Articles About The Nerd's Eye View Blog

As we enter the holiday season and 2018 winds to a close, I am once again so thankful to all of you, the ever-growing number of readers who continue to regularly visit this Nerd’s Eye View blog (and share the content with your friends and colleagues, which we greatly appreciate!). Over the past year, our readership has grown yet another 16%, with more than 220,000 unique readers visiting Kitces.com in the past month. But the journey for us is never done… as this year, we’ve added a number of new team members both writing for the blog and supporting us behind the scenes, as we gear up for an even bigger and better 2019 with back-end enhancements to the platform, new industry research studies, and new types of content that we hope you will continue to find valuable.

Yet we realize that the sheer volume of content that’s released from the Nerd’s Eye View can be overwhelming at times, and that, even though so many of you have made this blog a weekly habit, it’s not always possible to keep up with it all. Which means an article, once missed, is often never seen again, “overwritten” by the next day’s, week’s, and month’s worth of content that comes along.

Accordingly, just as I did last year and in 2016, 2015, and 2014, I've compiled for you this Highlights list of our top 20 articles of 2018 that you might have missed, including some of our most popular episodes of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. So whether you're new to the blog and #FASuccess podcast and haven't searched through the Archives yet, or simply haven't had the time to keep up with everything, I hope that some of these will (still) be useful for you! And as always, I hope you'll take a moment to share podcast episodes and articles of interest with your friends and colleagues as well!

In the meantime, I hope you're having a safe and happy holiday season. Thanks again for another successful year in 2018, and I hope you enjoy all the new features and content we'll be rolling out in 2019, too!

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Every year, we make new reinvestments back into Kitces.com and the Nerd’s Eye View blog to make it an ever-more-valuable resource for the financial advisor community, and especially all of you, our readers. Which we do first and foremost by asking you, every year, what you want to make this website even better for you!

Over the years, your reader feedback has shaped everything, from the visual design of the blog (from its original dense small font!) the comment system we use, to the expansion of our Members section to offer CFP and IMCA/IWI CE credits, and now CPE credits for accountants as well for Nerd's Eye View blog posts, the launch of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and more, allowing us to be recognized in 2017 by Erdos & Morgan as the #1 digital media brand amongst financial advisors for influence, objectivity, credibility, and outright usefulness to an advisor’s daily work!

But I know there’s still more we can do. Which is why, every year, we conduct a feedback survey for all of you who read this blog, to get your thoughts and feedback about everything we currently offer, your perspective on some new ideas we're considering, and take in whatever other input you're willing to share (good or bad!) about what we could do to make this a more valuable site (and a better user experience) for you.

So regardless of what kind of reader you are: an advisor, an individual consumer who reads this blog for your own benefit, a related professional that works with financial advisors, or you're associated with a vendor who serves advisors... I hope you'll participate in this year's survey. It's only 12 questions, should take no more than a few minutes, and will remain open until the end of next week.

Thanks in advance for taking a few minutes to click through on the "Read More" link below to access our reader survey, and share your feedback! 🙂

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Financial planning, and the process of creating a financial plan, has changed extensively over the nearly 45 years since the first class of CFP certificants. While early on, the financial plan was used primarily as a Calculator to do Needs-Based Analyses for the products they had to sell, over time it evolved into a Comprehensive Financial Plan that advisors could actually get paid for independent of any product implementation, which advisors then in turn Customized even further, and are now increasingly delivering Collaboratively with clients (where the focus is on the planning experience, and The Plan itself is merely delivered after the fact to commemorate the planning decisions already made).

Yet unfortunately, remarkably little research exists on how, exactly, financial advisors are actually preparing and delivering financial plans today. How often do advisors charge separately for planning? What is it that they actually deliver to clients? When advisors complain that it is very “time-consuming” to do financial planning, which part, exactly, is so time-consuming? And to what extent does financial planning software expedite the process… or exacerbate the problem?

In this context, we’re excited to announce the first Kitces Research initiative – a comprehensive study on the process that financial advisors actually go through to create and deliver a financial plan. Think of it as a benchmarking study for the creation of the financial plan itself, with a focus on identifying best practices.

