Hey everybody, Victor Medina, welcome back to another Five Fact Friday. In fact, it’s February 28th and tomorrow is February 29th, making it a brand new Leap Year. We’ve had about six of these in the most recent century. It’s incredible to me every time that we have it, because it’s like the coolest day in there, and you get all the people talking about how old they really are, if they were born on February 29th. Anyway, did you know that this got started back in Caesar’s time as a way to make sure that we stayed on the path for all of our seasons? Yeah, it wouldn’t matter if we had 365 days, and didn’t have a leap year, except we would start to shift so much, the season would be completely different. Anyway, it’s a cool little fact, and we’ve got that coming up for tomorrow. Before I get into the five facts for this week, I do want to address something in the financial world, and it’s related to the coronavirus. Now, we have to first recognize the incredible health toll that this is taking, there are so many people that are impacted by this, it really is a health tragedy. At the same time, it has had an effect on the financial sector that has put to the test even the most ardent believer in long term investing. We’ve seen things tumble, so the real question is, will this impact your retirement? Well the answer is, I don’t know. What’s important is, whether or not you’ve built the kinds of protections necessary to withstand this kind of risk or turmoil to your investment plan. Now those people that work with us on our financial services side already have plans baked in to what we have put together to weather something like this. We knew that something like this might happen, we didn’t know it was gonna be a coronavirus, but we didn’t do certain steps to reduce the risk in their portfolio, specifically, against the need for this money over the long haul to make sure that they had a smooth retirement, no matter what life dealt them. If you don’t know what this is doing to your retirement, if you’re not yet one of our retirement planning clients, then I’d ask you to think about coming in to explore exactly what the impact of this might look like and we can certainly offer that to you at no cost whatsoever, you just have to contact us. Now let’s get to the five facts for this week. The first fact has to do with something that I am reading about a different way to plan a city. It’s called Plan Melbourne, it’s in Melbourne, Australia and what they’re trying to do is create a world where everything is around 20 minutes away. I love this. In fact, my wife and I were out to dinner in New Hope this past weekend, and we parked the car, we were walking through the town, they had these little townhouses there, and we thought to ourselves, well how cool would it be, after the kids grew up, if we lived someplace like that, where everything was in walking distance? I’m kind of that way where I am in Pennington now, but I really like the idea of having tons and tons of restaurants, shopping, and a community like that. So I really enjoyed reading that part about what Melbourne is trying to do. Now, on to what I am watching. I will admit to a guilty pleasure, I love “The Bachelor.” Well did you know that “The Bachelor” has a casting call for “The Bachelor,” the senior edition? They’re asking people who are over 65 that are interested in appearing in a senior version of “The Bachelor” to apply. So it doesn’t matter if you’re a grumpy old man, or the goldenest of girls, you now have an opportunity for TV fame, and finding that one special person. I just hope that they use the word amazing as often as they do in the regular show, in the older version of it. Now, let’s get to an app on my home screen, and that is PulsePoint. Now this is a great app that allows people who are in cardiac distress to be connected to resources that can help them. Well we don’t see a lot of people in New Jersey taking this up, this is a great idea, because it can put you in touch with your 911 responders, your automatic defibrillator devices, it is just a great thought about really connecting and using something like a smart phone, or an app to connect people in need with the resources that they need. Now we’ve got two more links for you. One is something new in legal. Now, something new in legal is actually related to something that we’ve covered in the past, and that is the death of Prince, the music artist, and the estate administration that’s going on. Well we’ve had a development in that case, which is that his brother has recently passed away as well, and that has caused additional struggles in the estate administration. Now the reason why this is relevant for you is that if you’re doing estate planning, one of the most important things you should do is think about backups to the people that you’ve put in charge. We always ask clients to name as many people as they can think of, probably about two or three people deep, just in case the person that they put in charge isn’t around when they need them. This is a good reminder that we should not only think about who might be in charge, but who can back them up too, and really start to plan for all eventualities. The last link is something new in retirement, and in that, I’m featuring a link about how to have a discussion with your parents about their finances and their path for retirement. Now I happen to be lucky. I’m already in the industry so my parents, and in fact, my in-laws are routinely having discussions with me about retirement, it’s a pretty straightforward thing because it’s something that I already do, and I can help them with. But if you’re not in the industry, if you’re not a lawyer or somebody that handles retirement planning, then you might need a roadmap about what’s to discuss with your parents, and how to help them really make sure that they’re on the right path for retirement, because here’s the thing that happens. If you don’t have an upfront discussion with them now, you might be involved with it when they need a long term care estate. Or when they’re starting to run out of money. Or, they might move in with you once they’ve already run out of money. These are all important reasons to have this discussion up front and ahead of time before we get too far down the road. So those are the links for this week. As a reminder, if you’re worried about what’s going on with the coronavirus as to your finances, it is worth making sure that you explore that with somebody that regularly builds plans to withstand that kind of a challenge. I know that my clients, none of them have called me worried about that, because we know that we already have that plan in place, and so if you don’t have that kind of plan, it’s worth exploring with us, just to make sure that you know what the risk is and how to control for that. Other than that, enjoy the links for this week, enjoy Leap Year Day tomorrow, and we’ll catch you in a couple weeks. 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.
Reading: http://bit.ly/2PrwDah
Watching: http://bit.ly/39eHImU
Home Screen: http://bit.ly/2T21IUt
Legal: strib.mn/2Td7uBy
Retirement: nyti.ms/3920fmv
Bonus Fact: http://bit.ly/2wKD95z