I know it’s impossible to believe. There was an entire Apple event in the middle of June that highlighted all kinds of really great improvements that you’d want to hear about. And I didn’t even record a video. We’re gonna fix all that because I’m Victim Medina, and this is Five Fact Friday. Everybody, welcome back to Five Fact Friday for July 1st, 2022, as a reminder. This video newsletter is produced by Medina Retirement Planning, a joint venture between Medina Law Group and Plate Wealth Advisors, the only place you can go for holistic legal, financial and tax planning. Well, maybe it’s not the only one, but it certainly the best. Let’s get to the links for this week. But before we do, I do wanna let you know why we’ve been absent so much in the past. And that’s basically because we’ve been busy with the day job and not giving me a lot of time to record these videos. We just finished up a two night series with the Prepare Institute at Raritan Valley Community College that focused entirely on retirement planning which I will tell you was really well attended in large part because everyone wants to know what to do in light of the fact that we’ve had a really volatile stock market and they wanna know how it affects their retirement plan. Now, I will tell you most of the people there were not our clients, ’cause our clients were pretty comfortable with the plan that we put in place. But we are going to be hosting a few other, these are invited to come and teach a few of these through the Prepare Institute. And so if you’d like to get onto the invitation list for that, we can put you in touch with the Prepare Institute so that you can register and come and see one of those events that are coming up later in the year. Okay, now we’re gonna get to the links.
And the first link is what I am reading. And it’s appropriate because we are now in the summer which means it’s time for summer readers. And if you’re looking for something to read, it turns out that we have a Broadway-based set of books and audiobooks that you can now have on your list for the upcoming summer. I’ll tell you, I like having this list available because the summertime is a time where my nine year old asks me to take him to the local community pool. There’s nothing for me to do at the pool, it’s pretty much overrun with kids and he likes to spend hours and hours there. So I need something to read. If you do too, check out that link. You’re probably gonna find something that you would like.
What I’m watching, is actually kind of neat. It is a video watching somebody try to solve what’s going on in a murder mystery book. It turns out there are only three people that have gone ahead and solved this and they wanna figure out whether or not you or the person recording the video is going to be the fourth person to do that. It’s a really neat way to check out something on video. And if you’re interested in murder mysteries you might like that link.
Next one is, what’s new in tech, and here we gets to the thing that I opened with in the video, which is all of Apple’s really, really cool new features that are gonna be coming up in the next iteration of its operating system, called iOS 16. They’ve got a link that’s going to show the general features, but I’ve got a bonus link for you that’s gonna highlight something that I think that is really great for seniors. They’re introducing a way for you to not only keep your list of medications but also be able to trigger notifications and reminders to be able to take them. A lot of people rely on watch alarms or some other reminder system but now it’s going to be built into the operating system so that you not only are able to have your list of medications and the times to take them but you’re also gonna have additional information about whether or not there are any pharmacological interactions between them. I think that this is a fantastic new set of features for seniors, especially. And you’re gonna be able to share this information with family members that you choose. So if you’re ever wondering how is my family gonna know what medications I make in case something happens to me? Well, this is gonna be the one that will, this will be a feature that you’re gonna be able to use with it. Now I will tell you, of course that I’m biased towards Apple, but one of the reasons why is because they place such an emphasis on privacy. And so if you are wondering what’s gonna be happening with this, at least you can have some faith and confidence that Apple puts privacy at the highest level. In fact, they just introduced a new feature around being able to do a safety check, so that, and disable the tracking mechanism so that if somebody who would normally be able to advertise where they are out in the community with a map, if something happens to them like a victim of domestic abuse or something like that, they would be able to turn that all as part of their safety check features. Lots of really cool new features that are gonna be coming out with the newest operating system. Just a reminder, that’s typically something that is released in the fall. And they’re just gonna give you an advanced view on that. If you’re really adventurous, you could download the beta version of that and start to run it, but it’s gonna eat up your battery, you might wanna wait for the finalized version.
