Everybody, it’s Victor Medina, and we’re here with another Five Fact Friday, and boy, it’s starting to get chilly outside, but I tell you where it’s not chilly, which is Las Vegas. I just got back from a trip with my wife, where we had an opportunity to join about 700 other of what I think are the best financial advisors in the country, and it was a launch to a new year, and one of the things that makes this group of advisors so special, in my mind, is there are two things. First, they are focused on people who are near or in retirement, very much the way that we do our planning, but second, they are people who are committed to a fiduciary standard, meaning that they put their clients’ best interests first. Now, this event actually was headlined by a number of inspirational speakers. Got an opportunity to see a personal hero of mine, a guy named Michael Hyatt, who focuses on bringing leaders forward with their productivity, and he uses something called a full focus planner, which we use in our office, and I also got two see two speakers on the next day, one of whom talked about being able to, sort of with integrity, spread what your brand is so that you can share a little bit more about who you are in service of others. And he used a really great example, he talked about two Olympians, both who have achieved the greatest number of Olympic medals in history, both in swimming. One of them you’ve heard about, and the other, you’ve never heard about, and what the difference between them is. I’ll give you a guess, obviously the one you’ve heard about is Michael Phelps, but do you know who the other one is? I’ll kind of leave it up to a mystery. And then the second one was an inspirational speaker named Hal Elrod who had suffered both a horrific car accident and returned back from that, and a very aggressive form of cancer, and really he helped people establish a fantastic mindset, and he’s the author of a book called The Miracle Morning, which we really liked, my wife and I were both into what he was sharing. So it was a great opportunity to be in Las Vegas, because my wife and I actually love to eat at a number of the restaurants that are there, and also be surrounded by a number of great advisors, and come away with it, inspired for the next year. So really happy about that. Now, let’s get to the five links for this week. The first link is about a city in Mexico that is sustainable, and it can host over seven million plants and 130,000 people, and it is completely energy and food independent. So really interesting article there. The second one, one of my favorite trips that my wife and I took way, way back in 2002, is we went to Italy. Now, the story about this, kind of interesting because we had no money at the time, and since it happened right after 9/11, nobody wanted to fly, so we got a great deal to go nine days to Italy, and to this day, almost 20 years later, we still share stories about that particular trip. We went to Florence, and one of the things you can do when you’re in Florence is take a day trip to Pisa and see the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but the question is, have you ever thought about why it leans and why it doesn’t fall over, so this link actually explains that, and some of the changes that they made to prevent it from toppling, so I encourage you to look at that. Now the next link, you all know that we are involved with helping seniors and elders, especially those that are suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s, help them protect their assets. Well one of the things that have come out is a smart shoe, that has a GPS locator in it, which will help anyone who’s suffering from wandering risks to be able to get located so that they don’t, in fact, get lost. So you might want to think about that in your life if you have somebody that you are concerned about being a wander risk. The last two links, we’re gonna change it up a little bit this time. We normally have a legal one and a retirement one. Now, our legal one is one that we want to talk about, which is why children sometimes are treated differently in their estate plan. You know, most of the time when we meet with clients, they basically just want to make sure that all of their children are treated equally, but, from time to time, sometimes there’s unequal treatment, and that’s okay, it’s your money, you should do with it what you want to do, but in this link, we’re gonna explain a little bit about why sometimes kids are treated unequally in their estate plan. The next one is a little bit on a down note, because I wanted to include a second legal planning link, and it really is about, and related to the recent passing of Kobe Bryant. Now, people tend to have strong reactions about Kobe Bryant. Some people think that he was fantastic, and some people didn’t like him very much but I was struck by a story I came across, which is, he was playing in a game in Phoenix, against the Phoenix Suns, and turns out that somebody had reached out to him because there was a kid who was also named Kobe, who was suffering from sort of a terminal heart disease, and he made time in that schedule to go and visit him. The person thought he was just going to get a signed basketball, but he showed up, he played with him for about an hour, passed the basketball back and forth, and then disappeared. The reason why I was so struck by this story was, apparently the whole schedule around this was done in secret. They had to bring him up the back stairs, nobody knew about that he was gonna be showing up, and when he ended it, Kobe asked, you know, “What’s going on with this kid, is it a financial thing, I can help with that?” And they said “No, he really has a terminal heart disease and there’s nothing that you can do about that, his body wouldn’t survive a transplant.” So at the end of the story, when they connect again, it turns out that Kobe Bryant did this kind of stuff all the time, but he had really, sort of, two rules around that, and one of the rules was that there was no PR to be done about it. In other words, he wanted no fanfare about the fact that he went out and did these things. It was kind of interesting because if you ever watched Kobe Bryant after he retired, he was very joyful about his engagement with the rest of the community, not only just basketball, but generally around. So, even though he was very, very, competitive on the basketball court, I kind of feel that off the court, that personality that he showed and how he showed up in life when he had no obligation to do it, probably closer to where he is. For a lot of people in this area, Kobe Bryant is a hero because he’s a Philadelphia native, I mean, he was from Lower Merion, and he was raised in Italy, but he’s somebody from the east coast even though he’s associated with the LA Lakers. So, in any event, I included a link about when is it too early to start planning, because he was taken away at age 41, super, super early. And for many people, they think that estate planning is something that they’re gonna do in their 60s and 70s when really, maybe we ought to get done with that a little bit sooner. Well, anyway, let’s go leave you with an up note. The Superbowl is coming up this weekend, and they released an early ad, which really speaks to my heart. Those of you that know me well know that I’m a big fan of Red Sox Nation, I’m a fan of New England sports in general, of course I’m a little concerned, like what do you all do when you don’t have a football team in the Superbowl? I’ve been so used to the Patriots– I know, I’ll stop. Anyway, so they had an ad with three celebrities all hailing from the Boston area with their Boston accents, and I’ll just leave you with this link about what it’s like to have a smart car that you can park on your own. That’s it for this Five Fact Friday. Hope you enjoy the Superbowl, I know I’ll be watching even though my team’s not in it, and we’ll catch you in a couple weeks with the next Five Fact Friday. Thanks so much, see you later, bye bye.
Five Fact Friday is a bi-weekly newsletter produced by Medina Law Group containing 5 interesting or fun links. For more information, visit medinalawgroup.com or call 609-818-0068.
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