This week’s links:
In the world of paint colors, there’s a difference between white, off-white, baby’s breath, snow white. In fact, I know this because, every time I come home from the paint store, my wife yells at me because I’ve gotten the wrong color white. Well, I wish I had the app that I’m gonna share with you in one of this week’s links because I’m Victor Medina, and this is Five Fact Friday.
Everybody, welcome back to Five Fact Friday. I am so glad that you can join us and, by the way, if you’re watching this on a Friday, our radio show launches tomorrow morning. It’s broadcast on 920 AM, the Trenton station for ESPN, but our show is on at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings, and we are so happy to relaunch the show. In fact, this first week’s show, we’re gonna talk about March Madness and its relationship to retirement planning. It’s gonna be a fantastic show, and I’m joined by a great co-host named Mark Elliott. It’s a great relaunch of a program that I’ve really enjoyed doing over the last couple of years, and I’m excited that we’re gonna be bringing it back to you. Now, if you don’t happen to be able to listen to it live when it’s broadcast on Saturday morning, you can subscribe to our podcast, where we are going to rebroadcast that show as a podcast stream, and you’ll be able to download it onto your iPhone and then be able to watch it whenever you want. So that’s the big news for this week, and let’s get into the links.
The first link is what I’m reading, and here, for you to understand why I’m interested in this link, as a team here at Medina Law Group and Palante Wealth, we’re actually reading “The New Gold Standard”, which talks about the way that Ritz Carlton handles its hospitality and client service, and an investigation in there led me to the story of Joseph Lee who is one of the foremost hospitality entrepreneurs. But what most people don’t know is, first of all, he was born into slavery and rose himself up out of that and created into really a lot of memorable events, including changing the way breadmaking was done. So, you might be interested in checking out that link.
The second link is what I’m watching, and I love a great car chase. And this link actually takes us through the whole evolution of what it’s like to create a car chase scene in Hollywood, starting with “Bullitt” and maybe ending with “The Fast and the Furious”. I don’t want to let my son watch this. He just got his license in December, and there’s nothing about the Mazda 3 that he’s driving that he should be trying to attempt any of these stunts with.
The next link is what’s new in tech, and it brings me to the opener for this video. You know, there is a new app that allows you to take a picture of a paint color on the wall and match it perfectly to one of the paint colors that you can get in the store. This is fantastic ’cause I can’t tell you how many times I’ve painted a room and, of course, I’m gonna be a messy painter. So the top of the lid of the paint can becomes a mess. I can’t read what’s on there, and then I can’t replicate the color again, which means I’ve got to paint the entire room all over again, and that’s never any good. So this app actually helps you identify the color that’s on the wall, so that when you get to the store, you can get the perfect color to match the color on the walls and get that done.
The next link is what’s new in legal, and there is a recent law that was proposed by Bernie Sanders called the 99.5% law. I think the reason why it was named like that is that the law doesn’t affect 99.5% of the people. But in addition to a number of changes in and around the way tax is applied to corporations and other individuals, there’s a big change proposed to the estate tax, proposing to lower that number. There’s also a change on the way that capital gains are taxed, and we don’t know exactly how far this is going to go, but I will let you know that one of the things that we’re gonna be on top of here in our office is exactly how it’s going to affect people’s planning. So you should be on the lookout for any upcoming webinars or communications that we’re having where we’re gonna go into detail. Probably not worth going into a ton of detail on this, but if you’re interested in the proposed law, you should read through it. Once it makes its way through the normal channels and it’s something that we think is important enough for you to know, we will feature it here on our channel.
The last link is what’s new in retirement, and the yields on long-term bonds are increasing, making them maybe a little bit more valuable as part of a retirement portfolio. And to the question that the article looks to answer is how could you generate interest income and dividend income from the fact that long-term yields on bonds are increasing? Now, this actually goes into a deeper discussion on whether or not you should be relying on fixed income as part of your overall retirement strategy. And the difference for you to figure out whether or not that’s actually something you should do, you need to realize, are you going to be able to live just off of the interest income that’s generated, or might you need to liquidate some of those holdings in order to service your income needs? And if that’s the case, here’s the thing. As interest rates rise on new bonds, it makes the old bonds less valuable when you go to sell them, which means that we can actually sell those at a loss. And we want to protect against that in an overall retirement strategy. And by the way, this all comes together in what we produce as a Make It Last checkup plan, where we take a look at your income, investments, tax and estate planning. It is the way that we devise a playbook for you to be able to get through retirement. Might even think about it as your retirement business plan because we want to make sure that your business partner, the IRS, gets paid off with the least amount as possible, and you make it through a very successful retirement business cycle, making sure that you have all the money that you need, yet you’ve made it last.
And by the way, we cover all of those topics in our radio show, which I already told you is launching tomorrow morning, April 10th, at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday on the station 920 AM out of Trenton. So let’s recap the links for this week. The first link is what I’m reading. It’s the story of Joseph Lee, an entrepreneur born into slavery and really at the head of hospitality in and around Boston. The next link is what I’m watching, and they are car chases over the generations in history from “Bullitt” to “Fast and the Furious”. What’s new in tech, a new app that allow you to recognize the paint color on a wall and get it in the store. What’s new in legal is the 99.5% law proposed by Bernie Sanders, and we’ll be taking a look on that. And finally, what’s new in retirement, the yields on long-term bonds are increasing, and can and should you use them as part of your retirement income plan? So that’s all the links for this week. As you can tell, I’m really super excited. Don’t forget to subscribe to this channel here on YouTube where we’re gonna continue to post lots of great content for you. In fact, it’s gonna be the place where we’re going to be sharing most of our information. So you definitely want to make sure that you’re a subscriber of the YouTube channel so that you don’t miss any of the other updates. That’s it for this week. The weather is looking more and more like great spring weather, and we’re looking forward to bringing you more great content on the next Five Fact Friday. Catch you soon. Bye bye.