Archives Of Weekend Reading For Financial Planners

Enjoy the current installment of “Weekend Reading For Financial Planners” – this week’s edition kicks off with a look at President Biden’s newly proposed infrastructure plan, which may inject as much as $2.3T into the economy to tackle long-standing infrastructure projects that have long had bipartisan support… but still faces criticism from both Republicans and Democrats, and a “price tag” that is leading to proposed tax increases on both businesses and high-income individuals that may generate a lot of tax planning discussions for financial advisors and their clients in the months to come.

In addition, there are several other notable news items this week, including:

• The CFP Board is kicking off the next round of its $10M/year public awareness campaign with a new set of TV commercials and radio ads on the value of seeking out a CFP professional
• A new consumer study on pre-retirees that finds they are a much more age-diverse group than the traditional view of “those aged 55 – 64 within 5 years of retirement”

From there, we have several articles on advisor marketing to describe fees and value:

• The benefit of stating advisory fees directly on the advisor’s website, and tips on how to do so and position the fees effectively
• Why it’s often better to offer a ‘low-cost’ reasonably priced service than a “free” one (that usually really isn’t)
• How “simply” being an accountability partner that helps clients actually do what they plan to do can be a major enhancement to justify an advisor’s value for the fees they charge

We’ve also included a number of articles on industry recruiting trends:

• An emerging push to shift the broker-dealer and RIA custodian recruiting model from a commission-based to a flat-fee model
• How Schwab is pressuring recruiters to get paid directly from the RIAs they recruit, in an effort to force more transparency
• How earnouts for advisor acquisitions were on the rise in 2020 but are on the decline again in 2021 as acquisition demand heats up

We wrap up with three final articles, all around the theme of maximizing our focused productivity:

• How interruptions reduce our focus, but knowing that an interruption is coming can actually help us to focus and work faster
• Why focusing is often difficult because we spend too much time thinking about what we give up by focusing and not what we gain by doing so
• Why “success” in the end isn’t just about having good ideas, but actually executing them… which usually means getting focused on the very few things that will have the most impact if executed well

Enjoy the ‘light’ reading!

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Enjoy the current installment of “Weekend Reading For Financial Planners” – this week’s edition kicks off with the announcement that the CFP Board is updating the Principal Knowledge Topics of the CFP exam to reflect the ever-growing focus on behavioral coaching for clients that emerged from its latest Practice Analysis of what financial planners do in practice with clients, adding in not just a “behavioral finance” educational component but an entire “Psychology of Financial Planning” category that will become incorporated into CFP curricula (and the CFP exam itself) in 2022 and beyond.

In addition, there are several other notable studies about financial advisors and financial advice in the news this week, including:

• The majority of consumers earning more than $100,000/year use a financial advisor, and a whopping 95% of them say the advisor is worth it (but more than half of consumers think financial advisors are far more expensive than they actually are!)
• The overwhelming majority of consumers working with a financial planner agree that it’s better to focus on the long-term and ignore short-term market volatility (though it’s not clear how often financial advisors change their clients’ minds to be more long-term, or simply attract long-term-oriented clients and then help them to stay on track?)

From there, we have several articles on advisor marketing:

• Why it’s important to “get mad” in speaking about the frustrations and ‘financial injustices’ in clients’ lives to get them motivated to work alongside a financial advisor to solve those issues
• Thinking differently about 30-second or even one-sentence “elevator pitches” to open the curiosity loop with prospects (or quickly figure out if they’re not a fit and move on)
• Why good branding isn’t just about showing your value and Values but also tackling head-on the primary objections that result in not getting business the way you’re currently doing it

We’ve also included a number of articles focused on retirement planning:

• Who exactly will be eligible for the new “free” COBRA health insurance subsidy that just took effect at the start of April
• How technology is changing the way we engage as we get older to “get more life from our longer lives”
• 5 different “types” of retirement savers based on their psychographic tendencies to save for and be optimistic about the future (or not)

We wrap up with three final articles, all around the theme of maximizing your own career and productivity:

• How perfectionism is the enemy of delegation, and the way to break through if you’re stuck trying to figure out what you’re comfortable delegating
• A framework to build your own career plan as a young financial advisor
• Creating a system for and around yourself to pull your focus away from the $10/hour tasks that can be delegated and towards the $10,000/day tasks that only you can uniquely do to add the most value to the business

Enjoy the ‘light’ reading!

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Enjoy the current installment of “Weekend Reading For Financial Planners” – this week’s edition kicks off with a look at the new health insurance planning opportunities that have emerged under the American Rescue Plan, from the potential to receive several months of “free” (tax-credit-subsidized) COBRA coverage to new rules for Premium Assistance Tax Credits that can produce thousands of dollars in tax savings for those who buy health insurance from state insurance exchanges in 2021.

