The Return Of IAR Ethics CE Day And The State Of The (Nerd’s Eye View) Blog

The Return of Kitces IAR Ethics CE Day

In 2020, the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) announced its new Model Rule, impacting the entirety of Investment Adviser Representatives (IARs) with designations that allow them to provide investment advice for a fee. The New Model Rule requires IARs of RIAs to obtain 12 hours of annual Continuing Education (CE) every year – 6 hours of "Products & Practice" and 6 hours of "Ethics & Professional Responsibility" – in order to maintain their IAR registration.

Thus far, earning the "Products & Practice" requirement has been relatively straightforward for most financial advisors. There are a number of IAR CE providers offering the content – including this Nerd's Eye View blog via our Members Section – and any content that is eligible for continuing education to maintain CFP certification will also cross-qualify for the Products & Practice requirement for IAR CE (at least as long as the CE provider is registered to offer CE credits for both, as Kitces.com and most other multi-designation CE sponsors are).

However, the options to fulfill the "Ethics & Professional Responsibility" obligation for IAR CE are fewer and further between. The NASAA requirements for such content effectively require the material to cover the technical (i.e., legal, regulatory, and other compliance) rules that apply to registered investment advisers, and/or otherwise teach directly about the ethical and professional responsibilities that IAR (and their fiduciary obligations) entail, which is a drastically narrower scope of eligible educational content than what qualifies for Products & Practice, and requires more expertise (in RIA compliance and regulatory obligations).

Which is why last year, in addition to offering IAR Ethics CE content through the Nerd's Eye View (e.g., for articles written by compliance attorney and contributor Chris Stanley), we rolled out "Kitces IAR Ethics CE Day" – a live 6-hour virtual event that allowed financial advisers fulfill the entirety of their 6 hours of IAR Ethics & Professional Responsibility CE 'just' by attending for the day! Last year, more than 650 advisers joined the live event, getting credit not only for their Ethics & Professional Responsibility requirements but also for the full breadth of CE types that Kitces.com covers (including CFP, CPA, and all the various designations from IWI, American College, and the College for Financial Planning).

And in the months since our 2023 IAR Ethics CE Day, we've had more and more advicers reaching out to ask if we would be doing it again, especially with the ongoing rise in the number of states that have enacted the IAR CE obligation… from 3 states in 2022, to 11 in 2023, up to 18 in 2024. And given that the rule applies to any IAR with more than the de minimis number of clients in any state that has enacted the rule (even if the advisor themselves is not based there), the addition of California and Florida to the IAR CE roster in 2024 has rapidly expanded the number of financial advisors who must get IAR CE (again, or for the first time) this year!

Because of this combination – the enthusiastic response from our attendees last year and the significant expansion of IARs subject to IAR CE this year – we are once again offering Kitces IAR Ethics CE Day on August 29, 2024! Similar to last year, the event will once again also be eligible for CE for CFP professionals, CPAs, and holders of other professional designations, as well as CFP Board Ethics and IWI Ethics requirements as well!

Registration is open for Kitces IAR Ethics CE Day, a live virtual event on August 29th of 2024, covering the full 6 hours of IAR CE Ethics requirements, cross-applying for CFP, CPA, and other designations, and satisfying CFP Board Ethics and IWI Ethics requirements as well!

This year's IAR Ethics CE Day will focus heavily on maintaining one's ethical and compliance obligations in the face of the recent wave of new RIA regulations (and expanded enforcement of some older regulations) to help advisors determine the best strategies for crafting marketing, delivering advice, creating standards and policies to keep a firm and team compliant, and preparing for the event of a compliance audit. At the same time, attendees will also learn about future regulatory and legislative proposals under consideration in Washington in an ever-changing compliance (and advice!) landscape to be prepared for what may come next year!

