a lot of value in changing. There's a lot of worth in being able to make a different decision and to be flexible about it. It's probably something that should be held up as an example, for sure. It did raise the question for me, "Were they, in fact, ready to retire?"

As I said, I'm trying to help you make that decision as I think about my parents on one hand, this other client that's wrestling with that decision on the other hand. As an extension of this show, I want to make sure that you know that I can potentially help you examine your own retirement situation more closely.

You're welcome to call my office and schedule a consultation if you're ready to explore that. I want to help you examine the topic today as it pertains to your individual and unique situation. If you're interested in that, our phone number at the office is 609‑818‑0068. Again, the number is 609‑818‑0068.

You can also visit us online by going to our brand‑new website. I'm really excited to show this one off. In fact, we haven't had a full launch of this. You, my podcast and the radio show listening audience get advanced notice that it exists. You go to palantewealth.com. That's P‑A‑L‑A‑N‑T‑E W‑E‑A‑L‑T‑H dot com, and that will help you understand more about the services that we provide.

Either way, if you're interested in exploring that with us, remember we're one of the very few, if not, for sure, the best when it comes to being able to handle both the legal and the financial parts of your retirement planning, making sure that you have a plan that works together across the board. If you're interested in doing that, just reach out to us at 609‑818‑0068.

In my experience, as I mentioned, retirement means a lot of different things to different people. For some, it may mean starting a brand‑new career.

One of the shows that I did about a year ago that I love to recommend to other people talks about the different kinds of retirement. It explores a form of retirement in which you retire from what you were doing to doing something else. Maybe that can happen very early in your life. That is not an age 65 decision.

For some people, retiring is starting a brand‑new career or trying something new in the workforce. For others, it may mean kissing work goodbye forever, and finally living their lives without having to punch the clock ever, ever again.

My parents, when they retired from being in the school system, they were basically saying goodbye to waking up at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning, and working a job that required them to be there 184 days out of the year and that they couldn't set their own vacations. They were always already set by the school calendar.

They did different things from there. My mom started volunteering holding some babies in the NICU, in the ICU for neonatal. My dad ended up working the front desk at the hospital to help surgical patients and their families know what was going on at any point in time. They were doing other things, but they definitely kissed their work life goodbye.

For others, it can be a combination of those two, whether it's starting a new career or saying goodbye to something, but what I like to explore is what retirement means to you. Have you thought about that? Because if not, you might not be ready.

Have you considered, for instance, how much income you might need in your retirement assets to produce regularly to support your lifestyle on these. That's why I offered that report, the income report.

You can text the word "income" to 609‑554‑5936, but if you haven't considered that, you might not be ready for retirement. I can go on and on and on. What are these signs that you're just not ready.

I want to talk about that in today's show to make sure that you hear about the signs that might be pointing the fact that you aren't quite ready to retire yet.

When you are ready, then you want to explore that with somebody that can help you do that. Get some professional advice. The first thing that I want to do is, I want to talk about the major components of retirement planning.

We focus so often on the financial one. I'm going to get to that today as well, but I want to talk from a very high level on the main components. I'm not talking about investment decisions between stocks and bonds or tax sufficient strategies.

I'm talking about three main components to drive retirement and planning for it. There's a social part, an emotional part, and a financial part. Each one of these are considerations of retirement planning, and they need to have their own evaluation.

Each one of them individually to know that, in fact, you have considered the biggest the blocks that are necessary to being in determination if you're ready for retirement or not. Let's start with the social component first.

This one might be overlooked most often. The question that I want to put in front of you is, have you thought about how quickly your social life may change when you retire? How long have you been working? 20 years? 30 years? Likely more?

I know that my parents couldn't retire until they had gotten 35 years in, 35 years for many people. You've most likely tailored your entire routine on a weekly basis, maybe even monthly, seasonally, annually to your job, and the time that you spend there.

If you're the typical worker, but this, of course, doesn't cover everybody. Do you work from Monday through Friday from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM? You've been doing this for the last 30 years, even if your job has changed.

What hasn't changed is that you have had to work, and you, in fact, have been working. If that's true, or even partly true, you've likely developed a lot of social relationships through your work.

These are the people that you spent the most time with, and they started out as co‑workers, perhaps became acquaintances and now are friends. I just attended a church block party this Sunday. It happens to be that one of my wife's co‑workers is also a member of the church.

Here we are, we're sitting in the grounds of the church. There are tables that are up. Kids are out there playing. They're on the Slip 'N Slide. There's cornhole tournaments. There are food trucks there. It was really a fantastic time. We're sitting at the table and over comes the co‑worker.

That's the person that my wife spends most of the time with, nothing wrong about that, that she's not spending time with other people in the church, but she is. What are they talking about? They're talking about work‑related stuff. For them, everything around that related to the work and you have to understand that. My wife, she runs a schedule that goes from September to June. She's off right now.

She's not working in the school system, and by the way, neither is this other co‑worker. Here they are, hanging out with one another, socializing. It's Sunday afternoon. There is a pizza food truck. There is a burrito food truck, and there they are, socializing, talking about work‑related stuff. It's not going to restart until sometime in September.

You can imagine their entire world centers around this. This probably is you in some fashion, that there are these friends, that are all around work. Imagine that you aren't going to see them on Monday. Let's say that my wife and this co‑worker were hanging out on Sunday, but that Monday, they're not going to see them a whole lot.

They've gone from seeing each other and talking to each other, and being with each on a regular basis, too, pretty much not at all. Certainly with nothing in common to talk about any longer because if my wife has gone ahead and retired from her job, what's going on in the job...between you and me, a little pathetic. Let's move on. There's nothing there that you should be linked to.

This is a huge change, and I want to ask you the question, are you ready for the social change that you're very likely going to have to go through?

I believe that planning your social life in retirement and the changes that are surely going to take place is almost as important as the financial part. Why is that? Why do I think that?

Because part of the decision to retire should be in and around, making a decision to at least maintain your level of happiness going forward.

Your social connections, knowing that you belong to a tribe of sorts, that you belong to a group, and that group accept you for who you are, and that you can have interaction with other human beings at a level that matches what your needs are.

If you want to have intellectual conversations, you are. If you want to share an experiences, you're doing that. If you're contributing in some fashion, and giving to others that you're able to do that, as part of a group with other people, so that you have that sense of belonging.

That is so important to the joy that you can create and have in retirement, that it has to be considered. It has to be factored in, as you start to evaluate whether or not you're ready for retirement. You have to take this into consideration and make sure that you've planned around it because if not, why retire whatsoever?

Why even go through that exercise if you're going to move from a state in which you were previously happy, at least you were meeting your social needs.

Every human being figures out how to meet their social needs, their emotional needs. They figure a path through. You just don't sit there miserable all the time. At least I don't meet those people. They're not my clients. If you're one of those people, remember what I said about calling us and schedule, but don't call me. I don't want to talk to you if you're miserable like that.

I actually only want to work with the people that aren't miserable.

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Victor: If that's who you, are in a state where you're comfortable and happy, why would you move to one in which you're not happy? You've got to nail this part of it down if in fact, you're going to be ready to make a decision, to move into retirement

Let's do this. I'm up against a break here. I'm going to cover the next two parts of retirement planning, the components, the emotional and financial part when we come back from this quick break. Stick with us on, "Make It Last."

Announcer: Imagine, if the attorney you trust to protect your legal interests could also be trusted to protect your retirement wealth. One trusted advisor, dual‑fiduciary roles, Victor J. Medina. Mr. Medina is an estate planning and certified elder law attorney with a national reputation. He is also a certified financial planner professional.

Through his law firm and independent investor advisory company, Mr. Medina 360‑degree wealth protection strategies for individuals in or nearing retirement. His unique approach offers advantages to high wealth individuals seeking conservative advice and a professionally managed approach to their retirement wealth.