From there, we have several articles on advisor marketing:

• What is a “Retargeting Ad” and why retargeting can be an especially efficient way for financial advisors to spend their marketing dollars
• Why “Email” continues to be the #1 most popular marketing channel for financial advisors (and is becoming more popular with the rise of email marketing automation tools)
• What it takes to become “an authority” where your expertise attracts your ideal prospective clients
• The rise of website providers dedicated to working with financial advisors to produce websites at a “reasonable” (i.e., not $20,000+) cost

We’ve also included a number of articles focused on retirement planning:

• Why new retirees are beginning to look at taking a “gap year” between the end of work and the beginning of retirement (to better figure out what they want to do, and where they want to live, in retirement)
• How “retirement” itself isn’t just a phase, but continues 6 sub-phases in retirement (that advisors can help their retired clients navigate through)
• A new approach to thinking about more “flexible” retirement spending strategies and why “spending flexibility” itself is a continuum along which retirees can choose an optimal spending strategy
• The rise of new Social Security training programs, from the National Social Security Advisor (NSSA) program to the new Registered Social Security Analyst (RSSA) certification

We wrap up with three final articles, all around the theme of (re-)drawing the line between work and home life:

• How work itself is increasingly becoming “omnipresent”, where “are you available” isn’t a question of whether you’re actually available and have time, but whether you’re ready and willing to give attention to work at that moment
• How the pandemic gave rise to the staycation (taking a vacation but staying at home), and now the work-from-home work is leading to the rise of the “workcation”
• The ways that businesses are (re-)designing Paid Time Off programs in the modern environment, from more flexible sick-plus-vacation time, to “forced” vacation days, and floating holidays

Enjoy the ‘light’ reading!

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Enjoy the current installment of “Weekend Reading For Financial Planners” – this week’s edition kicks off with the big tax planning news that the IRS is delaying the standard April 15th tax filing deadline until Monday May 17th instead… providing some welcome relief to tax filing deadlines, and more time to implement recent tax law changes (from Recovery Rebate checks to non-taxable unemployment insurance), and creating a quagmire of misaligned deadlines as Q1 2021 estimated tax payments (and many state tax return deadlines) remain with the original April 15th deadline!

Also in the news this week are a few other industry headlines, including:

• Sorting through the confusion of how RMDs will work in 2021, between the 2020 suspension of RMDs under the CARES Act, new life expectancy tables taking effect in 2022, and the new age 72 onset of RMDs under the SECURE Act
• The ongoing rise of state fiduciary rules is creating a growing patchwork of dissimilar regulations troubling both small firms with clients across state lines and large firms with entire branches that span multiple states

From there, we have several articles on personal and team productivity:

• How real productivity is not about getting ‘more efficient’ with your time, but getting clearer about what the Most Important Thing (M.I.T.) is to be doing with the limited time you have
• The results of one company that has been testing out a 5-hour workday to balance productivity and employee satisfaction
• How author John Steinbeck achieved epic levels of productivity (including 33 books and a Nobel Prize) by staying largely inactive most of every day

We’ve also included a number of articles focused on personal finance tips:

• The most popular Password Managers to use to keep financial (and other) accounts in good order
• Tips on what to keep, shred, or scan as financial records increasingly move online
• A profile of Mint.com and how it has unfortunately languished in recent years of non-development (yet remains astonishingly popular)

We wrap up with three final articles, all around the theme of what it takes to become and remain “rich”:

• How often the pathway to becoming rich involves taking concentrated risks but staying rich is almost always about diversifying away from them
• Why being “rich” is a relative phenomenon that’s all about comparing who you spend time with (making most of us feel not-rich even if we are!)
• The difference between being “rich” and being “wealthy” (and why it takes different skills for the latter than the former)

Enjoy the ‘light’ reading!

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Enjoy the current installment of “Weekend Reading For Financial Planners” – this week’s edition kicks off with the industry news that the SEC’s new Marketing Rule has officially hit the Federal Register, which means it will not be paused or rolled back and is going live (with an effective date of May 4th, and a compliance date of November 4th in 2022), ushering in a new era of social/digital marketing and what is anticipated to be a rapid rise of the use of client testimonials and the emergence of third-party review sites for financial advisors.