So whether you’re frustrated that financial planning software doesn’t “do” what you need it to in order to demonstrate its value, or are simply looking for ideas to refine your own financial planning process to be more time-efficient or cost-effective (or valuable and able to command a higher price!), I hope you’ll take a few minutes to participate in our Financial Planning Process survey and help the world better understand what real financial planners actually do!

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In 2008, Kitces.com was first launched as a platform to showcase my new paid newsletter service, The Kitces Report, and to advertise my services as a speaker for financial advisor conferences, with a “grand vision” that my newsletter would help to draw interest for more speaking engagements, and that speaking in front of more advisor audiences would help me grow the number of paid subscribers to the newsletter. And on the side… I launched a blog, to share a few of my thoughts on financial planning strategies and industry trends that didn’t quite merit a full issue of the newsletter.

A decade later, the growth of the Nerd’s Eye View blog has surpassed even my wildest dreams, moving from a side project to the center of my business, built on a foundational belief that if we can stay focused on advancing knowledge in financial planning and helping real financial advisors to be more successful in their businesses and with their clients, that growth and other opportunities would come. And indeed they have, as the latest Erdos & Morgan study on financial advisor usage of digital media found that the Nerd’s Eye View ranks #1 for influence, objectivity, credibility, and simply being actually useful to financial advisors.

Given this growth, we’re excited to announce the addition to two new positions with the Kitces.com team. The first is a new Associate Editor role, to help us manage the ever-growing volume of content, readers, and behind-the-scenes logistics that are necessary to execute our growing media platform. The second is a new Senior Researcher, to replace Dr. Derek Tharp as he takes on a new financial planning teaching position at the University of Southern Maine’s business school. The Senior Researcher will help us to build a growing base of original research we aim to conduct directly through the Kitces.com platform, to help gain a better understanding of what real financial advisors actually do – from how they deliver plans, to how they price their services, how they use technology, and how they market and grow their advice-centric firms.

In the end, the goal of this growth and expanding the Kitces.com team is not to alter the service that we provide to the financial advisory community; instead, it’s simply to help us get even better at what we already do. Because in the end, a successful growing business needs more good people to be more successful and have a bigger impact to the community it serves. Which is true for both running a financial advisory firm itself, and also a platform that serves them. We’re nowhere close to being done yet, and I can’t wait to see what we can build to help the advisor community in the next 10 years from here!

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Running a successful business requires continual reinvestment… which is why, every year, we survey our Nerd’s Eye View readership to find out what we could be doing to deliver more value to you, and/or to make the reader experience even better. And so, as 2018 kicks off, I wanted to share a little perspective on the current State Of The Blog, and some of our plans for the upcoming year.

Overall, this past 2017 was another big year of growth for Kitces.com. Our total site traffic was up nearly 25% over 2016 – which at our size, means the blog grew more last year than it did in the first 6 years cumulatively. Our new Financial Advisor Success podcast has quickly become the most highly reviewed podcast for financial advisors on iTunes, and finished its first year just shy of 1,000,000 advisor downloads. And our team expanded, with the promotion of Rachel Zeller to Operations Manager, and the hire of Derek Tharp (who just successfully defended his dissertation and is now Dr. Derek!).

These new hires gave us additional capacity to begin a process of major reinvestments into the Kitces.com platform itself, and the services that we provide to our readers. Which means we’re have a number of exciting announcements to make!

First and foremost, the Nerd’s Eye View blog is now providing CPE credits for CPAs, in addition to the CE credit we already provide for CFP certificants and IMCA members with the CIMA or CPWA designations in our Members Section! In fact, Kitces.com has joined the NASBA Registry of CPE Providers – a significant national recognition for the quality of our CE content and instructional design – in addition to becoming a CFP Board CE Quality Partner. To our knowledge, we’re one of less than half a dozen CE providers for financial advisors in the entire country to have been recognized by both organizations, as we continue to reinvest into the quality of the content we provide.