Learn more. Call 609‑818‑0068. That's 609‑818‑0068. Or listen to the newest episode of Make it Last Radio Wednesday mornings at 11:00 on 1450 Talk Radio. Investment advisory services offered through Palante Advisors LLC., a New Jersey and Pennsylvania registered investment advisor.

Victor: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Make it Last. Today we're talking about the signs that you may not be ready for retirement. My goal here is really to outline for you those things that we see in everyday when we evaluate retirement for other people. It's not just the financial component of it, although we're about to get to that in today's show.

We also want to make sure that everyone that we see is ready for retirement in every capacity, in every way. We spent some time in the last segment talking about the social components of that. And whether or not that says that you are ready. The next component I want to talk about is the emotional component.

So another component, it deals with the emotional element of being ready for retirement and this is a tough one for a lot of people. I think it's filled with all sorts of concerns about the decision they are about to make because while they might be socially ready to retire and/or physically ready to retire, the emotional card might want you hanging on for a little bit longer.

Think about it this way, if you are someone who has taken a lot of pride in their work, it might be difficult for you to let go. You might have become a very reliable asset to your company and you've developed relationships with a lot of people who know that.

It is, as I mentioned earlier in the show, a component of your identity. You spend a lot of time defining yourself as someone who not only just works and works at what you do, but likely does it at a very high level.

If, for no other reason, then you've been at it for some time. My parents were there for 35 years. I imagined they were good at what they did over that course of time. If you've gotten good at doing something, it is a way of defining your value and worth.

You've spent so much time getting good at what you do, you rightly see yourself as somebody worth respecting for that. If that's the case, it is entirely understandable that making a decision to let that go is hard and it will impact you.

It could be something that the definition of who you are and losing that might hang you up in your course of making a decision to retire.

The other thing that you might be wrestling with, and this is also really understandable, is that you might feel like you are letting certain co‑workers, your departments, or your branch down or the people that you served down.

Here I am, spending day in and day out, dealing with families who are wrestling with retirement and the fear that long‑term care costs will devastate their estate, that it will leave them penniless or leave their spouse penniless.

A time in which I decide to retire, I've got to contemplate the fact that I'm no longer going to help these people. A big part of how I define who I am and what it is that I do is in the way that I impact the lives around me, positively impact them.

I spend a lot of time considering my actions in relation to the way that they improve the people's lives around me. I do that in lots of settings. I do that at home. I'm considering that with my kids and with my wife. What do I do? How do I serve them? That's a consideration of mine.

The other way that I do it is with my team members...the people that come and work with me in Medina Law Group and Palante Wealth, two companies under the same roof. Those folks, they're here sacrificing to assist me.

Yes, I've given them a job. Yes, they get a salary, but beyond that, they could get to those other places. I'm really taking them on to help improve their lives. They put a lot of faith in me. What am I doing to serve that?

Finally, of course, with my clients. Here I am with my clients trying to figure out how to help them lead great lives as well. The time in which I decide to retire, is a time in which I have to wrestle with this idea that they're going to have to go on without me. What does that mean? Am I letting them down? How many people am I letting down?

That's a big component of the whole. I can definitely see why people are emotionally tied or could be tied to their work and the fact that leaving that work is a function of letting the people around them down.

In addition to the emotional component, there is the financial component. Put this in whatever level of importance that you want. It could be the most important. It could be one of the most important. You could be socially and emotionally ready. However, if you are not financially ready, it won't make a hill of beans difference.

If you've already considered what your new retirement lifestyle will look like, you have friends that are retired, you've trained a good replacement and you know that you can leave your work behind, but if you haven't wrestled with and dealt with the financial component of your retirement life, that's not in order.

You might be forced to stay longer than you want. If that's the case each passing day that you have to wake up and go back to work is going to be harder, and harder and harder. It's going to be the part of the factoring in of what your retirement life is going to be like, how joyful will it in fact mean.

You have to make sure that the financial component of your life is there because unlike the other social and emotional components, which you might able to figure out during those introductory years of retirement, if you move into retirement trying to figure out the financial component, you could be making a huge mistake. We've talked about why.

There are very few ways to come back from that kind of mistake. You don't have the opportunity to go to work for a longer period of time or make up additional money if you've already separated from service that way.

All right, what are the signs that you're there because I want to give you some guidepost, see if you can see yourself in this. If you can, maybe you're not ready. While I admit that the social and emotional components are important areas to focus on, we need to be thinking about some of these signs that point to the fact that you simply aren't ready for a financial standpoint.

By the way, I want to be clear I'm not talking about just not having not enough money for retirement, I'm also referring to not having a plan or clear direction with your investments in retirement savings. Let's go through one of these first signs.

The first one is that you haven't created or looked at your monthly retirement budget. Now, watch how we put all of these things together under a heading like this, which sounds ostensibly like a financial component.

I've talked about this time and time again. I can't stress the importance of it. I'm not going to stop repeating it until every person who walks into my office actually already has a budget drawn up prior to retirement.

I'm not sure that's going to happen anytime soon. Get yourself ready to continue to hear about this as we explore. I don't care, by the way, whether you're actually following your budget to the letter or not.

When it comes to planning for a pending retirement date, you need to at least look at your budget and determine how much income you might need or want to spend from your retirement. You might be thinking to yourself something like this, "I've never had to live on a budget so why should I start looking at one now?" That's pretty common.

These days, people live for their cash flow. Meaning that if there's enough money coming in at the beginning of the day, they're just going to continue to feel like everything's OK. They're not going to sit and put aside envelopes that say, mortgage, and that's got cash in there for utilities.

They're not going to go through that exercise. If they haven't done it before, why is it that they need to do that now? Here's the thing. Your spending is likely to change when you hit retirement. It could be that you have more time on your hands, what you spend your time on is going to change, and what you're going to do with that time is going to change.

Here, we come back to this idea about being socially and emotionally ready. Defining how it is you're going to be spending your time to fill those needs is the important part of the budgeting exercise because you're not going to be doing the same things.

I hope you're not going to be doing the same things. If you just retire, and what you do with that is sit at home and stare at your grass growing, that's not really a great retirement. I think you ought to go back to work. I'm just going to lay that out there right now. Your time and the way that you spend that time is likely going to change.

If that's the case, then we're also going to need to factor in how your budget is going to change, and this idea that you are going to have to pay attention to one. Why do you have to? The reason is that your income and the amount of money that your retirement paycheck provides is likely going to have to change. For most people, it's not going to be less.

If you're someone who's always had more money coming in on a monthly basis than the money that's going out, savings came very easy for you. Now that you're retired, and the amount of income coming in doesn't cover the amount that you want to spend, i.e., you claim Social Security, which is a fraction of the money that you were making when you were working.

When's the last time that you've had to deal with that as a lifestyle and budgeting your lifestyle? Probably not for a super long time. I know that, for me, the last time that that happened was when I graduated college, and the only job that I could get was working for a copier company that was in a competitor's hometown.

I worked for a company named Pitney Bowes. They are most famous for making mailing machines. I don't even know if people mail things any longer. I'm kidding. I know that they mail things. We don't have a machine any longer, but we do put things in envelopes and send them out the door, in addition to scanning, emailing, and uploading everything.

Anyway, I had to work for Pitney Bowes. My job was to try to get people to like Pitney Bowes in the town of Stanford, Connecticut. Stanford, Connecticut happens to be the hometown of Xerox, little company that specializes in the area of copiers. Here I was trying to persuade people that Pitney Bowes copiers were somehow better.

That wasn't the reason why I needed to live on a budget style, that I wasn't successful in my job in selling these copiers. That wasn't the reason. The reason was that job paid $16,500 a year so I was living at home. If I wanted buffalo wings one particular week, there were sacrifices that needed to be made in order to make that happen.

I had a weekly tradition of watching football games with a couple of guys friends when I was home, which by the way, was one of the few things that could get me out of the house because I was otherwise living with my parents at that time. It had to be in the budget, and we had to go to a place where I could afford the mozzarella sticks if that's what I was going to be doing.

