An important message on Medicare Annual Election Period (AE) or known as Medicare Open Enrollment for Plan Year 2019 Medicare: Open Enrollment/One Stop Shops is from October 15 – December 7, 2018.

Stay with your current plan if it meets your needs. You can look for a new one with better coverage, higher quality and lower cost. Fill-out a Worksheet for a Comparison of Prescription Drug Plan for Medicare, Medi-Cal and Medicare Advantages. Please add name, dosage and how many times a day you take the prescription drug as it needs to be on the back of the form.

You can mail to 646 County Square Drive, #100, Ventura, 93003 or fax the form to HICAP, (805) 477-7341. Registered HICAP volunteers will select the top three plans with the least expensive cost. After the comparison is completed, you will get a phone call saying it is ready for you to walk into a location of your choice if needed. For more information, please call HICAP: 800-434-0222, 805-477-7310 or the Spanish line 805-477-7351.

The Ventura County Area Agency on Aging’s LIVEWell resource guide earned recognition from the 27th annual National Mature Media Awards, which honors the nation’s best marketing, communications, educational materials, and programs produced for older adults.

LIVEWell was established in 2017 to serve as the premiere resource guide for the more than 175,000 Ventura County residents 60 and over, individuals with disabilities, and their caregivers. A redesign of the former Eldercare guide, LIVEWell provides information through feature stories, resource listings, and news shorts that focus on important topics that range from insurance fraud, to financial wellness, balanced nutrition, caregiver support, legal information, and methods of maintaining an active lifestyle.

LIVEWell was selected for a Merit award for design and content by a distinguished panel of judges from across the United States.

The 2018-19 issue of LIVEWell will be available in October and is fully integrated to include content in both English and Spanish.

“The VCAAA is honored to receive this recognition and is proud of the impact LIVEWell has made on the community,” said Victoria Jump, Director of the VCAAA. “The VCAAA is dedicated to providing a thoroughly vetted and easily accessible tool that addresses the needs of the growing and diverse population served by the Agency. Having a guide that meets the needs of both the English and Spanish-speaking populations sets a new standard for how we communicate with our clients.”

For more information, or to receive a copy of LIVEWell, call (805) 477-7300 or visit www.vcaaa.org.

The Ventura County Area Agency on Aging, an agency of the County of Ventura, is the principal agency in Ventura County charged with the responsibility to promote the development and implementation of a comprehensive coordinated system of care that enables older individuals, individuals with disabilities, and their caregivers to live in a community-based setting and to advocate for the needs of those 60 years of age and older in the county, providing leadership and promoting citizen involvement in the planning process as well as in the delivery of services.

by Jayson Cohen American Legacy Solutions

Achieving a high income and net worth is half the battle in the quest for financial security. The other half is trying to keep and grow your assets once you have them. While this latter half is perhaps a nice problem to have, it has been the cause of many a headache.

One problem some people make is the proverbial “putting all of their eggs in one basket.”  In the investing world, even just putting too many eggs in too few baskets can be enough to sink a financial battleship. Too often, people make this mistake in a misguided effort to go all in on chasing maximum returns.

Conventional wisdom does indeed hold that you have to accept higher risk in order to get higher returns and, accordingly, have to accept lower returns in order to lower your risk. However, there are a couple of quite serious problems with this logic, common though it may be. For starters, it is almost impossible to predict with certainty which investments will flourish in the future and which ones will tank.

It is not as though anyone ever sets out to have their financial goals torpedoed by a bad investment, but, no matter how sound a plan may seem at the outset, there is always at least some chance that it could go awry. If a particular investment makes up even as little as 20 percent of your portfolio and crashes, it can take your financial goals and security down with it. Fortunately enough, this reality does not have to doom investors to rolling the Wall Street dice as best they can and then sweating out results over numerous sleepless nights.

The concept of financial diversification is actually old enough to have been referenced in a Shakespeare play, “The Merchant of Venice,” four centuries ago. In the 1950s, Harry Markowitz, an academic researcher, articulated modern portfolio theory. His research uncovered the insight that putting together a portfolio of investments that did not all correlate with each other had the effect of reducing the variability (risk) of the portfolio without giving up returns.

In other words, as long as all of your investments do not tend to rise and fall in value at the same time, your portfolio could be effectively insulated from catastrophic losses while still set up for strong long-term gains. Accordingly, diversifying your investments across numerous (thousands) of companies prevents you from having to worry about whether one or even several of them will collapse. Even though it could happen, it could be on a small enough scale that it will not hurt you.

Undoubtedly, these realizations explain much about why it is so difficult for even professional investors to beat the returns of broad indexes like the S&P 500.  Diversification is sometimes described as the only free lunch in finance.  Accordingly, as simple as it sounds, the best approach, by far, that you can take once you have otherwise reached a high income or net worth is to put your investment money in broadly diversified funds and leave the anxiety to those prone to over-thinking things.

Allow us to take a look at your retirement plan and assess the amount of risk you currently have.  You should be confident your plan will make it through any potentially volatile years to come.

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/27/diversification-the-oldest-trick-in-the-investment-book.html