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Weekend Reading For Financial Planners (April 4–5)

April 3, 2026 02:00 pm 0 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "Weekend Reading For Financial Planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the news that a recent study finds that while RIA mergers and acquisitions activity continues to break records in terms of volume and valuations, not all sellers are necessarily able to cash in on heightened buyer appetite, with those demonstrating strong organic growth, a client niche or specialty, simple investment operations, and an engaged next-generation team seeing stronger returns. Notably, on this latter factor, firms with shared equity amongst advisors and staff appear to be achieving stronger valuations, as they can demonstrate a level of greater employee buy-in that could be attractive to buyers looking to retain both clients and staff as part of a transaction.

Also in industry news this week:

The Department of Labor (DoL) this week unveiled a proposal meant to ease litigation risk for retirement plan fiduciaries that want to include alternative assets in their fund offerings for participants
While the share of new financial advisors who are women has plateaued in recent years, industry and firm initiatives could better attract and retain women (while providing additional benefits to the advisor population as a whole)

From there, we have several articles on estate planning:

How financial advisors can add value for their clients by holding a beneficiary designation review meeting and by being aware of opportunities for changes as their clients' (and the clients' current beneficiaries') lives change
How advisors can support clients in selecting an appropriate healthcare proxy (and by providing the chosen individual with the background information that can help them make the best-informed decisions when contingencies arise)
The value of proper estate planning for heirless clients and how advisors can address common client misconceptions

We also have a number of articles on advisor marketing:

How financial advisors can tailor their websites to reflect the questions prospective clients are asking AI tools such as ChatGPT
A blueprint for marketing in a world where Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) could become increasingly valuable
Why financial advisors might consider a marketing strategy refresh as Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered search becomes more prevalent

We wrap up with three final articles, all about learning more and reading more:

Why reading remains a valuable practice in a digital age featuring an ever-increasing amount of audio and video content
Lessons one author learned on happiness, productivity, and fitness from reading 102 books over the past year
Why setting a daily page goal could be the key to reading more books in the coming year

Enjoy the 'light' reading!

Mitigating Risk From (Litigious) Clients When Your Advisor Team Grows Beyond You: Kitces & Carl 187

April 2, 2026 07:01 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Kitces & Carl Podcast

Advisory firms often assume that one of the greatest professional risks comes from making a serious mistake with clients’ finances. Yet as firms grow, the larger the client base and the bigger the advisory team, the greater the surface area for potential disputes, misunderstandings, or even opportunistic legal threats. Even when a team is confident that it has acted appropriately, the economics of litigation can still pressure firms to settle claims… simply because defending them would cost more than the dispute itself. As a result, growing firms must confront a difficult question: how can they manage legal and reputational risk without burying advisors and clients under excessive layers of compliance and documentation?

In this 187th episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss how to manage the systematic (and unsystematic) risk in advisory firms. Financial advisors regularly help clients make high-stakes decisions involving large sums of money under uncertain conditions. As firms expand beyond the founder and responsibilities are distributed across multiple advisors and staff members, the owner’s direct oversight naturally declines while legal risk exposure still remains.

A practical goal, therefore, is to reduce the likelihood and severity of problems rather than attempt to eliminate them entirely. In that vein, firms must be careful not to respond to risks with excessive procedural controls, which can ultimately harm the client experience and team productivity. In theory, risk could be reduced close to zero through exhaustive checklists, constant disclosures, and mandatory sign-offs for every client action. In practice, however, such an environment would likely be intolerable for both advisors and clients. Overly burdensome compliance processes can erode trust, create administrative friction, and reduce a firm’s efficiency. At a certain point, the cost – both financial and cultural – of trying to eliminate every possible risk can exceed the expected cost of simply resolving the occasional dispute when it arises!

The challenge then becomes finding the balance between prudent safeguards and operational paralysis. Insurance – particularly adequate errors and omissions (E&O) coverage – exists precisely to manage the possibility of financially catastrophic outcomes. And advisory firms may still require explicit client sign-offs for high-stakes decisions – such as actions that trigger significant tax consequences.