The point was, it's been a long time, if I'm going to go into retirement, sometime, somehow, I'm going to have to start thinking about the budget. Because the income that comes in after retirement is not going to be the same income that came in before, and I'm going to have to create that.

Here's my tip. Create the budget even if you don't plan on using it to monitor your monthly spending. In and of itself, it's an eye‑opening experience. Create the budget with the idea in mind that you are going to try to have to imagine the lifestyle you want to live in retirement, and all of the expenditures that come with it.

You owe it to yourself prior to retirement to line up the ducks, left, right, where's money going to be going out to what you're going to be doing because you need some form a realistic guidepost or template as you explore and enter how to be spending money and how long that money can last.

Next sign we can look at is, OK, you've created your budget, but the income shortfall is too large. Now, let's imagine that you have the budget, and you're part of the way home to being properly prepared from a financial standpoint.

You have to subtract the amount of income that you will have on a guaranteed basis coming in every month from your needed budget to see how much of a shortfall is it.

By the way, shortfall, simple enough to understand. If you need $6,000 a month coming in from your budget but you only have $2,000 a month coming in from Social Security, many of you don't have a pension, you're going to have a shortfall of $4,000 a month.

From there, you're going to have to consider where are you going to get that $4,000 month from. Are you going to work? Are you going to cut your budget? Are you going to withdraw it from your savings that you have for retirement? That's basically the only three ways that you're going to get there.

You're either going to make money, or you're going to spend some of your saved money, or you'll make an adjustment to the budget, and not need as much money.

If you have done things properly, and you've identified a shortfall, and you know that you don't plan on working, and you don't want to cut your budget and live on less, then you fall to the same category of most of the people that I tend to meet. That's basically where everyone is.

They've identified that they've got a shortfall. They aren't going to go back to work. They are not going to cut the budget. What they want to figure out is how to make sure that the nest egg that they have collected, that represents all of their retirement savings, how are they going to make sure that that's going to be enough to sustain a set of regular withdrawals to support their needs?

While I could go into the investment side of the discussion and talk about how you're going to need a diversified and well‑rounded investment plan to help ensure that you can get the income that you need, I'd rather look at the logistics of the need. Let's go back to the example. Let me flip around the numbers because it's a little easier to understand.

Let's say that you need $6,000, but you have $4,000 coming in. You were really lucky. You had a budget. You got a good social security, so there's a $2,000‑a‑month shortfall.

Let's imagine that you got a couple here that's got a million dollars in retirement savings. If we simply take their annual need of $24,000 ‑‑ $2,000 a month times 12 months, $24,000 ‑‑ and they divided it by the asset pool that they have, a million dollars, that they have an annual withdrawal need of 2.4 percent.

Imagine instead of a million dollars, they only had $300,000 saved. If we divided $24,000 into 300, it yields an annual withdrawal rate of eight percent. Based on these two simplified examples, who do you think is in better shape for retirement? Where do you think it's easier?

Is it easier to sustain a withdrawal rate of 2.4 percent, or 8 percent? Regardless of what the investment options are, they're the same for both people, which one is easier?

I have a few more signs to go through, but let's do this, let's a take a quick break. When we come back, we will continue on with the signs that you may not be ready to retire, and then what you can do about it. Stick with us. We'll be right back after this quick break on "Make it Last."

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Announcer: Life is better when you have your legal ducks in a row. One area attorney can help you get your financial ducks in a row as well. Victor J. Medina fills dual‑fiduciary roles, an estate planning and certified elder law attorney, and also a credentialed certified financial planner professional.

Through his law practice and independent registered investment advisory company, Mr. Medina serves high wealth individuals seeking conservative advice and a professionally managed approach to retirement wealth management. Learn more about Victor's 360‑degree wealth protection strategies. Call 609‑818‑0068.

That's 609‑818‑0068, or listen to the newest episode of Make It Last Radio Wednesday mornings at 11:00 on 1450 Talk Radio. Investment advisory services offered through Palante Wealth Advisors, LLC, a New Jersey and Pennsylvania registered investment advisor.

Victor: Hey, everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. We're spending today talking about the signs that you may not be ready to retire. We've explored the social, emotional, and financial components of retirement. We've talked about some of the signs that you may not be ready to retire really focusing in on budget and shortfall.

Now that we're there, the next sign that I want to talk about is that let's say you have enough money to cover the shortfall, but you have no plan design to attack it. If you've created your budget, you know your shortfall, and you've calculated that your shortfall represents some form of an annual rate of withdrawal, you're getting close.

There are all sorts of rules of thumb that involve how much you should be able to withdraw as a percentage and hopefully not run out of money. You could use, by the way, the old Wall Street four‑percent withdrawal rule. You could use a new method taught by a PhD named Dr. Wade Pfau and others, by the way, that say that it is closer to a three or three‑and‑a‑half‑percent range.

You could do a more aggressive five‑percent withdrawal rate. Whatever it is that you choose to use, if you don't have a written plan for how you're going to structure your retirement assets, how you are going to invest your retirement dollars, and how those financial vehicles are going to help you gain confidence.

That your supplemental paycheck, that thing that you're going to be taking out of your retirement portfolio, the thing that your retirement portfolio is going to be paying you, is going to last as long as you need it to, you're missing the boat. Every good withdrawal strategy is carefully designed, the financial vehicles are chosen with the need to the adherence of the plan in mind.

Whether it's an income need or long‑term care planning need or whatever else, it ends up being designed around that. How do you know that you have a plan? Let's ask these questions. Do you know exactly where your withdrawals are going to come from? Do you have a good idea of how long they're going to last before the account does not pay any more out?

Do you know how market volatility that is? Do you know how stock market roller coasters will affect your withdrawal ability and how long those accounts will last? Do you know that? Do you know where you will take withdrawals from next if your current bucket is depleted? Or is it all in one bucket? In which case when that bucket is depleted you don't have another choice off of them.

Do you know which investment bucket will get an inflation adjustment need for the income that might be affected by inflation over these years? You see where I'm going with this? Don't ever enter retirement without having a definitive game plan for how this retirement check, which is being created by this retirement portfolio that you have, is going to come in and how long it's going to last.

There are all kinds of ways to skin this cat. No one plan necessarily stands out above the rest. There's no cookie‑cutter approach that will cover everybody. Your personal situation and needs will dictate which strategy might work best for you.

The point is this, you are going to need that plan. You're going to need to be able to point to something strategic that you have set up, that is the way that you're going to navigate this in retirement.

The problem is that I see too many clients coming in, looking at their investment portfolio decisions as the equivalent of a plan. That is to say when they say to me, "I have myself now 60 percent in bonds. Whereas before it was 60 percent in stocks and that is how I'm going to survive in retirement." It's almost enough for me to pull my hair out.

Those of you who have seen me in person know that I don't have any hair left. It's very little. I keep it short because anything else would just be...It wouldn't be a farce. My hairdresser, as I was getting older, would still take 30 minutes to cut my hair when there wasn't much hair there left. So I started cutting my own hair. I said, "The charade is over," and started buzz‑cutting the hair.

Here's the thing, I'm driven nuts by the people who come in with their investment decision or investment‑built portfolio as the equivalent of a plan. It's pretty easy to poke holes in that. I can go ahead and start pulling out statistics and reasons about why having a central bucket isn't always the best decision and how the math tends to foul that up. That's pretty easy for me to do.

I can talk about different contingencies that come up and asking clients to help navigate those contingencies. What if this happens? What if that happens? They'll be able to see how it won't stand up to that. That simply just having an investment portfolio or something like that or making decisions about 60 percent in bonds ends up being the same.

The point is that we need something better. We need something better than that. We need some form of a plan that takes all of this stuff into consideration.

Here's the thing, if you're someone who is in the stage where you're trying to make sure that you're ready to retire and you've looked at all three components, you've taken a look at the social component. You've taken a look at the emotional component. You've taken a look at the financial component including all of the signs that I've talked to you about today.

