This week we take a look at dying without a will as the late Chadwick Boseman did, sleep divorces, & some changes to Social Security.
This week’s links:
What I’m Reading: https://bit.ly/3nJYDqr
What I’m Watching: https://wapo.st/3apCtXB
What’s New In Tech: https://bit.ly/3AwMlJA
What’s New In Legal: https://et.tv/3bWS1CG
What’s New In Retirement: https://bit.ly/3nMtrHe
Bonus Link: https://bit.ly/3O9CA7o
Five Fact Friday is a bi-weekly newsletter produced by Medina Law Group & Palante Wealth Advisors containing 5 interesting or fun links. For more information, visit medinalawgroup.com or palantewealth.com
Read transcript below:
No matter where I go in my car, people are always staring at me, and it turns out that it’s not because I have a funny look on my face, but I’m actually driving one of the most stylish cars on the road, and it’s not just me that thinks so. 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.” It’s the only video newsletter hosted by Medina Retirement Planning, which is a joint venture between Medina Law Group and Palante Wealth Advisors, your one-stop shop for retirement planning, and let’s get to the links for this week. I’m really excited because I’ve got five links, each of them is really interesting, really fun to go through, so if you have something that you’re gonna be doing this weekend and you’ve got some extra time, and you want to figure out hey, can I watch that, can I read that, this actually is probably one of my favorite ones that we’ve put together based on the links that are in there, so I’m excited to share them with you.
Let’s get started with what I am reading. Well it turns out that it may be time for a divorce in your life, and no, I’m not talking about from your spouse and marriage, but perhaps from the beds that you all sleep in. Turns out that there is actually a study that shows that if you change your sleeping arrangements and you’re not in the same bed, it may actually lead to better quality sleep, and I tell you, there is tons of research out there suggesting that one of the most important factors to your overall health and your overall happiness is how you’re doing with your sleep. So you may want to check out the link and see if a sleep divorce is in your future. I’ll tell you for me though, it’s the opposite. I do a lot of traveling for coaching things that I do and for different industry stuff and it turns out that I’m in hotels a lot and I have worse sleep when I don’t have my wife next to me. I know she thinks that I’m just making it up, but there’s something about having her near me, breathing, snoring, laying there like a log, but it gives me comfort, it gives me a sense of calm, and it actually leads to a better sleep overall for me, so I know that I’m not gonna get a sleep divorce, maybe I’ll have a sleep remarriage ceremony and then we’ll get back to knowing that we’ll always be in the same bed together.
Next link is what I am watching, and actually, the thing that I think you should be watching is probably the new Thor movie, but the link is actually to an article talking about some of the different roles that Christian Bale has taken on. He plays a villain in the most recent Thor movie. What I really like about Christian Bale, by the way, is when he took on the Batman role, everyone thought he was gonna be nuts for playing a much darker Batman, but those three movies around the Dark Knight are held up as some of the best examples of anybody playing Batman, well, ever, and so if you like Christian Bale’s work, and he’s a little crazy, he played a villain in “American Psycho,” and then he ended up losing a whole bunch of weight for one role and then putting it back on again, he is definitely a dedicated actor, but if you’d like to learn more about him and how he approaches his craft, you might want to check out that link.
What’s new in tech is the link that I was talking about at the beginning of the newsletter, which is all about the car that I drive, and more importantly, the company that makes it. Turns out I drive an electric car called a Polestar. Now you may not have seen a lot of these on the road, I know that because I know their sales numbers, and they aren’t the biggest producer of electric vehicles, they are climbing, they just went public and the reason why they did that is they’re gonna be introducing a new brand every year, a new model car for the next five years, and so they took the company public, something called a special purpose acquisition company, or an SPAC, you actually might’ve heard of it. The point about the car though is that it’s pretty stylish.
In fact, Polestar has been known for years as being an after-market company that would redo Volvos and things like that to make them higher performing. Well, they ended up starting their own company, making cars, it’s a joint venture between Volvo and a Chinese company called Geely, and they sponsor an annual design contest looking for people to be forward thinking with all kinds of designs.
Check out this link because there’s some really novel designs that people have submitted over the years, for example, there’s one about a delivery vehicle using sort of drone helicopters that would take off, not people, but delivery for different packages and things like that. They’ve got a design for a springboard shoe, for people that are looking to run and be more efficient with their running. Really cool ideas out there so they’re sponsoring it because Polestar’s all about design and I feel a little justified that I have selected a car that is usually heralded by anyone that’s looking at it as having great design. I love driving it, if you ever want to talk to me about the Polestar, I will probably talk your ear off about what a great car it is, how much I like it, and my new electric vehicle life. It is decidedly not a Tesla, but I gotta tell you, I’m never gonna be a Tesla person. I like being a Polestar person, and maybe you’ll like some of the design stuff that’s in there by checking out that link.