Second, we’re beginning the process of a major technology overhaul in our back-end systems used to run the blog itself. The primary purpose of these changes are to make it feasible for us to better customize the reader experience for you – from sharing more relevant article suggestions, to removing prompts to sign up for our updates when you’re already a subscriber (which is a surprisingly difficult technology challenge to implement!), and giving you more flexibility to select which email updates you receive (e.g., the ability to exclude certain content categories that may not be of interest to you). You’ll see these changes roll out incrementally throughout 2018. We also plan to leverage these new tools to conduct more survey research of financial advisors, on key practice management topics that aren’t being sufficiently studied elsewhere.

Third, the growth of the Nerd’s Eye View means we’re hiring again! A new Research Associate position is currently listed in our Career Opportunities section, and we’ll be hiring a “Director of Digital Engagement” to help us roll out our customized content enhancements later this year. So if you know anyone who might be interested, please send them our way!

In the meantime, we’ll also have more opportunities in 2018 for Guest Posts, and another year of the Financial Advisor Success podcast means 52 new podcast guest opportunities as well! If you’re interested, please reach out directly via our Contact page to let us know!

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As 2017 comes to a close, I am once again so thankful to all of you, the ever-growing number of readers who continue to regularly visit this Nerd's Eye View blog, and have been kind enough to share the content with your friends and colleagues as well (which I greatly appreciate!). Over the past year, the cumulative readership of the blog has grown yet another 25%, with more than 200,000 unique readers coming to Nerd's Eye View last month. And we're gearing up for a number of major new upgrades in early 2018 as well, from new CE opportunities, to back-end changes to our platform that will help to further improve your own reader experience.

Yet notwithstanding how many of you have made reading the Nerd's Eye View a weekly habit, I realize that the sheer volume of articles can feel overwhelming at times, and that it's not always possible to keep up with it all. And once published, blog articles are usually quite quickly left in the dust as the next new one comes along.

Accordingly, just as I did last year and in 2015 and 2014, I've compiled for you this Highlights list of our top 20 articles of 2017 that you might have missed, including some of our most popular episodes of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. So whether you're new to the blog and #FASuccess podcast and haven't searched through the Archives yet, or simply haven't had the time to keep up with everything, I hope that some of these will (still) be useful for you! And as always, I hope you'll take a moment to share podcast episodes and articles of interest with your friends and colleagues as well!

In the meantime, I hope you're having a safe and happy holiday season. Thanks again for another successful year in 2017, and I hope you enjoy all the new features we'll be rolling out in 2018, too!

Read More...

Here at Kitces.com, the goal is always to make the Nerd's Eye View blog and the Members Section an ever-more-valuable resource for all of you, the readers. Which means we want to hear from you about what we can do to make this website even better for you.

Over the years, reader feedback has shaped everything from the visual design of the blog (from its original dense small font!) and the Disqus comment system we use, to the expansion of our Members section to offer CFP and then IMCA CE credit (and soon, CPE for accountants as well!) for Nerd's Eye View blog posts, the launch of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and more.

And while I'm happy with the progress we've been making, I'm sure there's still more than we could do differently to serve you better. Accordingly, every year we conduct a feedback survey to all of you who read this blog, to get your thoughts and feedback about the features we're offering, some new ideas we're considering, and whatever other input you're willing to share about what we could do to make this a more valuable site (and a better user experience) for you.

So regardless of what kind of reader you are: an advisor, an individual consumer who reads this blog for your own benefit, a related professional that works with financial advisors, or you're associated with a vendor who serves advisors... I hope you'll participate in this year's survey. It's only 10 questions, should take no more than a few minutes, and will remain open until the end of next week (June 24th).

Thanks in advance for taking a few minutes to click through on the "Read More" link below to access our reader survey, and share your feedback! 🙂

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Every year, we look to make improvements to Kitces.com and the Nerd’s Eye View blog to make it more valuable for all of you, the readers, based on your feedback to our reader surveys. And as we kick off the 2017 New Year, I’m excited to announce several new features and changes we’re making today and in the coming month to better serve you!

First and foremost, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. An increasing number of you have been asking for us to add a “Kitces podcast” that you can listen to while you commute or work out, and after a year of planning and preparation, it’s finally here! The first episode will air tomorrow – Tuesday, January 3^rd – and going forward, will become a regular part of our weekly content every Tuesday!