Advisers looking to join the live Kitces IAR CE Day virtual event can register here. The pricing of the event is:

• Registration: $199 for the full day of live content
• Registration for Kitces Premier Members: $149
• Dual registration for IAR CE Day and joining the Kitces Members Section: $338 (cost when priced separately: $388)

The cost of IAR Ethics CE Day registration already includes the $18 IAR CE filing fees as a part of the price. Additional discounts are also available for multi-advisor groups by contacting [email protected].

Ultimately, Kitces.com is committed to providing enough written content throughout the year to cover the entire IAR Ethics CE obligation for Kitces Members (at no additional cost beyond membership itself), but for advisers who would like to fulfill their IAR Ethics obligations in one fell swoop (and avoid the often-painful 'December IAR CE completion crunch') and be able to see and hear the content as a live event (instead of reading it!)… we hope to see you on August 29!

Introducing Our New "Optimizing Roth Conversions" Course

Every year, countless advicers help their clients look ahead to plan for a financially secure retirement, with an eye towards helping them save, both to invest their savings for growth and minimize the tax burdens along the way. And the intricacies of tax-optimized retirement planning are well-highlighted by the technical and logistical challenges that come with executing Roth conversions, from figuring out whether or how much to convert each year to choosing when to convert within the year and how to handle the tax burden… and as tax laws and market conditions continue to evolve, these conversions have only become more complex, not simpler.

And, as with so many aspects of financial planning, many advicers who are early in their career face a conundrum when learning how to do this well. Accumulating technical skill requires advicers to recognize opportunities, explain concepts, and execute strategies… but actually doing this 'live' with clients comes with its own risks in an industry that is inherently high-trust (and comes with hard consequences in the event that something is done incorrectly!). At the same time, without practicing and iterating on these skills, advicers are unable to progress and learn how to do the specialized planning work.

So, given the complex landscape of Roth conversions, the technique's breadth of utility from high-earning pre-retirees to Roth conversions in early (and even later) retirement itself, and the fact that new advicers need a space to learn the practical and communicative skills of executing on these tactics, we're excited to announce the launch of our latest Kitces Course: "Optimizing Tax-Efficient Roth Conversion Strategies And Implementation", featuring our very own Jeff Levine and Michael Kitces as instructors!

The latest Kitces Course is on "Optimizing Tax-Efficient Roth Conversion Strategies And Implementation". Due to launch in early August, this 6-hour Roth Conversions master class, taught by Jeff Levine and Michael Kitces, will delve into everything from exactly how much to Roth convert each year to when (and whether) a client should do a Roth conversion in any particular year (or not!).

As with all of our Kitces Courses, our new Roth Conversions course is designed primarily for advicers who are in the early stages of their career (or perhaps those further along who wouldn't mind brushing up a little!) and aims to go beyond 'just' learning the technical rules of Roth conversions; instead, this 6-hour, 7-module master class focuses on real-world client scenarios that give advicers a chance to iterate on conversion analyses, strategies for common client scenarios, ways to present Roth recommendations to clients and get their buy-in about the upfront tax impact, and mitigation of the potential negative consequences of Roth conversions… so that they can go into live client meetings and scenarios with confidence.

Our new Roth Conversion Course will be finishing its beta testing in July and will become available to the advicer community in August at our standard $397 per advicer (or $297 for Kitces Premier Members, with further discounts available for multi-advisor groups) – so advicers who want to learn not just the "what" but also the "how" of Roth Conversions can stay tuned to their email inbox for our newest Course's imminent launch announcement!

More IAR And Other CE Available Through Kitces Webinars (And Save-The-Dates For Upcoming Kitces Events)

In late 2023, we made significant investments into our Kitces Education team both to expand the depth and pace of delivering our Kitces Courses and also to accelerate the cadence of our ever-growing live virtual events.