Equally important is attention to human factors within the firm; advisor hiring standards, emotional intelligence, and relationship skills can play a major role in preventing disputes. In many professions, practitioners with the worst communication and bedside manner – not necessarily those who make the most mistakes – face the highest rates of lawsuits. Additionally, firm leaders may want to consider which behaviors their compensation incentivizes – do they structurally permit (or even encourage) advisors to offload problematic clients?

In the end, risk management in advisory firms mirrors the broader financial planning process itself: some risks can be mitigated through processes and safeguards, others can be transferred through insurance, and some must simply be accepted as the unavoidable complexity of doing meaningful work with clients. Recognizing and thoughtfully managing those trade-offs will allow advisory firms to grow sustainably while continuing to deliver high-quality advice and maintain strong client relationships!

10 Charts To Address Client Concerns On 2026 Geopolitical Conflict, Rising Oil Prices, Tariffs, Inflation, And More

April 1, 2026 07:02 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Investments

Advisors entered 2026 facing a familiar but challenging dynamic: a surge in headline-driven uncertainty prompting clients to question whether they should take action with their portfolios. A combination of geopolitical conflict, rising oil prices, evolving tariff policy, persistent inflation, and questions around artificial intelligence has contributed to the first meaningful market pullback following a strong 2025. While these developments can heighten investor anxiety, the more pressing challenge for advisors is helping clients distinguish between short-term noise and long-term fundamentals, avoiding reactive decisions that could undermine financial plans.

In this article, James Liu, CEO of Clearnomics, explores how advisors can address client market concerns in a reassuring, data-driven way, helping clients maintain perspective and recognize that the underlying economic and market backdrop remains more resilient than headlines may suggest.

Corporate earnings are growing at an above-average pace, bond yields are meaningfully positive after years of near-zero rates, and diversification is proving effective as leadership broadens beyond large-cap U.S. equities. Even the current decline remains well within historical norms, with pullbacks of similar or greater magnitude occurring regularly without derailing long-term returns. At the same time, geopolitical shocks – while consequential in the near term, especially through energy markets – have historically been temporary drivers of volatility rather than lasting determinants of portfolio outcomes. Oil price spikes, for instance, can contribute to inflation and complicate central bank policy, but are often moderated over time as supply adjusts and demand responds.

At the same time, there are legitimate risks. Inflation remains above target across multiple measures, and rising energy costs may limit the Federal Reserve's ability to ease policy. This creates a more complex environment for both equities and fixed income, particularly as bond markets adjust to a higher-for-longer rate backdrop. Meanwhile, the labor market is showing signs of cooling beneath the surface, with a growing divergence between higher- and lower-income households. Credit conditions are also tightening even as yields remain attractive. Structural shifts – including the ongoing AI investment cycle and evolving global trade policy – further complicate the outlook by introducing both opportunity and disruption across sectors, while elevated valuations in parts of the market leave less room for error.

In this environment, portfolio construction and risk management take precedence over prediction. Diversification across sectors, asset classes, and geographies remains valuable as leadership rotates and different segments respond differently to inflation, interest rates, and global events. Similarly, equity investors are increasingly reliant on earnings growth rather than expanding valuations, reinforcing the importance of focusing on fundamentals and maintaining broad exposure rather than concentrating in a narrow set of themes such as mega-cap technology or early-stage AI beneficiaries.

Ultimately, the central lesson is that while the sources of uncertainty evolve, the principles of successful investing remain consistent. Periods of volatility and discomfort are not anomalies to be avoided, but inherent features of markets that reward discipline and long-term thinking. Advisors play a critical role in helping clients understand that well-constructed portfolios are designed not to avoid every downturn, but to endure them and participate in subsequent recoveries. By reinforcing perspective, emphasizing diversification, and maintaining alignment with long-term goals, advisors can help clients navigate uncertainty with greater confidence while demonstrating the long-term value of financial planning.

