Enjoy the current installment of "Weekend Reading For Financial Planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the Financial Planning Association's transition to its new incoming President Skip Schweiss, an experienced executive and newly minted CFP professional, who is aiming to work with the FPA's incoming new CEO Patrick Mahoney to try to turn around its declining membership in a shifting environment where "CE and Community" alone don't create the distinction it once did for associations in an increasingly competitive environment (even as the social isolation of the pandemic makes connectedness more important than ever, and ongoing industry regulatory debates arguably make financial planning advocacy more important than ever).
From there, we have several investment-related articles, including:
- A discussion of whether it's still worthwhile at all to try to invest in bonds for client portfolios as yields continue to drift to new record lows
- The appeal of multi-year guaranteed fixed annuities as a higher-yielding bond alternative in the current environment
- How Single Premium Immediate Annuities (SPIAs) can be used, not as a lifetime income guarantee vehicle, but as a fixed-income alternative (with a mortality credit kicker) that simply gets reinvested back into equities as it pays out, and
- Why the advisory community may need to change its mind on the long-term staying power of Bitcoin as its recent rise nearly doubles the prior "peak" that many advisors had said was a bubble that would never be achieved again (except... it has).
We've also included a number of articles around the topic of behavioral finance and client communication:
- How to think about a 'hierarchy' of financial wellness that clients can build upon over time to improve their wellbeing
- Why it's crucial to understand a client's "money story" to better glean why certain clients make certain not-so-rational decisions
- The rise of "Financial Therapists" as either a new player in the holistic advisor team, or even a new direction (and new CFT designation) for financial advisors to pursue, and
- What it is that actually makes money so meaningful to us (hint: it's not the money itself, but what it allows us to do)
We wrap up with three interesting articles, all around the theme of looking ahead to and planning for the coming year:
- Why creating an effective Strategic Plan for 2021 isn't about going through a vision/mission exercise, but instead simply getting clearer about the Key Performance Indicators that the business needs to improve upon in the coming year
- A checklist of new (and what's-old-is-new) marketing ideas to reinvigorate growth for 2021
- A broad look at the state of financial planning itself as a profession, and what may be in store as the coming year unfolds (from more virtual client meetings to virtual team management, and the ongoing rise of alternative non-AUM fee models for advisors)
Enjoy the 'light' reading!