The next link is what’s new in legal, and actually we’re gonna be doing both the legal and retirement link focused on the volatility that’s in the stock market. Let’s first focus on what’s going on with the legal side of it. And it’s this the bear market that was just recently announced, which basically means that we’ve gone down 20% of the course of a successive quarter is actually a benefit for all kinds of legal based planning. A lot of legal planning on the higher level of estate tax planning is all around transferring assets around and so that you can get them out of your name before you die. You can also make sure that you lock in the value at the gifting amount as of the date of the transfer. So now you can imagine the way that this would work. If you gift away assets while their value is lower, you’re able to gift away more assets. And part of the whole strategy is to avoid the growth on those assets later. Then it turns out that you’re actually more, you got more powerful planning strategy because you’ll be able to give them away when they’re lower and then they’ll expand greater and you’ll have avoided all those kinds of tax planning. Now, maybe you’re not somebody that’s worried about estate taxes, but let me tell you a strategy that we are reviewing with a lot of our clients that might actually be beneficial for you. Maybe you’ve got a large IRA and you’ve been thinking about doing some Roth conversions to get them into a tax free bucket. Same principles apply if you transfer those assets when they are shrunk down smaller, almost like a slinky compressing itself, and you move them into the tax free bucket when the slinky expands, turns out that you get all of the benefit in a tax free bucket. Hey, is your advisor talking to you about these strategies? If not, maybe you’d like to schedule a meeting to come and talk to us, ’cause this is the kind of planning that we do. Finally, is what’s new in retirement, and it is also related to specifically the crunch on bond values as interest rates have been going up over the past pretty much nine months. Let’s just review what that means. As interest rates have been going up currently, that means new bonds that are being issued today have higher interest rates, which means that the current bond values, they’re a little less valuable to people, which is of course compressed those. Now, question is, is this good or bad for you? And the answer really depends on your time horizon. So from a mathematical speaking sense if you have about seven years for you to be able to reclaim the increased interest values, then this bond crunch right now is actually to your benefit. If you’re relying on them in the shorter term it can be more of a detriment and you may not see the whole expansion. Now, what is there to do if you are in fact on the shorter end of things, where we’ve been talking about alternative investment products and strategies that’ll allow us to take advantage of some current benefits of the interest rates while also providing some of the security that is typically associated with bonds in the portfolio. So, if you’d like to explore that, if you’re not hearing that information from the person that you’re working with, and you’d like to have that conversation with us, I’ll invite you to contact us because we might be able to provide for you a strategy that actually takes advantage of what’s going on in the current market so that you actually make out better. Always want to make sure that you’re focused on the planning aspect of it, control the things that you can control, ’cause stuff like right now, the stock market volatility, you’re not gonna be able to control whether or not that continues on, stops, reverses, that’s all entirely out of your control. But planning is well within your control and I’d encourage you to explore that and give us a call if you’re interested in our thoughts on it. So let’s review the links for this week. Link number one, what I’m reading, it’s a series of Broadway based readers for the summer. Link number two is what I’m watching, and that’s somebody being able to see if they’re gonna figure out a murder mystery off on YouTube, check that one out. What’s new in tech is Apple and their new operating system and the host of features that are gonna benefit you all specifically seniors that are interested in how to manage your medication. What’s new and legal is how to take advantage of a bear market by using depressed values as part of your gifting.
And finally, what’s new in retirement, how a current bond market crunch could actually be for your benefit depending on the length of time that you have in your horizon to be using those bonds. Well, listen, those are the links for this week. Welcome to July. Just wanted to put you on notice that we’re gonna continue to do these going forward but I actually have a great trip that’s planned for towards the end of the month that I’m gonna be probably focusing on and sharing with you as part of our overall video newsletter. I’m gonna be going to Portugal and the south of Spain. So I’m excited to share some of the cool things that we’re gonna be doing over there. We might even have a themed five fact Friday for it. Again, if you’re interested in coming to see us for either the Prepare Institute classes that we’re gonna be teaching later in the year, or if you’re interested in just coming in and evaluating what’s going on with your retirement plan, we are available for you. You just have to contact us, that’s it for this week. We’ll catch you soon on the next Five Fact Friday. Bye bye.