What did we talk about? We talked about the signs that you may not be socially ready to retire. That you don't know where your social interactions are going to be coming from. That you don't know how you'll be replacing that friend, the community that you've come to rely on as you enter in retirement.

To go back to that original part of the show and the topic, you don't know that in retirement, the people that you used to socialize with, you're going to still be able do that. Your lifestyles between the two of you may be very different if you are somebody that saved really diligently, and you were ready for retirement, and they weren't.

It could be that in situations like that, that they are not in great shape. That could be that. You have to be ready to nail down what that social component is, and how it's going to get served when you're in retirement. In the emotional side, do you know how you will gain your identity? Where you'll be taking that from when you are no longer...

Somebody who's at the top of their game doing a job that they've been doing for 35 years, and the skills that they've been working at. Do you know how you're going to plan and adjust for the way you'll be letting people around you down?

Whether it's your co‑workers in your department or, ultimately, the people that you serve in your company. Where are you going to find how you define your role in life?

Then all that stuff that we talked about financially. If you've gone ahead and you are at that stage, and you've looked at all that stuff, it's time to get a second opinion. You can come in and you can see us. I want to make sure that I help you.

Not only ensure that you're ready to retire when you look at that social and emotional component, but that you also have the game plan or the written plan that gives you confidence that you need so that you can finally pull the trigger.

The idea here is going to be that looking and meeting with me, analyzing your current retirement position from all different levels, giving you the blueprint for how you can pursue your ideal retirement.

That's all going to be a way of making sure that you enter into retirement with the highest degree of confidence, with the ability to go in from a position of joy, from a position of optimism. Just that you are so excited for what retirement brings that you are grabbing it with both hands.

I'll leave you with this story. I'm not even sure how relevant it is but it occurs to me that it's the right mindset for you. I'm getting ready to give this presentation to a bunch of family law attorneys from across the country. It's something that I was asked to come and do.

I'm going to be talking to them about something pretty straightforward. Why they should keep their desks clean? It's a pretty simple topic. When you start to pull the threads on it, there's a lot of stuff that is wrapped up into that. There is the stuff that's on their desk that is causing them to have anxiety. There is the stuff in their desk that they just haven't gotten through.

There's stuff that if they're going to have to delegate, they've gotten lazy to get rid of. The goal and the point is to be in a position where someone, instead of looking at their desk or walking into their office, feeling this enormous sense of dread because they know that that mess represents everything in their life.

It's what their business is, it's talking to them, it's what's going on in their home life. All this anxiety that is produced at the office will carry through with them when they're back at home. The goal is to have somebody filled with energy when they come in.

It can be as simple as the fact that their desk is clean and clear, and they're ready to go out and do their best work. Your retirement is that same way. You should be coming into retirement with the desk clean and clear. There shouldn't be tons of baggage all over the place. There shouldn't be piles that represent planning that hasn't been done.

Where worry and anxiety that something inside one of those piles is going to come back to haunt you later. You should be engaging with life at that level, at a super high place, where it's filling you with energy, and filling you with joy.

The way that you do that, the way that you get the metaphorically clean desk in your retirement life, is to look at all of those components, and know that you have them taken care of.

If you don't have the skill to do that on your own, then you've got to get help in order to do that. I want to help you two different ways. The first way is, I just want to give you something that will help you feel comfortable as you get through retirement.

I want to give you our income bridge checklist, our guide. You get that by texting the word, "income" I‑N‑C‑O‑M‑E, to 609‑554‑5936. That will get you started on your way. If you're ready to jump right to the front of the line, then what you ought to be doing is giving us a call at 609‑818‑0068 or visiting us online at palantewealth.com.

That's P‑A‑L‑A‑N‑T‑E W‑E‑A‑L‑T‑H.com, palantewealth.com. Visit us there, call us at our number, schedule a time to come in, so that you know in evaluating your retirement that you have all of the little checkboxes marked as done, completed, and ready to go.

Get that second opinion that confirms for you that you're in the right position. Again, if you want to do that, if you want to reach out to us by phone, that's 609‑818‑0068. Otherwise, take the guide that I walked you through today and start to evaluate whether or not you're ready for retirement.

Make sure that you have nailed down those three big components of social, emotional, and financial readiness, including the signs that we talked about today. That's one of the ways that you can make sure that as you enter into retirement, you go through that full of confidence.

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Victor: Full of confident that you're ready to take on the world and enjoy yourself. I hope it's been helpful for you. This has been Make It Last, where we help you keep your legal ducks in a row and your financial nest egg secure. We'll catch you next week on next week's show. Bye bye.

Announcer: Investing involves risk, including the potential lawsuit principle, any references to protection, safety or lifetime income, generally referred of fixed insurance products, never securities or investments. Insurance guarantees are backed by the financial strength and claims paying abilities of the issuing carrier.

This radio show is intended for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be used as the sole basis for financial decisions, nor should it be construed as advice designed to meet the particular needs of an individual situation.

The host of this show is not affiliated with or endorsed by the US government or any governmental agency. The information and opinions contained here and provided by third parties have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed.

On average, after age 60, financial literacy decreases by 1.5% per year. In today's episode, Victor discusses how to handle this idea moving forward in financial planning. Victor also talks through scammers using gift cards to finance fraud as well as the rise of nursing home expenses.

Text QUESTIONS TO 609-554-5936 for a free report to help you figure out who you should be working with and questions you should be asking you current advisor, or a potential advisor.

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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

See Below for 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 your host, Victor Medina. I'm glad you can join us for another exciting adventure in the world of legal and financial retirement planning.

We have to start out today with a bit of an apology. We ended up keeping last week's show ahead of time. We made a reference to what was going to be going on for the Fourth of July.

It turns out not only did we not broadcast that show live in the week that it was supposed to be, but we got preempted by the Somerset Patriots. There was absolutely no real reference to what was going on on the Fourth of July whatsoever.

What can I say? I was found out. We recorded this ahead of time and it turns out that baseball became more important for what [laughs] we were doing.

In any event, I hope you all had a fantastic Fourth of July weekend. I had a great one. I had the opportunity to close the office for the fourth and the fifth. Everyone in my office got to have a nice, long weekend. I got to spend the time with family making hamburgers by hand, grilling them.

Of course, it's the weekend in the summer. We have to go out and do some yardwork. I trimmed some hedges and what not. In any event, it was a fantastic weekend, really. I got the chance to be with family and the ones that I love. I hope you had an opportunity to do that as well.

I've got a little bit of a potpourri of topics to go over with you today. A lot of them are relevant for what happens as you get older and a lot of the decision‑making that comes with that, some of the risks that come with that as well.

I do want to talk to you a little bit about these topics. We're going to talk about how the financial decision‑making skill goes down over time. I want to talk to you about nursing home expenses continuing to rise.

I want to talk you about how scammers use gift cards to steal your money, and all of these topics that I came across more recently as I was reviewing the news. I thought that it was important to share that with you.

The first one that I did want to cover is the surprising reality of financial decision‑making as we age, a form of tracking our ability to make decisions over time. Here's the thing. One of the least discussed risks associated with retirement in general is the issue of cognitive decline as we age and, specifically, how it impacts your financial decision‑making.

Most of you are already aware about the incredible incident of Alzheimer's in cognitive‑related disease that's out there, whether it's dementia, dementia‑related. It is that biggest thing, lots of statistics being bandied about, about how quickly it's going to increase over time, how many cases there will be, whether it marks the year 2040 or later.

The idea, generally, is that we could be facing quite an epidemic of people who are healthy but suffering through cognitive decline and their ability to care for one another.

That's not even the topic that I mean to cover here. That's one form of a disease state that is something that if people can start to see. There are some obvious ramifications to be going through that. If people starts to wander, they become a wander risk. If they are extremely forgetful, if their short‑term memory is lost, we can start to see that as the impact of something that may be a dementia‑related disease.

There's this other component of it. That is the ability to make decisions. Listen, I can feel it even today. When I try to set my schedule up for the week, the day, I happen to know that I am much better making decisions early in the morning than I am making decisions in the afternoon.