Closing (More Affluent) Clients In The First Meeting With An “Approach Talk” Method To Create Urgency: #FASuccess Ep 483 With Erin Botsford

March 31, 2026 07:02 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Erin Botsford Podcast Featured Image FAS

Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 483rd episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Erin Botsford. Erin is the founder of The Advisor Authority, a coaching platform that trains advisors on attracting more (and wealthier) clients while also scaling their businesses by building a successful team around them.

What's unique about Erin, though, is how, over the course of her career as an advisory firm owner herself, she developed what she calls the "approach talk" method to closing affluent clients in the first meeting by focusing on risk management exposures that create urgency to act.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Erin's "approach talk" method centers largely on making prospects aware of (up to) 26 risk management exposures (including potential estate planning and insurance items) they face that can create a strong incentive to act (though it often only takes reviewing two or three of them to get prospects to want to become clients), why Erin thinks it's important to meet with both members of a prospect couple (and to recognize that different factors that might spur each of them to want to take action), and how Erin, before entering the room for a prospect meeting, showed them a "founders video" that introduced her and her story to the prospects efficiently (removing the temptation for her to talk extensively about herself during the meeting itself).

We also talk about how Erin used a fee structure that includes both a flat planning fee (to orchestrate implementation of the risk management plan) and an AUM fee on the client's assets (to compensate for the advisor's work managing their portfolio and the risk exposures they take in doing so), how Erin finds that advisors often need to quote a higher planning fee than they might expect when meeting with a high-net-worth prospect (as doing so will help the prospect associate the advisor with the attorneys and other highly paid professionals they already work with), and how Erin found that while some prospects might have initially resisted moving all of their investible assets to her firm from their current advisor, they typically eventually would once they understood that she was raising planning issues that their current advisor never addressed (and would therefore likely provide a deeper level of service in the process).

And be certain to listen to the end, where Erin shares why it's important for founders to be able to eventually remove themselves from every client case in their firm (both to better scale and to ultimately increase the value of their business), why Erin encourages founders to think about what they want their last day in the business to look like and then work backwards to inform how to structure their firm today, and how working as an advisor coach has ultimately allowed Erin to give back to the profession and expand her own philanthropic goals.

So, whether you're interested in learning about a process to close more clients in the first meeting, using a fee structure that combines a flat planning fee with an asset-based fee, or how founders can effectively remove themselves from every client case as their firm grows, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Erin Botsford.

Social Media For Advisors: Market Scalably With Evergreen Content

March 30, 2026 07:02 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Marketing

Social media marketing remains an attractive yet often elusive strategy for financial advisors seeking to build their client base. Its low cost of entry and potential for wide visibility give it a strong initial appeal. However, as the latest Kitces Research on How Financial Planners Actually Market Their Services shows, it is also one of the least efficient and most time-consuming marketing tactics in practice. While social media ranks as the fourth-most-used tactic among advisors, the research reveals that acquiring a client through social media can cost advisors an average of $16,700 when factoring in both hard and soft costs. These soft costs – time spent on content creation, adapting to shifting algorithms, trend monitoring, and building an audience – can add up quickly, particularly when advisors struggle to consistently produce high-impact content.

A central challenge with social media is that success often hinges on two distinct but rarely simultaneous goals: reach and conversion. One post may generate likes, comments, and new followers (reach), while another might prompt newsletter sign-ups or webinar registrations (conversion). Expecting a single post to achieve both is unrealistic, and the constant push to meet these divergent goals can lead to an exhausting and unsustainable content creation cycle. Making matters more difficult, social media platforms are increasingly saturated, making it harder for advisors to stand out without significant time investment or specialized skills in content strategy.