Also in the news this week are a few other industry headlines, including:

• FINRA is proposing a new rule to help it better clean up “bad actors” after reports continue to emerge of brokers who are even in jail awaiting trial for murder or fraud but still don’t have their indictments showing on FINRA BrokerCheck
• How the shift to virtual is expected to create a new boom in the move to independence as more advisors seek to capitalize on the flexibility that virtual advisory firms allow

From there, we have several articles on the recent phenomenon of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens):

• An explainer on what an NFT actually is and how they work
• How NFTs allow creatives to monetize their audience and fans in a way that wasn’t possible in the past
• Why NFTs may be here to stay as a collectible but still aren’t necessarily good to view as an investment

We’ve also included a number of articles focused on practice management and hiring:

• Best practices in hiring remote virtual employees (or more generally, the first time the firm hires a new employee in a new state!)
• Tips for writing an effective job description to attract good talent
• Research on what it really takes to improve the industry’s gender diversity (hint: it starts with how firms promote new job openings in the first place)

We wrap up with three final articles, all around the theme of finding more success:

• Why it’s important to build skills over just looking for “hacks”
• How having too many priorities really means having no priorities at all
• How the “Common Denominator Of Success” is in making a habit of doing the things that other people don’t want to do

Enjoy the ‘light’ reading!

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Enjoy the current installment of “Weekend Reading For Financial Planners” – this week’s edition kicks off with a recent academic study that evaluated the activities that advisors engaged in with their clients in the midst of the pandemic and its market volatility last spring, which found that clients of financial advisors really did appear to sell less and buy more during the downturn, driven in large part by an uptick in proactive communication that advisors engaged in with their clients that helped keep client expectations positive (i.e., that the markets and economy would bounce back soon enough).

From there, we have several articles on the value of financial advice itself, including:

• A reminder that in the end, financial advice isn’t just about helping people identify and set a path towards their goals, but in navigating the complexities that arise along the way (that can block us from achieving those goals, without an advisor’s help to navigate around them)
• A framework to define an advisor’s value across three dimensions of Portfolio, Planning, and Personal (and how to vocalize it in a prospect meeting)
• Why it’s so important to frame a value proposition in terms of how the client benefits, not just the positive traits of the advisor (e.g., “I’m a CFP professional” or “I’m a fiduciary”)
• How the value of financial advice is increasingly shifting towards financial wellness because of the way that money touches virtually everything in our lives

We’ve also included a number of articles focused on improving client communication:

• 6 ‘simple’ but impactful actions that can be taken to show clients that you really care and are thinking about them
• How the Asset Map software helps provide a one-page visualization to simplify a client’s complex financial life
• The power of being a client’s “Chief Empathy Officer” (CEO) when often the blocking points to our goals are mental, not financial
• How a personal finance columnist engaged a financial planner himself to navigate the challenges of his father’s ALS diagnosis, and what she did to provide value to him along the way

We wrap up with three final articles, all around the theme of how we can try to become a little happier and wiser:

• Why it’s how we spend our time (not how we spend our money) that becomes the biggest driver of our happiness and wellbeing
• The incredible impact that a simple compliment can have on making someone happier and more content
• How the path to knowledge is about reading and learning, but also getting the broader perspective that often only comes with trying something and making a mistake, providing a pathway to wisdom through self-reflection and self-correction

Enjoy the ‘light’ reading!

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Enjoy the current installment of “Weekend Reading For Financial Planners” – this week’s edition kicks off with the big industry news that Apex Clearing is going public via a SPAC and in the process will raise a massive $850M of cash to reinvest into its custody and clearing services, with a particular eye on pivoting away from its roots in serving as a back-end platform for robo-advisors and instead bringing its ‘tech-savvy custodian’ solution to take on the oligopoly of current RIA custodians including Schwabitrade, Fidelity, and Pershing.

Also in the news this week is some buzz that state regulators are taking a closer look at the rise of ‘alternative’ advisor business models like monthly subscription fees and scrutinizing whether clients are really receiving services commensurate with the ongoing fees that they’re paying… and in the process are discovering that the potential of “fees for no service” may be a problem in the currently popular AUM model as well.

From there, we have several articles on advisor compensation and career tracks:

• The latest Schwab Advisor Compensation study, which finds there’s a rapidly emerging ‘war for talent’ that is causing compensation for experienced advisors to spike
• More and more large advisory firms are beginning to develop internal career paths, as it becomes increasingly appealing for firms to attract and develop young talent themselves
• How equity is becoming more common as a component of advisor compensation, but usually still with some level of buy-in attached

We’ve also included a number of articles focused on improving a firm’s client experience, including:

• Tips from the “Book Of Wow” on how to create not just good client service but “Wow” client experience moments
• How it’s the first four points of contact with an advisory firm that set the tone for the entire relationship
• The importance of taking a hard look at a firm’s initial onboarding experience to help set and manage expectations
• A discussion of what really is the “ideal” number of clients for a financial advisor to have (and really be able to serve effectively)

We wrap up with three final articles, all around the theme of what it takes to really create value for clients:

• How medicine shows us that some of the best and most impactful advice is really just about helping people actually implement the simple habits that truly matter
• Why having difficult conversations is becoming a key skill for financial advisors to hone
• Why there’s so much value in not just paying for expertise itself but having a relationship with an expert on an ongoing basis… which helps to explain why, despite all the naysayers, the AUM model continues to rise and advisory fees have remained so resilient in the face of the ongoing threat of fee compression?