There has been tons of research to support this, that essentially, decision‑making is a resource that you have that is finite. Your ability to make great decisions is definitely better when you're fresh than when you're tired.

I saw an example of this a couple of weekends ago. My middle son is a soccer player, and quite a good soccer player. Don't ask me where he gets his physical skills from because he is already a size 11 and a half shoe and he's 12 years old.

He's going to grow to be enormous. I am not. I'm decidedly shorter than average. He's going to be really tall. He's a fantastic soccer player and developing to quite a good defender. He's got a great body to be a defender.

In any event, we were at a tournament in Hershey, Pennsylvania. There were a couple of things that were happening in this tournament. The first thing is that we were always on the same field. No matter whether we played early in the morning or in the afternoon, they had us on the same field. They tried to just keep all of the kids of the same age together.

He's at an age where he could play in a really big field. He does. He plays in a really big field. They kept all of the kids who were born in the 2006 range, whether they were boys or girls, whether they were of a high flight or a lower flight. Whatever it was, they kept them all essentially at the same field.

Which means that we got to see the same refereeing crew basically throughout the day. There was no rest for them. Sometimes they are sent out. If you aren't familiar with soccer, you know there's generally three people on the field officiating.

There's a person in the middle that's the head referee. Then you have two assistant referees or ARs that are on either side of the field, calling different plays that are going out there in fractions and whatnot.

In a really great setup in the tournament, you might see maybe a crew of four or five, where three are on the field at any particular time, and one or two are rotating off and resting. That didn't happen in this case, even though this is a really huge Memorial Day tournament, there was only three. We had games in the morning and in the afternoon.

Because we really didn't have any reason to go anywhere in between, I basically stayed throughout. I watched all of the games. My kid is out playing with his friends but I got to watch a lot of the games in between.

What I noticed is that the referees were making better decisions, objectively better decisions. See, because my kid wasn't playing in the games that I was observing. It wasn't like I was biased about the calls that were coming in there.

They were making objectively better decisions in the morning than they were in the afternoon. It's as though their capacity to make great decisions had just been used up, through no fault of their own.

I'm certain that they weren't trying to miss calls or favor one team over the other. I take them as being really good objective referees, doing what they needed to do. In this case, it was clear that they were using up whatever resource they had, the reserves to make great decisions, and it happens over time. That was something that was very visible.

Here were people that were being asked to make judgment calls and decisions about what to call intent, whether or not people were playing with an advantage or not over the course of well over 12 hours, or so.

We started at seven o'clock in the morning. We were done by seven o'clock in the evening. There was a lot of decision making to be made. They barely had time for lunch.

As I said before, I find the same thing happens in my own professional life, that I'm better in making decisions, really good, strategic decisions early in the morning. It's one of the reasons why I try to get in here before the rest of the team gets in, to think about the more important things that my business needs decided or acted upon.

The same thing happens as you get older, and particularly with the case of personal finances. Research is showing that the decline is actually quite predictable. It is susceptible to numbers and a rate of decline that follows along a curve that we can predict.

Predictable to the point, by the way, that we know, on average, after age 60, financial literacy decreases by one and a half percent per year. What they're doing is they are applying a test of financial literacy. There's a score of that. What they find is that they looked at people, by the way, that were age 24 to 94 in this.

You peek at age 49 ‑‑ this is the top of that ‑‑ then decline from there. What's interesting about that test or the research that they're doing is despite an obvious, measurable decline in financial literacy, the confidence that's associated with financial decision making doesn't decline at all.

In fact, there is a very slow rise on their confidence over time. If we've just looked at people from age 60 to age 90, what we find, as I said before is their financial literacy is declining by 1.5 percent per year, but their confidence is pretty constant in the first 10 years, and then increases after that.

The decline in financial literacy, coupled with a continued confidence, can lead to pretty poor financial decisions. Meaning, if you were aware that your financial decision‑making capacity was going down, and it was going down, you might be able to make some accommodations around that.

When you believe that your financial literacy is as strong in that moment as it ever was, when in fact it's less than that, well then we can get some pretty poor results. We can have things like an increased susceptibility to scams and to fraud. We know this to be the case.

Look at the news out there, and recognize how many pieces there are about people scamming the elderly. Why? Are the elderly more trusting? Is there something about that population? It can be a combination of the idea that their ability to make decisions has gone down even though their confidence about making the decisions has remained the same.

It goes beyond just susceptibility to scams and attack. You could have very routine things happen along the way. You could be missing credit card or mortgage payments in a way that you never had before.

Then, of course, there are some more insidious things, whether it's making donations to organizations that you'd normally would stay away from, especially if you had your wits about you and recognized that they weren't as good in their mission as they said that they were.

We could have forms of elder abuse, where children or other people that you're trusting are taking advantage of you, financially. The key here is to be prepared for this eventuality. It is a predictable result that you will be there. It is also a predictable result that your confidence won't go down over that period of time.

I want to share a few ideas that you might want to consider to establish a better overall strategy to deal with this decline. The first thing is have a conversation with your children. Bring them into the loop. Let them know what actions you are taking to prepare for this decline.

Most children are wary of having this conversation with their parents because they don't want to offend them because it could be perceived as insulting. The dynamic between the two of you is one where they've always given you a measure of respect and deference. Even if they didn't agree with your decision, you likely raised them to respect their elders.

They're not necessarily going to challenge you on that, especially if they love you. Until it gets really bad, they're not going to be in a position where they're going to be offering, "Hey, we ought to have a conversation about your impending financial literacy decline, and by the way, pass the croissants."

If they're not going to bring it up, you have to bring it up. You have to offer them a guide to your thoughts on the topic and how they, as your trusted children can navigate that conversation down the road. What permission are you going to give them to enter into that conversation? How are they going to feel comfortable that that permission exists all the way through?

You're going to want to talk about some strategies around that. That there may be some key phrases that they can use to enter into that conversation. You may want them to begin a conversation in a particular way so that you can recognize that it's coming from the place where they are concerned about. Wary around your ability to make decisions, and why it's being impacted.

The next strategy you might want to consider is writing a letter to yourself. In here, you're going to want to consider the tell‑tale signs that it might be time to delegate some of this financial decision‑making. You might want to write a letter to yourself reminding you that you have children who love you and people who care about you that want nothing in the world but the best for you.

Give this letter to the person most likely to help you with your finances now so that when the time comes, they're prepared. Back to the that first recommendation, ensure that your children are on the same page, or at least the majority of them, in the belief that it may be time to present the letter back to you. This can be key or cue that it's time to hand over the reins.

If you have a conversation with yourself, it might smooth over the hard feelings or the natural resistance that you'll come up with when you are facing that decision in the future. Remember, your confidence level is going to stay super high on this, and so you want the opportunity to overcome that fatal flaw.

Where I work, in terms of being an estate planning, specifically an elder law attorney, we make it a requirement of part of our planning that people nominate somebody as a power of attorney or as a successor trustee to help them with your financial decision‑making beyond their spouse, if they're married. We recognize that people are going to get older.

If they only trust their spouse and nobody beyond that, I can tell you from experience that they're going to be set up for a particular failure in the future. Meaning that they will run out of one or both of the spouses as options, and they're going to have to rely on somebody else.

A good comprehensive plan will cover this designation of a trusted person in those roles. Whether we're talking about a power of attorney, a trust document, healthcare directive really doesn't matter. All of the documents are important.

However, we need to get a backup in there so that if you fly by that decision‑making limbo, where you are not great at making decisions but you're still capable of making them, that we have some backup so that there's no failure point in your planning. That is really important.

Not only are you susceptible to the scams and the poor decision‑making on your own as you get older, but the consequences of not having great estate planning documents means that you could get to a point in time where you are incapable of making your decisions.

If you don't have any documents that help somebody else make those decisions with you and for you, then you can be forced to go through a guardianship proceeding, which is a legal proceeding that costs a lot of money, takes a good amount of time, and completely avoidable with great estate planning documents.