In this article, Sydney Squires, Senior Financial Planning Nerd, discusses how advisors can overcome this issue by using evergreen content, which retains its relevance regardless of current events or seasonality, and offers a scalable solution to the high soft costs of social media. A guiding principle in evergreen content strategies is harnessing what's called the "long tail" effect: a small percentage of content often generates the majority of results. In practice, this means that only about 10% of an advisor's posts will drive most of the engagement and conversions, while the rest produce little return. This dynamic poses a significant burden for advisors who feel they must constantly create fresh content in hopes of striking gold. However, recognizing and leaning into the long tail can be a turning point. By identifying which posts already perform well, advisors can repurpose top-performing content – especially evergreen content that remains relevant over time – and avoid the burnout of perpetual reinvention. Reposting content is not only efficient but also effective – audiences are unlikely to recall seeing a post months earlier, and repeated exposure often strengthens a message's resonance.

The success of evergreen social media content ultimately depends on strategic planning and performance tracking. Each post should be assigned a clear objective – either engagement or conversion – and performance should be measured accordingly. Tools like UTM codes and Google Analytics can help advisors track which posts are driving website traffic, while social media platforms and schedulers often provide data on in-platform engagement. Over time, advisors can refine their evergreen libraries through regular audits, removing outdated or underperforming content and adding newer, high-performing posts. Leveraging AI or working with copywriters can further streamline ideation and content creation without compromising the advisor's unique voice.

In sum, while social media marketing is often labor-intensive and inefficient when approached haphazardly, advisors can dramatically improve their return on time and effort by leaning into evergreen content. This strategy not only mitigates the pressure of constant content creation but also maximizes the value of high-performing posts. By developing and maintaining a well-curated library of reusable, relevant content, advisors can build a more consistent and scalable marketing pipeline that highlights their personality and expertise – helping them connect with prospective clients more meaningfully over time!

Weekend Reading For Financial Planners (March 28–29)

March 27, 2026 01:15 pm 0 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "Weekend Reading For Financial Planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the news that the CFP Board is considering waiving the bachelor's degree requirement to be eligible for marks, and is expected to make a decision in early 2027, renewing the debate over whether the bachelor's requirement represents an unnecessary barrier to entry into the financial planning profession or an essential baseline standard for knowledge and critical thinking skills (though the decision might ultimately be driven by CFP Board's goals for overall growth in the number of CFP certificants).

Also in industry news this week:

Experienced advisors are moving to new firms at a faster rate, with a 16% increase in senior advisor attrition from 2024 to 2025
Advisory firms are now under the clock to implement new policies under the SEC's comprehensive Regulation S-P, with the deadline for smaller firms fast-approaching in June

From there, we have several articles on tax:

Several effective tax planning strategies for high-net-worth clients, from tax-aware long-short investing to private placement life insurance and annuities to strategies for pre-liquidity business owners
How the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) expanded the Section 1202 Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) rules allowing shareholders of QSBS-eligible companies to exclude up to $15 million in capital gains
How investors with portfolios that can't be rebalanced without incurring significant capital gains can transfer those funds into a more tax-efficient ETF wrapper via a Section 351 exchange

We also have a number of articles on practice management:

How advisory firm founders can adapt as their firms demand different roles from them, while minimizing the risk of burnout or role misalignment
Why leadership capacity is about more than 'just' a lack of time – and why, while a lack of leadership capacity often manifests as a hiring and team retention shortfall, it may need to be solved with different resources
Why growth opportunities for a firm's support staff may be the key to long-term growth and team retention

We wrap up with three final articles, all about college sports in the midst of March Madness season:

Why the odds of picking a 100% perfect NCAA bracket (for all 63 games in the NCAA basketball tournament) are so extremely low that we'll likely never see it done in our lifetimes
How structural changes to the business college sports, including allowing payments for athletes' Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) and greater ability to transfer between schools, have reduced the number of unlikely "Cinderella" teams making extended runs in the NCAA basketball tournament
When a college athlete receives payment for their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL), it has the potential to be a life-changing opportunity – but only if they handle it thoughtfully (which most 18-22 year olds could use a lot of trustworthy guidance to learn how to do!)

Enjoy the 'light' reading!