In addition, in the coming quarter we’ll be launching a new opportunity to CPAs to earn Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credits, on top of the CFP and IMCA CE credits we already offer. The new CPE credits will be offered for any and all of the more-than-30-hours of Kitces.com content that is already eligible for other types of CE, at no additional cost (beyond the requirement to join our Premium Members Section itself).

We’re also making a number of tweaks to the visual style and format of the blog as well, to help make it easier to read and enjoy. This includes both adjusting the default font to be a little darker and easier to read on mobile screens, and new font resizing buttons that make it easier for you to enlarge the size of the text (without otherwise distorting the reading format). And we’re working on an adjustment to the sign-up prompts so that they’ll be fully eliminated once you’ve already signed up (which due to technical challenges, will be implementing later this quarter).

I'm also excited to announce that we're expanding the content team here at Nerd's Eye View, and have hired Derek Tharp, who is finishing up his Ph.D. in Financial Planning at Kansas State and will be both helping me on behind-the-scenes research to support our articles, and also publishing a few of his own from time to time. We're also slightly expanding our available Guest Post slots, if you're interested in submitting something yourself to be featured on Nerd's Eye View!

And last but not least, I’m excited to announce that the votes are in for naming the Nerd’s Eye View community, and the overwhelming winner was that you wanted to be called the “Nerd’s Eye Crew” of readers! (But if you still don’t think that’s the “right” name, please leave your feedback in the Comments section at the end of this post!)

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As 2016 comes to a close, I am so thankful to all of you, the growing number of readers who continue to regularly visit this Nerd's Eye View blog, and have been kind enough to share the content with your friends and colleagues as well (which I greatly appreciate!). Over the past year, the cumulative readership of the blog has grown yet another 35%, with more than 160,000 unique readers coming to Nerd's Eye View last month. The continued growth has meant more reinvestments into features and even staffing, to continue to build this platform for the benefit of advisors. And we'll be announcing a number of major new initiatives in early 2017 as well!

Yet notwithstanding how many of you have made reading the Nerd's Eye View a weekly habit, I realize that the sheer volume of articles can feel overwhelming at times, and that it's not always possible to keep up with it all. And blog articles, once published, are usually quite quickly left in the dust as the next new article comes along.

Accordingly, just as I did last year and in 2014, I've compiled for you this Highlights list of our top 20 articles of 2016 that you might have missed. So whether you're new to the blog and haven't searched through the Archives yet, or simply haven't had the time to keep up with everything, I hope that some of these will (still) be useful for you! And as always, I hope you'll take a moment to share articles of interest with your friends and colleagues as well!

In the meantime, I hope you're having a safe and happy holiday season. Thanks again for another successful year in 2016, and I hope you enjoy all the new services we'll be rolling out in 2017, too!

Read More...

Here at the Nerd’s Eye View, we're always looking for opportunities to make the site and its content a more valuable financial planning resource. Over the years, our regular reader surveys have shaped everything from the visual design of the blog (e.g., making the font size bigger than the tiny size it was when we originally launched!), to the expansion of our Members section to offer webinars and CFP and IMCA CE content, the frequency of the content we publish, and more!

The rapid growth of the blog has been a wonderful affirmation from all of you that we're getting at least a few things right, but I know there's always more we can do to make this even better. And in fact, now that the site (and our staff resources) have grown, we're trying to iterate even faster to make improvements for all of you. As a result, we're accelerating our usual annual reader survey to become a semi-annual survey - and with 2017 coming up, we're anxious for your feedback about what we should be working on for you in the coming year!

And so regardless of whether you're a financial advisor, a related professional that works with financial advisors, someone associated with a vendor who serves advisors, or you're simply an individual consumer who reads this blog for your own benefit, or a member of the media who follows the Nerd's Eye View for story ideas, I hope you'll take a few minutes to answer this survey. It's only 10 questions, should take no more than a few minutes, and will remain open until the end of next week (December 9th).

Thanks in advance for clicking through to take this survey, and for sharing your feedback! 🙂
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