The idea is that you don't want to stick your head in the sand about the need for this over time. You don't need a terrible event like an Alzheimer's scenario in order to benefit from having great estate planning in place, to having your legal ducks in a row.

Your normal decline in ability to make financial decisions could be the reason why you have these estate planning documents in place so that as we get the predictable decline over time.

When you go over that fail‑safe point where it's just not possible to make decisions any longer, then you have the documentation that empowers somebody and not just the spouse, but somebody at the next generation to help you make decisions on their own.

As I mentioned, you're going to decline at some point in your life. The research is clear about that. It is simply an unfortunate fact of life.

[background music]

Victor: Making the transition to having somebody help you with your finances doesn't have to be a painful experience.

You can set some conditions up where you can be successful, like writing yourself a letter, putting your state planning documents in place, and having proactive conversations with your family members to make sure they're aware about what your wishes are and what the conditions are you are going to need help. You're going to be really glad that you did. I promise you.

We're going to take a quick break and we'll come back. We will continue with "Make It Last."

Announcer: Life is better when you have your legal ducks in a row. One area attorney can help you get your financial ducks in a row as well. Victor J. Medina fills dual fiduciary roles, an estate planning and certified elder law attorney and also a credentialed certified financial planner professional.

Through his law practice and independent registered investment advisory company, Mr. Medina serves high wealth individuals seeking conservative advice and a professionally managed approach to retirement wealth management.

Learn more about Victor's 360 Degree Wealth Protection Strategies, call 609‑818‑0068. That's 609‑818‑0068 or listen to the newest episode of Make It Last Radio, Wednesday mornings at 11:00 on 1450 talk radio.

Investment advisory services offered through Palante Wealth Advisers, LLC, a New Jersey and Pennsylvania registered investment adviser.

[background music]

Victor: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Make It Last. We're going through these potpourri of topics that I want to cover with you today. It will change your pace from what we normally do, which is take one topic and go really deep on it.

We spent the first segment talking about the decline of financial decision making over time. One of the things that I mentioned is that it makes you susceptible to scams and fraud. I came across an article in AARP that highlighted one of the ways that gift cards are being used to finance fraud.

They make them an easy choice for scammers. This was on, as I mentioned, the AARP website, which is obviously for retired persons. Let me give you the background. There was a woman who entered a Kroger's, which is a grocery store in Virginia, back in February. She was a school teacher.

She was on her cell phone talking to a man who had identified himself as an officer from the IRS. That gentleman has explained in some threatening and nasty terms that she owed $5,200 in back taxes and that she would be arrested if she didn't pay it off.

Now, thankfully, fortunately, an arrangement between Google, IRS, and her local police department, she could make a down payment on her debt and avoid jail, so says the person. All she had to do was buy two $500 Google Play cards, gift cards, read their code numbers to him over the phone.

She's in her 50s, by the way, just her 50s. She walks into the grocery store, and she tries to buy the cards by check. The clerk at the store gets suspicious. Do you know where these are going? How are they going to be used? After a pause, she kind of nods, yes.

The clerk says, "OK, good, you know, because we got a lot of stamps." They're using these Google prepaid cards for them. She covers the phone so the person on the phone can't hear her and she says, "Please help me." She and the clerk go to the store manager, explain that she was being scammed, had her hang up, and the effort to separate this woman from her money was over.

You can think of a gift card as the perfect birthday or graduation present for a relative who'd like to buy music, video games, clothing, or food at a restaurant. As the ordeal for this 50‑year‑old school teacher illustrates, gift cards have also become a popular payment mechanism among scam artists.

Whether or not someone is masquerading as the officer from the IRS about to arrest you or tech support, which they do a lot, or attorney for a grandchild who's supposedly in jail, criminals pressure their targets to buy these gift cards for Apple iTunes, Google Play, Best Buy, or other popular retailers.

Order them to provide the code numbers and PIN numbers on the back of the card so they can be redeemed. It is a growing trend. The FTC, which stands for the Federal Trade Commission, has data that shows that 26 percent of scammers ask for gift cards and reload cards back in 2018, just last year, versus 7 percent in 2015. In three years, it had nearly quadrupled in the rate.

Here's some good news. As awareness of gift cards in scams grows, so do the efforts to head off these scams. There are employee training programs. This was something that had happened at Kroger's, for example. Their service desk personnel are trained to engage with customers to ensure that they're not being scammed.

That's how this 50‑year‑old school teacher was able to be saved because that clerk had undergone that training. By the way, they are entitled to refuse the transaction, if necessary. This is, according to Kroger's and the way that they're being trained.

Apple, Best Buy, Target, all say that they train employees to be on the lookout for people who might be buying gift cards in the midst of being defrauded.

A quote from the general counselor from Best Buy, who's also their chief risk and compliance officer says, "What we wanted to be able to do is have people recognize if they saw somebody in distress."

There are other measures that are being introduced, including limits on the purchase and use of gift cards. Last year, three major retailers ‑‑ Best Buy, Target, and Walmart ‑‑ announced that they were voluntarily implementing two measures to reduce gift card fraud.

One was to lower the maximum amount of money that people could load onto gift cards in one transaction. Their idea there was if they could limit that, in terms of only let's say $100 in one transaction, it would at least reduce the magnitude of the scam or the fraud.

Unlike the two $500 gift cards that the scammer representing the IRS was at the beginning of the story here would have only been limited to $100 if she was able to buy two $200 instead of $1,000.

The other measure that they're implementing to reduce gift card fraud is to put new restrictions on using gift cards to buy other cards which is a practice that scammers are using to hide their tracks, a little bit of a shell game. If they use one set of gift cards to buy another gift card. Then use those gift cards to buy something else.

By the end, when you start to unravel it, you never knew what money was being spent on if you could find it at all.

AARP collaborated with Best Buy and the National Association of Attorneys General, which are the state law enforcement officers in each of the various states to create a public service announcement warning people about gift card schemes and scams.

One of the key messages in that is gift cards are not used and cannot be used to pay bail, taxes, or court fines. Those are topics, that are these hot button topics meant to essentially engage your emotional concern for another human being. That can overwhelm your rational thinking basis, but, in fact, you can't. You can't at all.

By the way, the followed up with the woman who was attempting to be scammed. She said that she was extremely thankful about the help that she received at the Kroger's. She ended up thanking the store manager, the clerk, everyone that was involved.

Back in the parking lot, when she was sitting in the car, she got another phone call. It was the officer [laughs] from the IRS, and he was angry. She ended up yelling at him, "Don't you call me again." Without any prompting or any help, she hung up on him, and got rid of that.

There are a few other things that people can be doing to help themselves save money. I came across a fantastic article in "The Wall Street Journal," in the tax section. One of the things that they were talking about was unnecessary monthly subscriptions. The truth is that everything is moving to this model.

Everything is moving towards models where people pay on a monthly basis. When we do shows talking about setting budgeting, I probably have been guilty of not spending enough time with you, coaching you through examining whether or not the monthly bills that you're paying, the monthly subscription plans, are worth it or not, or it belong in your budget.

It's too easy to just accept to the budget the way that it is, and then build your income around it. It takes more work to unwind that, to see whether or not we should be, with as many monthly subscriptions as we have. If you're unfamiliar as to why everything is moving to this model, it's pretty easy to figure out.

Back in the day, people used to simply pay money for an item. That would mean that they bought it once, they owned it, there was a life cycle on it. They had to make a bigger financial decision to purchase something on a lump sum basis. The company always had to be coming out with new products and new configurations in order to make money.

They were always selling as a one off. With the Internet of Things and service being a bigger benefit than something that is tangible and hardware, companies are moving to these subscription models in large parts to help streamline or smooth out their cash flow.

If they can get a bunch of people paying a subscription instead of paying something on a one‑time basis, they can make really predictable models about how they're going to grow and what kind of revenue they're going to get. It makes it easier for them to secure financing, gets a stronger business model for them.