The next link is what’s new in legal, and it’s actually an update to a link that I have talked about probably more than a year ago. You may recall that the actor that played the lead role in “Black Panther,” Chadwick Boseman, ended up passing away suddenly, and because of that, there was a lot of news about him and the way they had organized his estate. I gotta tell you something, estate planning attorneys love to find the angle about how somebody created their estate plan anytime anybody famous dies, mostly because it gives an anchor for when we’re talking to folks like you about why it’s so important to have a comprehensive and up to date estate plan. Well the article that I’m sharing with you here talks about how his estate is going, because he died without a will. One of those important things that you should pay attention to in that article though is they talk about how much higher the fees were because he didn’t have an organized estate plan. In fact, it’s one of those important things that we talk about when we navigate estate planning for somebody. We say, “Well listen, it’s not just the upfront cost “of what it takes to create a plan, “but you should take into consideration “all of the costs of estate planning, “including the cost of estate administration.”
You want the lowest overall cost, and one of the ways you can do that is by having a great plan in place.
In fact, if you’d like to learn more about how to create a great plan, we’ve created a nutshell guide that we’ll make available to you absolutely for free. All you have to do is let us know that you’re interested in it and if you can stop by the office, we’ll hand it to you, if you’d like it mailed to you, just let us know, we will put it in the mail for you, or if you’re somebody that meets with other people that wants to learn more about estate planning and you care enough to share that information with them, let us know and we’ll deliver maybe a dozen to you and you can hand them out to your closest family, friends, and clients so that they can learn more about that as well, but the point about this is that much like the point that’s being made in the article, it turns out that if you have a great estate plan in place, you’re gonna spend less overall and you’re gonna have a more efficient estate administration when you’re gone, which is really the reason why you do it. You do it to make it easier on the people that you leave behind.
The last link for this week is what’s new in retirement, and it’s actually a link all about the changes that are coming up to Social Security. Well, turns out that one thing isn’t changing, which is this is the first year the Social Security full retirement age is the same as it was before. Over time, when they make changes to Social Security, slowly started increasing the amount, the age that you had to be before you could get your full retirement benefits, and not have any of the money that you might be working on offset what you were getting as your Social Security benefit.
One of the most important things that you can do in retirement planning is plan for Social Security optimization, which is when you claim it, how long, how do you use that money, and in fact, how much of that you keep from tax planning. It’s something that we do every time we create a make it last plan where we focus on income, investments, taxes, and estate planning. That first pillar around income often focuses on the best way to use Social Security so that you can benefit from that in retirement. So while the full retirement age is not increasing this year, there are changes that are coming up that you’re gonna want to pay attention to, and the link is gonna talk all about them, but let me highlight one here on the video for you, which is this: it’s predicted that there are going to be changes to the penalties that will be enforced if you work before your full retirement age.
One of the things that the Social Security Administration does in making sure that it can fully fund Social Security for as long as possible is have a rule that says if you happen to be claiming your benefits early, but still working, they’re gonna offset those benefits going forward, so we’re gonna make an adjustment to that, and by the way, that’s the only way that they can pay for things like high cost of living increases from year to year. We saw nearly 6% this year, anticipate it’s gonna be similar because of the inflation that’s going on in the world right now, and so they gotta fund that somehow and one of the ways that they do that is by payroll taxes and also by offsetting your benefits by claiming some of that stuff back. In any event, you want to be focused on your best Social Security picture, and you’ve gotta do that with some pre-planning, so if you’re at all interested in making sure that you get that done and you’re not already a client of Palante Wealth Advisors, I’d encourage you to reach out to us, schedule an appointment to talk about that, we’d be able to put a picture together for you about what would be best for your Social Security optimization as part of an overall retirement picture, not just in that area.
So let’s recap the links for this week. The first link is what I am reading, and it’s all about the benefits of a sleep divorce. I’m not getting one, but maybe you should.
The next link is what I’m watching, and while it is a link to the Thor movie and it’s really a link about Christian Bale, and just because I’m such a big Marvel fan, there’s actually a bonus link in there which is you’ve got two more days to order in your special popcorn holder that’s in the shape of Mjolnir, that’s the special hammer that Thor wields and runs around, in fact, the one that they’re showing to you, ’cause I gotta have to geek out for you here, the one they’re showing to you, ’cause in the past movie, the hammer broke, they put it back together, you actually get the updated one that’s put back together with all the cracks and it’s kinda cool.
The next link is what’s new in tech, and that’s the Polestar Design Contest, my car, love driving it.
The next link is what’s new in legal, and that is the update to the story around Chadwick Boseman’s estate administration, having died without a will. Remember, put a great estate plan in place so that you don’t have the same circumstance in your life.
And finally what’s new in retirement, all the changes that are gonna be coming up in Social Security, you may want to check all of those out.
Hey, we love doing this video newsletter for you and if you like it, make sure that you pass it along to a friend. All you have to do is forward the link that you got, or you can hit the share button right on YouTube and send them a copy of it, turns out that people actually do like these things, but the more that we can spread the news, the more people can get joy from all of these links that we are sharing. Also want to let you know one thing before I wrap up, is that I actually have a vacation coming up. I’m gonna be visiting Portugal and Spain with my entire family, so couple of these may not seem timely and like they’re right on top of the news because we’ve pre-recorded them so that you have them in the absence, but I can’t wait to come back and share with you all of the fun stuff that we did and all of the cool, related links to the trip that I’m sure gonna be putting together from that. Have a great one and we’ll see you soon, bye bye!