Kitces.com - Advancing Knowledge in Financial Planning

The Salience of Financial Planning Fees – It’s Not Just About How Much You Charge, But How You Charge

June 7, 2012 11:04 am 22 Comments CATEGORY: Practice Management

When considering a purchase, we all evaluate the value that we will receive relative to the cost of the transaction. Yet research shows that some methods of payment make us more sensitive to the cost than others - which in turn can distort the cost-benefit analysis and change the decision, but also impacts the ability for sellers to raise prices without changing the buyer's willingness to pay.

For instance, research on toll roads shows that consumers are less sensitive to toll increases when they pay electronically than in cash; similarly, we are more willing to spend money when we pay by credit card than when the cost it made salient by paying in cash. The upshot of highly salient pricing is that it helps to ensure businesses don't raise prices unfairly and abuse their customers; the downside, however, is that it can make it more difficult for honest, fairly priced businesses to attract new clients and grow their revenues due to price sensitivity.

In the financial planning world, this helps to explain the popularity of both commission and AUM models, and the relative difficulties of hourly and retainer fee models - it's not just about how much the firm charges, but also about how the firm charges!Read More...

Research Reveals Cash Reserve Strategies Don’t Work… Unless You’re A Good Market Timer?

June 6, 2012 11:03 am 7 Comments CATEGORY: Retirement Planning

Cash reserve strategies that hold aside several years of spending to avoid liquidations during bear markets are a popular way to manage withdrawals for retirees. In theory, the strategy is presumed to enhance risk-adjusted returns by allowing retirees to spend down their cash during market declines and then replenish it after the recovery. Yet recent research in the Journal of Financial Planning reveals that the strategy actually results in more harm than good; while in some scenarios the cash reserves effectively allow the retiree to "time" the market by avoiding an untimely liquidation, more often the retiree simply ends out with less money due to the ongoing return drag of a significant portfolio position in cash. As a result, the superior strategy for those who want to alter their asset allocation through market volatility (the effective result of spending down cash in declines and replenishing it later) appears to be simply tactically altering asset allocation directly, without the adverse impact of a cash return drag. Nonetheless, this still fails to account for the psychological benefits the client enjoys by having a clearly identifiable cash reserve to manage spending through volatility - even though the reality is that it results in less retirement income, not more. Does that mean cash reserve strategies are still superior for their psychological benefits alone, even if they're not an effective way to time the market? Or do total return strategies simply need to find a better way to communicate their benefits and value?

The Problems With Trying To Benchmark Unconstrained Portfolios (Guest Post)

June 5, 2012 11:02 am 16 Comments CATEGORY: Investments

Benchmarking is a standard tool for investors and investment professionals to evaluate the results of an investment manager. In a world of investing within asset classes and style boxes, the benchmarking process is relatively straightforward – any particular investment offering can be easily matched to an appropriate benchmark. In a world of unconstrained, “go-anywhere” style managers, though, the benchmarking process is less certain. Common methods to determine an appropriate benchmark – such as an ex-post regression of what the fund was invested in – can obscure the actions of the manager, for better or for worse. Is the only solution to simply select an arbitrary benchmark and proceed accordingly? Can we eschew a benchmark altogether?

Social Media As Drip Marketing For Financial Planners In The Digital Age

June 4, 2012 11:09 am 6 Comments CATEGORY: Marketing

The principles of drip marketing are not new; the concept of marketing by sending a series of messages to prospects over time to build familiarity and remain top-of-mind so that you're likely to be contacted when a need arises has existed for decades. In fact, drip marketing has only gained in popularity as the costs of distribution have declined - from the increasing efficiency of printing postcards, catalogues, and newsletters, to the almost negligible cost of sending messages via email (sometimes taken to its abusive extreme, "spam email"). Unfortunately, though, the challenge of most drip marketing is that it's still very impersonal, and it can often be a challenge to even identify a list of people to whom the messages should be communicated in the first place. Yet the growing world of social media creates the potential to take "drip marketing" to a whole new level, because it is more social - making it more personal and more engaging, with sharing tools to help the people who receive your content to refer you to their friends and family, and for those you want to reach find you!

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (June 2-3)

June 1, 2012 07:14 pm 0 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" - this week's edition starts off with two articles about the ongoing debate in Washington on the Investment Advisor Oversight Act of 2012 (the so-called "Bachus SRO legislation"), including a scathing report from the Project on Government Oversight on why FINRA would be a poor choice of SRO, and a second article about why in the end there probably won't be any action on the Bachus legislation until next year anyway but it's still important to take it seriously now. From there, we look at a few practice management articles, from an interesting look at how young Generation Y agents are changing marketing and business development in the insurance industry, to the importance of having a good first-six-weeks process in your firm to ensure that your own new Generation Y hires will stick around for the long run, to the importance of choosing the right name for your firm, knowing how to sell to develop your business (even as a professional!), and that the key to growing your business is to deliver an experience that is remarkable - as in, literally, something worth remarking about. There's also an article about whether Veralytic is really a useful tool for advisors evaluating life insurance on Advisors4Advisors (a response to a post on this blog from a few weeks ago), an examination of how advisors have shifted their investments before and after the financial crisis, and a look at how the due diligence burden on really evaluating ETFs has become far more complex with the proliferation of ETF innovation. We wrap up with Bill Gross' latest missive from PIMCO about the Wall Street Food Chain, and how the 1% at the top may be disrupted more than they expect as the global deleveraging process continues. Enjoy the reading!

Linking Academic and Planner Research on Retirement Income

May 31, 2012 11:07 am 23 Comments CATEGORY: Retirement Planning

"Planners and academics need to work together to develop a profession with evidence-based practices." That is the message given at the FPA Retreat by Dr. Michael Finke, a professor of personal financial planning at Texas Tech University, and a co-author of mine at the Journal of Financial Planning.

Yet while the Journal of Financial Planning is a great resource, and it has been the go-to outlet for research on retirement planning from the perspective of practicing financial planners, especially regarding safe withdrawal rate strategies, the academic research approaches the retirement challenge from a different perspective and focuses on different tools and strategies.

Ultimately, researchers can use their technical skills to investigate optimal retirement strategies, and practitioners can guide these investigations by suggesting real world constraints and ideas for solutions, and even by sharing in the nitty-gritty process of conducting the research. Let’s encourage these interactions to get rigorous analyses which can be applied to real-world problems.Read More...