Starting in January 2024, our historical monthly webinars have now expanded into a 2-webinars-per-month series on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of every month at 3:00 PM ET. These 1.5-hour events feature deep dives into technical topics that we hope will actually make a difference for advicers – and in usual Kitces-style, focus on just the educational content, with no sponsors or vendors. And this year, in addition to increasing the cadence of our popular webinars, we expanded CE eligibility to 1.5 hours per webinar (so the Q&A time with instructors receives CE credit, along with the presentation itself), and will now be offering IAR CE credit for Members who have purchased the IAR CE add-on (in addition to our usual CE for CFP, CPA, and designations from IWI, American College, and the College for Financial Planning). As always, webinar registration is free for Premier Members (or $49 per event for non-Premier Members).

In 2024, Kitces Education has expanded to 2 webinars per month on the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays at 3:00 PM ET, expanded CE credits to 1.5 hours per webinar (including presentation and instructor Q&A time), and now provides IAR CE credit in addition to cross-applying for all other CE types!

Notably, Premier Members also get access to additional live virtual event offerings from Kitces, such as our continually popular advisor makeovers on the 3rd Friday of "even" months (February, April, June, etc.), where Michael and another industry expert take a deep dive behind the scenes (or, perhaps more aptly put, behind the screens) of a real advisory firm in a live consulting session to problem-solve with the advisor on a variety of practice management issues, from a marketing makeover of their website to a review of their advisor compensation plan or their profit-and-loss statement. Alternatively, on the 3rd Friday of "odd" months (January, March, May, etc.), advisors can join Financial Planning Nerd Adam Van Deusen in our Software Showcases, which features tech demos from a set of vendors who offer competing solutions in a popular software category, such as Client Relationship Management (CRM) or estate planning software, to make it easier for advisors to compare and contrast the major providers and narrow down to the ones they want to explore further.

And lastly, please Save The Date for our ever-popular Kitces Financial Planning Value Summit! On December 12, 2024 (from 12:00–4:00 PM ET), real advisors will show attendees what they've implemented in their practices to deliver and demonstrate their upfront and ongoing financial planning value to clients and prospects. Tickets for the Value Summit will be available soon. For advisors who want to share the ways that they're providing ongoing value, keep an eye out for applying to be a presenter!

With so many moving pieces, here is a brief calendar showing the back half of the year for Kitces events.

 

Expanded Support For Multi-Advisor Groups And Large-Firm Enterprises

In the early days of Kitces.com, most advisors who joined our Members Section simply purchased it for themselves as a way to get Continuing Education credits for the Nerd's Eye View blog content they were already reading. And our focus as a platform was simply on making it easy to purchase membership and access the content.

In recent years, though, a growing number of multi-advisor firms and larger enterprises have been looking to Kitces.com as a way to solve all the CE needs for all of their advisors with one big Group subscription(particularly when there are multiple advisors with multiple designations across multiple states with IAR CE obligations… and it's nice to be able to solve for it all with one CE provider). However, because Kitces.com was originally built for individual advisors purchasing Memberships one at a time, administrators of multi-advisor groups who wanted to create a new firm-level relationship with Kitces, and then add or remove members, had to manually submit service ticket requests to our Member Services team for each and every one of those actions!

With a growing number of multi-advisor Group subscriptions, this year, the Kitces Members Section has built new Group and Enterprise administrator dashboards to make it easier to add or remove members, enroll more advisors into IAR CE, and enroll and onboard their team!

And so, at the beginning of 2024, we began a series of platform improvements to make this easier for our growing number of group and enterprise administrators… starting with the ability for them to add and subtract advisor members from their subscription and to add IAR CE reporting, and more recently for Groups to entirely purchase and enroll their group members directly through the platform.

For the time being, Enterprise administrators will still need to contact member services to purchase memberships (because of the differences from one enterprise to the next in how they onboard), but once an enterprise is added, administrators are empowered to ensure their teams have everything they need, without needing to submit a ticket and wait for our Member Services team to process their requests!

 

And, of course, this certainly isn't the end of our Members Section improvements from our platform team – there is more to come in the second half of this year and into 2025! But we're excited that these changes are already making a measurable difference both to administrators and to the advisors within their firms in being able to more easily manage their multi-advisor Group members!

