Should Bitcoin be part of your retirement portfolio? Are books a thing of the past? The answer to these questions & more in this week’s Five Fact Friday!
What I’m Reading: https://cnn.it/3eS2jTj
What I’m Watching: https://bit.ly/2RiYFJw
What’s New in Tech: https://cnet.co/3bxJZwT
What’s New in Legal: https://bit.ly/3eVd2g5
What’s New in Retirement: https://bit.ly/3olGAqf
Transcript Below
Finally, you’ll be able to enjoy your soda in peace without contributing to the demise of the climate and the environment. What am I talking about? Well, we’ve got that link and more because I’m Victor Medina and this is Five Fact Friday. Hey everybody, I’m Victor Medina.
Welcome back to Five Fact Friday, hosted by Medina Retirement Planning Channel where we help you know it so you don’t blow it and I’m excited to bring you five great links for this week. So let’s jump right into them.
The first link is what I’m reading, and it’s actually something that’s causing a lot of people some anxiety. As you can see, it’s summertime, I’ve got my short sleeves on. In fact, I even have my shorts on but I’m just not gonna show you my pants on this video, but that also means that in this particular year, out come the cicadas. Yes, once every 17 years, the cicadas come out of the ground, basically, to infest the entire ground, the world, everything that’s in there, they’re buzzy, they’re gross, and they cause a lot of people anxiety. We’re gonna give you a link to talk a little bit about what they are, why they come out every 17 years, and I suppose what you can do about it, which is basically just stay inside if that’s what you wanna do.
The next link is what I’m watching, and it’s a little bit of ironic link because it’s a Ted Talk video about why books are not going away. So this is kind of what I’m watching about what I’m reading and it’s an argument why physical books aren’t gonna go anywhere. Now I’m a tech guy. I actually love using technology even to read. One of my favorite devices is the Kindle. And part of the reason for that is I can host, basically, hold every book that I ever wanna purchase on this little small tablet and the battery lasts for weeks. And more importantly, they’ve gotten to the point that it’s so light that when I fall asleep reading, which invariably I do, and it hits me in the face, which invariably it does, it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as a big book. So actually I’m in favor of technology, but they make a good argument on video about why you’re always gonna have books to read.
The next link is what’s new in tech, and it’s actually the link that we hunted at the beginning of this video about why drinking soda will now no longer contribute to the ruin of the environment. The reason for that is Pepsi believes that the future of soda bottles includes paper bottles. If you wanna learn a little bit more about that technology, go ahead and check that out. I actually, myself am not a soda drinker, so I really don’t think that I, it contributes too much to the ruin of the environment with my drinking habits. By the same token, I’m also a big water drinker and I don’t use a reusable cup. So definitely, if you see me in the streets, you’d wanna give me the tisk-tisk, shame shame thing for not having reusable cups. But in any event, maybe I’ll now start to be able to drink soda because it’ll come in a paper bottle. I’ll actually test that out.
What’s new in legal is Larry King’s holographic will. No, I’m not talking about further technology, actually talking about a will that is handwritten. You know, anytime one of these celebrities passes away, it gives us an opportunity as estate planning attorneys is to reflect on the quality of their estate planning. And here’s the thing, nobody ever gets it right. We don’t walk out of there and talk about this wonderful thing that occurred with their estate planning. In fact, most of the time, when the celebrities die with great estate planning, you actually never hear about it. In Larry King’s case, he hand wrote his will. I don’t know if he thought he was quaint. Remember, he was probably one year older than dirt when he died and so for that reason, maybe just writing a will was what he thought people did. We don’t recommend it. Actually, the way that you wanna create your estate plan is you wanna make sure that it is properly executed, it’s typewritten, initialed on certain pages, signed on the back, updated regularly, mean all the things that are in contained in our Nutshell Guide on how to create a great estate plan, how to get and keep your legal ducks in a row and in fact, I’m going to make you an offer here. If you would like a copy of our Nutshell Guide, all you have to do is reply to this email or send us at contact, somehow, phone, email or something along those lines. Let us know what you’d like one. We’d be happy to ship it out to you. You can tell us your preference, whether or not you want it to digitally. In which case you can put it on your Kindle. Or if you do believe that books are gonna be around forever, we’ll send you a hard copy of it in a book format, but that’s absolutely free from us to you as a gift and you can learn what a great estate plan looks like. And it does not include Larry King’s handwritten will.
Final link for this week, what’s new in retirement. It talks about whether or not you should hold Bitcoin in your portfolio. So I have some really strong beliefs on that. And then they don’t line up with what the article is, but I thought it was a great way to introduce the topic. In fact, I had a meeting with a client this week who asked me what about did I think about Bitcoin. And I said, “Well, I don’t.” I mean, I do think about it, but it’s not part of it a portfolio. I’m gonna give you a really brief lesson on the reason why. So stay, so listen up for this. Here’s the way that it works. You know, Bitcoin is what we’ve considered to be an uncorrelated asset class, meaning that it doesn’t move in proportion or in reaction to the other asset classes that we’re managing and for that reason, it actually is not a bad thing to hold. We’ll do the same thing with certain kinds of currency or other forms of commodities because you do want things that are uncorrelated. The only problem with Bitcoin is that it has no expected premium or return on investment. I know that sounds weird because we’ve heard about all of the value of this kind of going up and up. You might think, well, of course it has an expected positive return. That’s actually not the case and we don’t have enough history to know that be the case. There’s nothing inherent about that that would lend it to be better as a choice for an investments than you than normal investments, like stocks, bonds, mutual funds, so on and so forth. So when we have the choice between investing in things that have an expected return and things that don’t have an expected return, our clients are better served by having their money in things that have an expected return. It’s a better and safer bet for their money and their investments. And that’s especially the case, by the way, when you enter retirement, because as you enter retirement, you’re actually going to need this money. You’re going to use it. You need to sell it. You need to create cash out of it. You need to be able to spend it. And for that reason, we need more certainty around the investments that we are putting ourselves into at least what their expected return is and what we can diversify into and that’s actually a better bet than something that is more speculative. So what’s the short answer. Should you hold Bitcoin in your retirement portfolio? My answer is no. And we give you the reasons why and if you differ that’s okay, just do your own investing. Don’t ask me to do it.
Anyway, let’s do the recap for the links this week. The first link is what I’m reading. It’s all about the cicadas that will be all over the ground very shortly and you won’t be able to dance around without stepping all over a whole bunch of them. But rest assured it won’t happen again for another 17 years. The year 2038, I’ll have the same exact video. In fact, we can just probably recycle this bit. The second link is what I’m watching and it’s the ironic video about why paper books will always be around. What’s new in tech are our upcoming paper bottles for your soda and other drinkable products. What’s new and legal is why you should never have a holographic will. Even though Larry King had one, don’t hand write your will. Hire an estate planning attorney to do that. And finally, what’s new in retirement, should you own Bitcoin? The answer is no. Geez, I think I just disagreed with absolutely everything in the links for this week. Hopefully that made it more entertaining. Meanwhile, if you’d like a copy of our Nutshell Guide about how to get and keep your legal ducks in a row, reach out to us. We’ll be happy to send that out to you, either in digital or hard copy format. That’s the links for this week. Enjoy summer. I’m gonna enjoy my short sleeves. I’ll catch you in a couple of weeks. Bye-bye.