This week we will be talking about Great Performances, a New York based catering and event company that decided to give back to their community during the pandemic by switching their services to providing seniors with nutritious meals.
Show us the money, honey! We’ll also be talking about new money trends for 2022… what you should be concerned with, as well as when you should be filing your tax returns.
Reading: https://cnn.it/3KAQzTo
Watching: https://bit.ly/33FYkqn
Tech: https://engt.co/3GTxIjX
Legal: https://bit.ly/3fXVxv2
Retirement: https://bit.ly/3Iqq9lf
Full Transcription Below
They say that the two things that you can’t avoid in life are death and taxes, but I just bought ya three extra days on the second one. What am I talking about? Well, I’ve got that link and more because I’m Victor Medina, and this is Five Fact Friday.
Hey, everybody, welcome back to Five Fact Friday. I’m Victor Medina. I am the founder of Medina Law Group and Palante Wealth Advisor, and this is the only video newsletter that is hosted entirely by your favorite retirement planning firm.
I’ve got five great links for you this week, and I want to jump right into it with the first link, what I am reading. And it’s time to start thinking about filing your taxes. That’s right. As of January 24th, the IRS has let you know that it will start accepting your tax returns. And there’s been a lot of news out there that says to expect delays, not just in their ability to process your tax return, but also when you should expect your tax refund. If you’re counting on getting money back, I would tell ya, you’re gonna have to wait a little bit longer. They look like they are going slowly. Now I did promise you at the beginning of the video that I just got ya three extra days to file your taxes, and it’s actually nothing that I did. But the way the calendar lines up, the last date for you to file your taxes this year is April 18th instead of April 15th. Now I’m certainly not gonna encourage anybody to wait till the last minute, but if you are a procrastinator, if you’re somebody that likes to wait till the last minute, well, guess what? Ya got three extra days this year. Use ’em wisely.
The next link is what I am watching, and it’s actually a video about how a service in New York City called Great Performances re-engineered what they were doing after the pandemic. They were known in the industry as being a leader in providing food and event planning, but they made a switch to be able to provide meals to seniors. So I gotta tell ya, I got nothing more that warms my heart than being able to provide services to seniors, especially ones that have been holed up after the pandemic. There are a lot of seniors that decided not to go out because they were the most vulnerable population to the effects of COVID. And so what that meant, there was a lot of people that were stuck at home, and Great Performances did a great job of being able to provide them meals. I encourage you to check out that video and see if you think so the same way.
The next link is what’s new in tech, and I love this technology. This is so cool. Hey, when I was growing up, I used to love a kind of cartoon called “Robotech”. And what it did was it kind of envisioned what it would be like if there is this marriage of people and robots, and you could use them, and they kind of became part of you. Well, long story short, they’ve actually got something out there called the Power Loader, and what it is is a form of an exoskeleton. It weighs about seven kilograms. You wear it like a backpack, and it assists people in performing tasks. Now it helps them carry some more, but it even has some safety features involved that allows it to tell you when you are exceeding your ergonomic limit off of it. I think it’s gonna be going a long way because essentially those people that are in the most manual labor services, including moving a lot of heavy equipment, their livelihood is subject to their ability to stay healthy, and this piece of technology might actually help them work safer for a longer period of time.
What’s new in legal. Well I found this great link that’s actually included on some of the stuff that was on the IRS filing, but here is the reason why I’m sharing it. Those of you who have been long watchers of the video newsletter already understand how important I think it is for you to have a fiduciary retirement planner as the person in your corner helping you plan your retirement. Now that’s a big loaded term, and there are a lot of people that manipulate that term so that it sounds like they’re working in their best interests, it sounds like they’re working as a fiduciary, but they’re not really. Let me give you an example. There are some advisors out there that say that they are held to the highest possible legal standard. Well that’s meaning that they can be held to a lower standard in their industry ’cause they don’t have to be held to the highest one that exists in the world. Well the highest one is the same relationship that a lawyer has with you, that a fiduciary advisor has with you, which is this. They’ve got to put your best interests in mind, and I love hearing about this news. Beginning in February 1st of 2022, they are going to begin enforcement of the fiduciary rules that had been in place for a period of time. Now they had been shelved in the prior administration but brought back as something to help consumers going forward. One of the areas where they really focus is in rollovers from 401ks to IRAs. Now I’ve got a number of different radio shows where I talk about when it is advisable for you to consider rolling over a 401k into an IRA. There are different circumstances that you can do it. You can even do it while you’re still working. But every time that we make that recommendation, we are looking at what is in the client’s best interest. And so, what we do is we compare everything that’s out there. Where are they coming from? What are they moving to? What advantages are they getting? What are they giving up? And each one of these sort of calculations or considerations is what comes together as essentially our fiduciary level advice. So if you are on the verge of retirement planning or you know somebody that has needs around doing retirement planning, making sure that their financial and their legal ducks are all set up, you might want to consider sending them our way. We consider nothing more than what’s in the client’s best interests when we devise a plan, and we don’t just think about the products that we’re gonna be using it. Our primary focus is in the creation of a plan that helps people focus on their income, investments, tax and estate planning. Only after we’ve completed that work, do we make some judgment about what products they should be in. But here’s the thing. We’re gonna start to see some more enforcement. So you bad actors out there, you bad financial advisors that are not working in your client’s best interests, it’s time for you to go back under the rocks under which you crawl out and leave it to the rest of us that are working in the client’s best interests. So I’m excited for that one.
The last link for this week is what’s new in retirement, and I’ve got a really sad story that’s part of this link. It really is something that people did not consider when they were doing their financial plan, but it is something that we consider for our clients all the time. And this is what to do when planning for infirmity or what happens if you become ill, not when you die, not when you’re trying to retire and how long the money’s gonna last, but what if you get sick sometime in the future. There’s no more perfect marriage of helping you navigate that than working with a firm that does both elder law and retirement planning, which is what our focus is. I want you to read the story as a cautionary tale. I’m not saying that it should drive you out to do something immediately, but if you’re not working with somebody that considers both what you need in terms of retirement, as well as what you need if you get ill along the way, you may not be in the best spot for you. And so it is a cautionary tale that, when you create a plan, you should also consider what happens if you get ill along the way.
Hey, let’s recap the links for this week. The first link is what I’m reading, and it is a notice from the IRS letting you know that, as of last Monday, they started accepting returns. So get your taxes filed, but also, if you’re a late procrastinating kind of person, you’ve got until April 18th to file. The next link is what I’m watching, and it’s a video about how Great Performance is a company in New York City, had re-engineered what they were doing to help provide meals for seniors. The next link is what’s new in tech, and actually it is a Power Loader, a little bit of an exoskeleton that brings us into the future where we’re kind of in the marriage of normal life and robots helping us, and it’s a really cool piece of technology. What’s new in legal is a focus on the enforcement of the fiduciary rule. You remember, you need a fiduciary advisor helping you plan your retirement, and there are only a few categories of people that fall into that. We’re one as well, and that’s because we’re an independent registered investment advisory firm, which means that by law we’re required to do that. But you know what? By our own intention, we want to do that as well. The final link for this week is what’s new in retirement, and it is a cautionary tale that, whenever you put a financial plan in place, you have to consider what happens if you get sick, not just what happens when you die or what you need for retirement. So those are the five links for this week, and we’re really excited to bring them to you. But if the weather is what it was supposed to be, you’re probably kind of frigid and weathering cold weather. I wanna encourage you to stay warm over the weekend. We’re only the beginning of this winter. I’m hoping that we stay warm the rest of the time. We’re gonna catch ya in a couple weeks with the next Five Fact Friday. See you soon. Bye-bye.