New Kitces Marketing Study Results On How Advicers Actually Do Marketing

Giving good financial advice itself involves both technical skills (in doing the analyses necessary to give the best recommendations across many different circumstances) and communication skills (in giving those recommendations well, and in a way that people are more likely to act upon them). Developing these skills is a core part of becoming an established CFP professional… but an often less-developed part of many advisors' skill set is bringing in those clients in the first place. After all, it's difficult to deliver high-quality professional financial advice if you can't find and persuade clients to engage you for advice services in the first place!

Fortunately, there is still a 'blue ocean' of demand for financial advice, as while the industry has raised fears of whether robo-advisors – and now AI – will be a threat to financial advisors, in reality, consumers have been seeking out financial advisors more in recent years, not less. And when financial advisors often top out at no more than 75–100 clients per advisor, and there are 'only' 100,000 CFP professionals, there are only enough financial planners to serve barely 10 million of the 130 million households in the U.S. today!

However, where advicers were once able to differentiate themselves in the financial advice industry itself by focusing less on sales and more on comprehensive advice, the reality is that now many parts of the industry have caught up – simply being a comprehensive financial planner is not the differentiator it once was. More and more advisors offer comprehensive advice in an ongoing AUM or subscription fee model, all willing to work with any client who has the financial wherewithal to afford their services and a proclivity towards delegation… which is making it increasingly difficult for consumers to figure out which advisor to work with in particular, and for any consumer who is looking, to find an advisor relatively quickly. Which means it's gotten very difficult for most advisors to differentiate in a crowded marketplace as they compete to win the trust of a client facing the high-stakes decision of whether to give all of their life savings to a financial advisor.

By and large, most advisors aren't blind to this – our latest Kitces Research Study on How Financial Advisors Actually Market Their Services shows that financial advisors are spending more money (and time!) on marketing than ever and relying on a growing range of marketing tactics beyond 'just' client referrals. In fact, our results showed that the highest-growth firms are relying on referrals the least to power their growth! And that while client referrals have long been the backbone of advisor marketing, this year's study marked a fall in the aggregate number of advisory firms who used referrals as a way to find new prospects – from 93% to 88% of total advisory firms.

 

So what are financial advisors doing to market instead? The short answer: Everything. Our results showed that the biggest determinant of faster growth was not any particular standout marketing tactic, but simply that the more time and dollars that are spent on marketing, the more that a firm grows.

 

At the same time, though, many advisory firms are struggling to get a good yield on their hard and soft dollars invested into marketing. In other words, spending 'more' (in dollars and time) is not necessarily a guarantee of growth unless this spending is also done efficiently. Accordingly, one of the most distinguishing factors of high-growth firms was simply that these firms are better at deploying their marketing efforts – in whatever tactic they use – into actual results, with most high-growth practices generating more than $1 of new revenue for every $1 of time or hard-dollars they spend on marketing!

 

This, in turn, points to the real key trend emerging from both the decline of referral marketing and the rise of 'other' marketing tactics: The success of marketing tactics isn't about the particular tactic that advisors pursue (there is, unfortunately, no 1 thing advisors can do to guarantee clients); it's more of an acknowledgment that the most successful advisor-marketers recognize what makes them and their firms unique and the ideal client they're trying to speak to… and that they then target their marketing accordingly.

Furthermore, what is equally important is that advisors recognize that, as their firms grow, the time-based marketing tactics that were used to grow their firms in the first place can become unsustainably expensive. Thus, the challenge for advisors becomes both finding what their own unique value propositions are and molding a process that articulates their value to prospects without taking too much of an advisor's ever-more-valuable time.