Enjoy the ‘light’ reading!

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Enjoy the current installment of “Weekend Reading For Financial Planners” – this week’s edition kicks off with the news that the Biden administration will not be halting the new Department of Labor fiduciary rule, which controversially will begin to allow ERISA fiduciaries and those advising on IRA rollovers to receive commissions as long as they otherwise meet “Impartial Conduct Standards”… but that the DoL may still be looking to implement future “improvements” to the rule and its conflict-of-interest exemptions that may tighten the permitted level of conflicted advice in the future.

Also in the news this week are a number of other notable industry headlines, including:

• The DoL’s new fiduciary rule taking effect means brokers and RIAs will now face additional DoL scrutiny on rollovers from IRAs (and not just when advising on ERISA employer retirement plans) and may need to prepare new policies and procedures to document (and maintain documentation of) their rollover recommendations
• A new study on the ‘Pulse of the [RIA] Industry’ finds that despite the 2020 turmoil, the average RIA grew substantially last year, and the average firm is now projecting a 10% hiring binge in 2021 with ongoing growth

From there, we have several articles on social media marketing:

• Key tips on how financial advisors can build their own online personal brand via various social media platforms
• How TikTok is rapidly becoming a new platform for financial advisors to market themselves (through short-form ‘edutainment’ videos)
• Why Instagram is proving to be an effective social media marketing channel (particularly for advisors pursuing next-generation upwardly mobile clients)

We’ve also included a number of retirement-related articles, including:

• How fixed annuities can improve net after-tax returns over traditional fixed-income alternatives simply by taking advantage of the tax deferral benefits and avoiding tax drag
• Why single premium long-term care insurance may be coming back in vogue (both to avoid the risk of future premium increases, and to ‘take money off the table’ in the face of high market valuations and low yields)
• A look at how to adapt the future of Social Security to support more private savings (and how other countries are dealing with their own social insurance programs)

We wrap up with three final articles, all around the theme of what it takes to build and maintain trust:

• How low trust (both between individuals and with industries) can outright increase the cost of doing business and the end cost of products and services (including financial planning) to consumers
• How ‘humanizing’ robo-advisors (by literally giving them a name) actually decreases our trust when looking for help on complex tasks
• A deep dive into how the military has managed to maintain its institutional trust while virtually every other major institution has faced declining trust in recent decades (and the lessons it implies for how to get societal trust back on track)

Enjoy the ‘light’ reading!

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Enjoy the current installment of “Weekend Reading For Financial Planners” – this week’s edition kicks off with the announcement that the Investments & Wealth Institute (IWI) is launching a new online advisor networking/community platform called “The Hive”, to be available to both IWI members and those beyond, as the organization seeks to expand its footprint beyond its roots of CIMA and CPWA certificants into a more FPA-style “open tent” association for financial advisors.

Also in the news this week are a number of other notable industry headlines, including:

• The latest Cerulli Associates data showing the largest broker-dealers are getting even bigger, with the top-25 broker-dealers now accounting for nearly 72% of brokers and a whopping 90% of all IBD assets (up from just 58% and 83%, respectively, a decade ago)
• A new study of TAMPs showing that investment outsourcing continues to rise, though while TAMPs started in the independent broker-dealer channel, it’s now RIAs leading their growth

From there, we have several articles on investment management:

• The ongoing rise of direct indexing is now gaining enough traction that index providers are scrambling to figure out how to license their indices to the emerging direct indexing platforms
• The complexity and opacity of alternative investments isn’t doing much to slow their growth, but is spawning rapid growth in the CAIA designation for advisors who want to learn more about how to properly exercise due diligence regarding alternative investments
• A Morningstar analysis on whether Bitcoin is really a good idea to hold (or “HODL”!) in a client’s portfolio given its dramatic volatility

We’ve also included a number of marketing-related articles, including:

• How using the word “if” turns prospect pitches into awkward leading questions and why using open-ended questions is better
• Why it may be better to make your advisor marketing less rational and more emotionally driven
• Rethinking the business development process to better highlight how the advisor brings expertise to the table to identify less-than-obvious problems and provide less-than-obvious solutions

We wrap up with three final articles, all around the theme of being more flexible to a changing world and making mistakes:

• The difficulties of planning for your long-term future amidst a world with such uncertainty, and how a “micro-planning” approach can help
• Given that every successful person has a lot of mistakes to share, perhaps it’s time for us to get less fearful of making mistakes and more focused on simply learning from them?
• Why it’s a good idea to deliberately put yourself in situations where something may go wrong… because in the end, it’s far easier to “practice failure” in a controlled environment than to risk it in the moments that matter most

Enjoy the ‘light’ reading!

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