Overall, these things become sticky over time. In the article, quite amusingly, the author, who's a tech journalist, tech columnist, that I've been reading for awhile, she says that she was paying $15 a month for an electronics fax service that she used twice.

She'd been paying it for three years. She paid $540. She could have bought 10 fax machines, or a plane ticket to Ireland to visit the museum where the world's first fax machine is on display.

Everything in the subscription economy business, every business, is moving towards billing you monthly or yearly. There are subscriptions for everything, the shirt you're wearing, hardware, everything is in there. You may have noticed, at some point in time, where iPhones went from being $ 600 or $800 to being available for $40 a month.

Essentially, for the rest of your life, they'll give you a new one every year. This is all part of this subscription economy off of it. There are some services to help you with this as you start to examine whether or not you should be paying all the things that you are.

There are some ways to help you with this. They include some apps, which I'm not sure if they're actually on subscription or not. I'd be hilarious. Imagine if they are. There are things that you can do. There are some services that help you.

There's a service called Truebill, another one called Trim, and another one called Bobby. Truebill is a pretty good one, and so is Trim. They essentially burrow into your personal finance accounts and find these recurring charges. You give them access to that. Whereas, Bobby is one that you input your subscriptions and monthly fees into manually.

There are a couple of steps that you can do if you'd want to access this and address it. One is to do an audit. Log into your credit cards and your bank accounts, and make a list or a spreadsheet of all of your monthly and yearly subscriptions along with their charges.

As I mentioned, there's an app called Bobby. It's available for iOS, which is your iPhone. It allows you to make a simple list and tally up the totals. This next step is you may want to consolidate to family plan. You want your partner, spouse, or otherwise to do the same, and cross‑reference the list.

You may spot some duplicates in your household. You could get some savings that way. Obviously, we want to be able to cancel. Mark down the subscriptions that you really don't find any value in anymore, or worse, things that started off as free trials that turned into small recurring monthly charges. Say goodbye to them.

Right now, you're dying a death by a thousand cuts. More often than not, the Cancel my Subscription button is hidden in a menu item, or you have to call and question what you've done in your life to deserve 30 minutes of hold music in order to address all of these.

There is a new law in 2018 in California, which requires businesses to provide a way to cancel subscriptions online. That has certainly helped. If not, you can try the company's customer chat service, or send an email. Those are ways of doing it.

Whereas, a good benefit, and it could be something that you were avoiding trying, there could be a good benefit to you having your subscriptions through the Apple platform.

Apple iTunes gives you a fantastic way of managing and subscribing to all kinds of services. All the way up through, including things like Netflix, which is a movie subscription base that is not localized to your Apple account. You can pay for it that way.

If you subscribe through the Apple system, they will actually provide for you a very easy way of canceling your subscriptions on your iPhone. You go to Settings, and then go into the iTunes at app store, tap on your Apple ID, which is the button there that has your picture and your name next to it, then view the Apple ID, then Subscriptions.

When you're signing up for something to disable the auto‑renew function off of that, and set a reminder. If there is a free trial on your calendar, just before the trial period ends, you can consider canceling before you get charged.

Technology really is your friend in this regard. You should be able to set a pretty easy reminder, just by asking your phone to do that. It can be canceled, whatever it is that you are looking to cancel.

The only thing that I would recommend on top of that is to set an annual reminder to do this.

[background music]

Victor: As I mentioned, I think that there's certainly some risk over time that we can get some bloat back again. You can just find yourself in the same situation if you are not diligent about looking at your free trials that turn into subscriptions, that turn into this debt by a thousand bucks.

Listen, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to finish with the last topic of the day. Stick with us. We'll be right back on Make It Last.

Announcer: Imagine if the attorney you trust to protect your legal interests could also be trusted to protect your retirement wealth. One trusted adviser, dual fiduciary roles, Victor J. Medina. Mr. Medina is in an estate planning and certified elder law attorney with a national reputation. He is also a certified financial planner professional.

Through his law firm, and independent registered investment advisory company, Mr. Medina provides 360‑degree wealth protection strategies for individuals in or nearing retirement. His unique approach offers advantages to high‑wealth individuals seeking conservative advice and a professionally managed approach to their retirement wealth.

Learn more. Call 609‑818‑0068. That's 609‑818‑0068, or listen to the newest episode of Make It Last Radio, Wednesday mornings at 11:00 on 1450 Talk Radio. Investment advisory services offered through Palante Wealth Advisers LLC, a New Jersey and Pennsylvania registered investment adviser.

Victor: Welcome back to Make It Last. We've been talking today about financial decision making, things that can impact your ability to make a great financial decisions as you get older. We've been talking a little bit about scams that people are using around gift cards to try to take your money away.

I wanted to end in this sweet of potpourri topics about new financial apps that aim to protect the elderly. I've come across a growing crop of financial tools, online tools, that are meant to help adult children manage and monitor their parents' finances and their well‑being as well.

The rise of these services really comes as financial companies look to technology to cater the changing needs of an aging population.

I suppose another benefit or bonus for these companies is their opportunity to develop relationships with the adult children, who are probably going to end up being beneficiaries of whatever wealth transfer is coming in later years. They call that trying to reduce attrition or increase yield.

What they're really looking to do with these tools is leverage forms of artificial intelligence to help users perform a range of tasks, whether it's paying bills or monitoring accounts for suspicious activities and things like that.

These services can assist in curbing exploitation by unscrupulous caregivers or helping family members restrict spendthrift behaviors by parents who are in cognitive decline. This is really, I suppose, an early look at where we're going with this.

While a lot of the tools that have been created in the financial services world that really try to leverage online stuff have been...There have been tools that have been created. Most of them have been focused at the younger crowd, millennials. I don't know what they call people who are even younger than millennials, but they don't have any money anyway.

The millennials, they've got jobs and maybe they're saving something. The idea is they're trying to reduce the friction between those two things, having people have money and being able to manage it and make money off of them.

They really haven't been focusing on the older folks. This is not withstanding all of the news that's out there that says that the most growing part of the population is the baby boomers. Not growing, but there's going to be 10,000 baby boomers turning age 65 every day between now and the year, I think, 2040 or something like that.

It makes sense that we should pay attention to these folks. These FinTech or these financial technology companies should be doing that. As I've been trying to illustrate in the suite of today's topics, this is going to be an ever‑increasing or growing set of concerns.

As people get older, their ability to make financial decisions is being reduced. It's lessening. They are more susceptible to attacks, scams, frauds, all that kind of stuff. What we want to be able to do is help these folks not get injured that way.

A couple of tools that I want to share with you, specifically, in that world. One is a company called EverSafe. What this is, is an account monitoring tool that's aimed at finding financial exploitation. There's another one called True Link Financial, which offers a prepaid debit card that can be customized, both to limit how much money someone can spend, and where they can spend it.

This is a great solution for people that are in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's or something similar, where what they want to do is make sure that the money...They're still autonomy. We want to make sure that people are still living independently, that they are living with dignity, and that not all control has been wrestled away.

They also want to make sure that they are controlling for bad things that might happen. Something like this works really well, especially when we limit where it can be spent. Not how much can be spent, but we can limit where. Maybe you don't have to take away the QVC spending, but we can limit it to $40 a month, and then people have the opportunity to use some of that money for that.

Or maybe we'll give somebody full autonomy to manage their finances, but they are going to be able to spend money only on the grocery store or the bills or something along those lines. That is a fantastic way to help somebody who is struggling with this kind of cognitive decline, again, maintain their dignity. That's really what we're looking for.

Most of these folks have lived a life, a tremendous life ‑‑ I keep using this word ‑‑ but dignity that they've come through. As they get older, their biggest fear is that they will lose all of that. We don't want that. We want to be able to help provide that along the way.

There are other solutions that I think are good ones to look at. There are companies that will analyze accounts to eliminate unnecessary expenses, help with bill paying. Talked a little bit about some of those in terms of subscription plans and things like that. There are financial decision‑making assessments.