Ultimately, the key takeaway from our latest Kitces Marketing Research is that, in the absence of a 1-size-fits-most marketing strategy, it's up to individual firms to consciously craft a strategic marketing plan to speak to their ideal client and whatever that prospective client needs to hear – which can offer both a creative challenge and immense rewards to the advisors who continually track and refine the marketing tactics that work for their firm over time!

Advisors wanting more insights about the marketing tactics that real advisors across multiple firm sizes use can read the full Kitces Research on Advisor Marketing here. And that's not the end of the research insights! This fall, we will be launching our 2024 study on How Advisors Actually Do Financial Planning. Sign up for our email list to take the survey (which gives participants early access to the results!), and help us document more fully what real financial planning actually looks like for advisors across their many roles, firm sizes, and circumstances!

Upcoming Opportunities With Our Kitces Team Of Nerds

As the community of "Financial Advicers" who deliver (and get paid for) high-quality, truly comprehensive financial planning has grown, it has brought with it a hunger for more education, resources, and guidance in how to improve the art and science of financial advice, from career-building to practice management to accurate, in-depth technical knowledge.

The Kitces team has grown right alongside that community, now numbering 23 full-time employees (and half a dozen more part-time contractors) dedicated to facilitating education to financial advisors. And it's this team growth that has allowed us to continuously expand our high-quality offerings, including the increased frequency of webinars, our ongoing Research Studies, more support for IAR CE, and the group and enterprise management features outlined above.

In just the last several months, we've welcomed several new hires to the team to provide better support and insights to our new Members and offerings, including Engagement Coordinator Stacey Garber, Senior Full-Stack JavaScript Engineer Benjamin Leffler, and Director of Research Mark Tenenbaum.

Additionally, as our Kitces Team of Nerds grows, one of our fundamental principles has been, and continues to be, that team members have the opportunity to "get your nerd on" in order to develop their professional passions (i.e., 'nerd out on') in the workplace. That principle, combined with the realities of being a young, rapidly growing company, means that new opportunities arise, which were not present when a team member first joined the team, offering opportunities to pivot into new growth paths.

In that context, we're excited to announce that Managing Editor Sydney Squires will be transitioning into a Senior Financial Planning Nerd role, where she will be more focused on writing more of our nerdy long-form Kitces articles (and helping us to curate guest authors who might be a good fit for the Nerd's Eye View blog)… which also means the Managing Editor role is open now for someone who's excited to lead our team of nerdy writers, manage the day-to-day publishing calendar of the blog, and drive the ongoing growth of our advicer readership. This role is open currently, so apply now (or share with someone you know who might be interested)!

As current Managing Editor Sydney Squires moves into a Senior Financial Planning Nerd role, the Kitces Team has an opening for a new Managing Editor… if you're interested or know someone who might be, check out the Kitces Career Opportunities page for more details!

In the coming months, we'll also be hiring a new role – an Operations Coordinator to further support the workflows, processes, and systems that come with the realities of supporting a rapidly growing team, as well as the onboarding process and team retreat planning!

So, if you or anyone you know might be interested, sign up for the Kitces Careers mailing list here to stay apprised when we begin the hiring process for these (or other future) openings on the Kitces team.

All of which is ultimately in pursuit of our mission at Kitces.com – to Make Financial Advicers Better, and More Successful, through our N-E-R-D-y organizational strategy: providing Navigational resources, delivering Educational Insights, conducting Research on Advicers, and supporting the Development of Advicer skills.

 

And, of course, we still remain as committed as ever to creating high-quality, advicer-centric, insightful content through our Nerd's Eye View blog articles by growing our team of nerds, with plenty of opportunities for Advisors themselves to get involved or become contributors. In that same vein, it's sometimes easy, as Advicers, to underestimate their own good work and unique insights. We encourage Advicers to 'take a chance' and apply to contribute if any of our opportunities sound like a good fit – after all, we only grow as an Advicer community by sharing our insights and solutions with others! Or, just keep following the content journey with us!

If there's anything else you think we should be working on that we've missed, please share your thoughts in the comments below!