Wealthcare planning offers a tool that assesses older people's financial decision making capabilities, suggest specific steps for families to prepare for future challenges that are facing these older folks.

There definitely is a market need. Looking at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they've put out statistics that said in 2017 seniors experienced 3.5 million incidents of financial exploitation, including fraud perpetrated by strangers, theft by caregivers. Adults, aged 70 to 79, are estimated to have lost an average of $43,000 in each reported case of financial abuse.

Now, most of these tools that are aimed at a senior population are actually targeted at adult children. We might call these people folks that are in a caregiver or sandwich generation. Those people that are caring for parents, as well as their own children, is what makes them in the sandwich.

They're already familiar with things like online banking. They're willing to try new services that might save them time. What has changed over all of this ‑‑ just the way families live ‑‑ what's changed over time is that people don't live with their parents any longer. They don't even live nearby. We are very mobile. We're very nomadic.

How do you take care of parents when you live 3,000 miles away in a different time zone? You do it online. You do it on your phone. You do it with an app. You do it when there's something alerted on your watch that says, "Hey, watch out for this, that, or the other."

In order for adult children to access their parents, they're going to need things like their permission or power of attorney. There are a couple of good stories that help underline or underscore what the benefit of this is.

There is a gentleman named Mr. Olinger, who's a 60‑year‑old tech entrepreneur in the Bay Area. He came up the with the idea of Golden Core, which is one that helps eliminate unnecessary expenses and a lot of things, because the bank alerted him that his 84‑year‑old father had missed a mortgage payment three months in a row.

When he went over the bank statements, he realized that his dad, who was otherwise independent, I suppose, needed help managing his money. He shaved almost $18,000 a year from his annual expenses by canceling. Watch this, a 427‑channel cable contract in subscriptions to magazines he no longer read.

The whole concept behind all of this is really trying to make sure that we are putting in place the safety nets so that as people decline, as people get older, we can catch them. We can give them the opportunity to not fall flat on their face. I see this a lot in both of the areas of my businesses.

I see that in the elder law planning, where we're looking at asset protection and protecting assets against the costs of long‑term care. All of that, I see that every day, because I'm watching a lot of children come in to help with planning for their parents. I'm also seeing it on the financial side.

In the way that it manifests itself there, it's often, when I review what the recommendations are for a particular financial plan, whatever that is. When I see that, I'm seeing recommendations that purely benefits the adviser but not the clients. The client is losing the ability to latch on to the important parts of financial literacy and decision‑making.

What I observe is happening is that they are giving up on processing it. It's very difficult for them to admit that there's some form of a shortcoming on what they're doing. Because it's difficult for them to admit that, they give over, completely give up and give over all of the responsibility for these kinds of decisions, and just hope and pray that it works out OK.

Here's the thing. In many cases, it turns out to be OK. These people aren't bankrupted for what they're doing. It's also not really what they need. The best way to make sure that you are getting the advice that you need, that someone is committed to doing that is always, always, always work with a fiduciary who is out there looking for your best interests and not just their own.

How can we do that? If you work with a lawyer, a lawyer is putting your best interests ahead of their own. You want to be searching for a lawyer that is really good at talking about everything that the senior might encounter in their lives. Not just the legal planning documents but the financial documents. Not just the financial documents but the taxes.

You want the entire spectrum of that being covered by somebody really knowledgeable to do that. One of the ways that you can help control for that is to work with somebody that is a certified elder law attorney or CELA.

Those are the folks that passed exams, a very difficult exam, but they passed the exam in order to demonstrate a level of expertise, knowledge, experience, skills, all in and around to dealing with issues that seniors encounter.

You can take the next step. The next step is to essentially bring somebody on board who is also not just a lawyer but also has the financial background. They're a certified financial planner. Not just that, but they have designations in retirement planning.

We have to take that one layer more because those people can still be doing things that are not looking out for your best interest. What do we want after that? We want somebody that is a registered investment adviser, an independent financial services professional, who has to, by statute, put your best interest ahead of their own.

You're looking for somebody that works through an RIA, because those RIAs are contractually obligated, statutorily obligated, to put your best interests ahead of their own, be a fiduciary, work with everything that's out there to find just the things that work out in your best interest.

That's really what you're looking for. If you want some more information about that, I can offer you a really insightful report that will help you determine who you should be working with when you work in the whole financial sphere. The way that you do that is, I want you to text the word, questions, plural, questions, to 609‑554‑5936.

You put the word, questions, into your text message app. You send it to the number, 609‑554‑5936. What you're going to get back are nine questions to ask your next adviser or your current adviser, and understand who it is that you should be working with, and what's going to make them important.

What we're looking for here is a guide so that you are able to make great questions and great decisions around who to be working with. If you don't have a list of questions that will help you determine who you should be working with, you're just going to fall for some fancy titles.

You don't know if they're going to be the right fit. This whole guide has got questions that you should ask, like, how do you get paid? Why did you start in the business? What costs do I have to pay in addition to your fee? I'm going to try to give you these interview tips to help you make sure that the adviser is the right fit for you.

It's completely complementary. All you have to do is text the word, questions, to 609‑554‑5936. You want to read this guide before you hire your next financial adviser. I wouldn't want to start working with somebody before I knew the answers to those questions. That's what you want. Just text, questions, to 609‑554‑5936. It's, questions, to 609‑554‑5936.

That's going to mark the end of another episode of Make it Last. I really hope that you enjoyed this show. You get a little potpourri of different topics. We're going to return back to our more encompassing show themes when we come back for next week.

If you enjoyed this, and if you enjoy the show regularly, the best thing you can do is share it with a friend. You do have a friend out there that would love to learn more about the important things in and around legal and financial retirement planning, and what they should be doing to make sure that they get their ducks in a row and their financial nest egg secure.

[background music]

Victor: That's what you're going to get with Make it Last. Share the show with them, either in podcast format, or tell them to tune in at 1450 AM at 11:00 AMs on Wednesday, when we're not getting pre‑empted by the Patriots' game [laughs] . There's going to be a show sometime on a Wednesday at 11:00. Just keep tuning in. Otherwise, get on to the podcast.

That's been it for me. This has been Victor Medina. This has been Make it Last. We'll catch you next week on the next week's show. Talk to you later. Bye‑bye.

Announcer: Investing involves risks including the potential loss of principal. Any references to protection, safety, or a lifetime income, generally referred a fixed insurance products, never securities, or investments. Insurance guarantees are backed by the financial strength and claims‑paying abilities of the issuing carrier.

This radio show is intended for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be used as the sole basis for financial decisions, nor should it be construed as advice designed to meet the particular needs of an individual situation.

The host of this show is not affiliated with or endorsed by the US government or any governmental agency. The information and opinions contained herein provided by third parties have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed.

In today's episode, Victor breaks down electronic wills and reiterates the importance of mindfulness. Victor also lays out the 5 Psychological Stages of Retirement as inspired by a study done by AgeWave, Ameriprise Financial, & Harris Interactive to learn more about the attitudes and worries of people before and after retirement.

For a FREE checklist to help with your retirement income planning, text the word CHECKLIST to 609-554-5936

Like this episode? Leave a review and give a 5-star rating on the Apple Podcast app. As always, share with a friend!

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.

In today's episode, Victor tackles the question, "Are my financial advisors working in my best interest?" Victor also discusses 5 Retirement Planning Sins and ways to avoid and overcome them.

For additional information on retirement planning issues and things you should look to avoid, text RETIREMENT to 609-554-5936.

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.

In this episode, Victor interviews Professor Jamie Hopkins. Professor Hopkins is the Director of Retirement Research for the Carson Group (an organization that assists financial advisors), and teaches retirement planning at the American College of Financial Services and is the author of the book "Rewirement : Rewiring the Way You Think About Retirement".

This is a fantastic interview that covers all of the major mistakes of retirement planning as well as what the future might hold for retirees.

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.