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Cross-Border Financial Planning: Issues When Advising International Clients

October 14, 2020 07:02 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: General Planning

As the growing international economy and prevalence of virtual communication continue to flatten the world, millions of individuals are finding it easier to cross national borders, leaving their native countries for opportunities to work and live abroad, whether going from the US to other countries or coming from other countries to work and live in the US. Yet crossing international borders introduces a number of unique issues and challenges, from financial reporting obligations to tax complexities, moving money across currencies to moving retirement benefits between countries… which on the one hand creates a unique opportunity for financial planners to specialize in the needs of cross-border clients to differentiate themselves… but also increases the burden of what financial advisors must learn to be able to effectively provide advice to an international clientele.

In this guest post, Ashley Murphy – Founder and Executive Director of the Global Financial Planning Institute in Minneapolis, MN – shares a framework for financial advisors to classify common issues that arise with inbound or outbound cross-border clients, and discusses some of the main challenges that advisors must be aware of when working with an international clientele. Additionally, he offers resources and suggestions for financial advisors to expand and hone their knowledge of the issues that their cross-border financial planning clients require from them.

The types of services cross-border planning clients require from financial advisors can often be categorized by their particular stage of transition with respect to crossing national borders. These stages include 1) Pre-Move, 2) Acclimation, 3) Global Integration, and 4) Retirement and Independence. Each comes with unique planning issues, and by identifying the specific transition stage that applies to their client, financial advisors can more readily pinpoint their international clients’ current needs and anticipate what they may require in the future. For example, clients in the Pre-Move stage may need help with immigration logistics and pre-move planning, banking and cash management, and ironing out family issues (e.g., identifying education standards for children, work options for spouses and other family members, etc.), whereas clients in the Acclimation stage may need help with worldwide tax questions and establishing or transitioning retirement plans. Clients in the Global Integration stage might need more help with longer-term immigration planning and coordinating and allocating their worldwide assets, and clients in the last retirement and independence stage may have the ‘usual’ planning needs (e.g., retirement and estate planning), but advisors will need to understand the international aspects of these areas to help their clients effectively.

Cross-border planning clients have unique considerations that financial advisors must take into account when helping them set their financial planning goals. For nearly every international client, advisors should know how long the client expects to stay in their destination country; the US and foreign tax implications of all income sources, including any capital gains; the protocols in place for foreign investment and performance reporting; and the account transfers that the client will need to make, along with the logistical issues that may arise from those transfers (especially when these transfers are between different countries). Notably, advisors should also be cognizant of Foreign Bank Account Reporting (FBAR) requirements and potential penalties related to Passive Foreign Investment Corporations (PFICs) that may affect their clients.

In addition to helping clients identify goals, advisors also must be familiar with the resources and services that their clients will need to make progress toward and realize their goals. For instance, advisors should be able to identify appropriate products (e.g., life insurance, disability insurance, investment funds, etc.), suitable broker-dealers or custodians to service their clients (as many won’t accept international clients, due to the additional compliance burdens), and competent experts to step in when specialized services are needed (e.g., international tax planning professionals and estate planning attorneys).

When it comes to servicing international clients, financial advisors will have their own operational needs. For instance, an advisor with cross-border clients will need to understand the relevant regulatory and licensing requirements in place with the foreign countries where their clients are located. They may want to review their Errors & Omissions (E&O) coverage to ensure that exposures unique to their international clients’ planning needs (e.g., trading in foreign securities) are sufficiently covered by their policies (which isn’t always the case). Furthermore, advisors may even wish to review their business model to ensure they are servicing their international clients most profitably, as the traditional AUM model (which typically is reliant on a long-term US-based portfolio) will not always be the best solution for the advisor.

Finding suitable products and service providers not only for clients but for financial advisors themselves can be a challenge when there may be limited means available to vet such products and services. However, there are resources to help advisors with their international research needs, such as the Financial Planning Standards Board (FPSB), which oversees international CFP certification standards, and the Global Financial Planning Institute (GFPI), which offers resources specifically to support advisors with international clients.

Ultimately, the key point is that while advisors with international and cross-border planning clients need to understand a wide range of rules applicable to the other countries in which their clients reside and be able to access services and products that their clients may need, there are resources and specialists available to the advisor that can help them serve their clients effectively. And because of the growing community of expats around the globe, financial advisors may find it worthwhile to establish competency in these cross-border financial planning issues to help their international clients… no matter where they may live!

#FASuccess Ep 198: How The Creator Of The 4 Percent Rule Applied It For His Clients And His Own Retirement, With Bill Bengen

October 13, 2020 07:04 am 8 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 198th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Bill Bengen. Bill is the former owner of Bengen Financial Services, an independent RIA based in Southern California that oversaw nearly 50 million of assets under management for 80 affluent retirees.

What's unique about Bill, though, is that he's also known as the father of the 4% rule and the progenitor of the research that we now know as safe withdrawal rate, research that he not only published in a series of studies in the "Journal of Financial Planning" and a subsequent book, but also research that he put into practice with his clients as a financial planning practitioner.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Bill first developed the safe withdrawal rate research, the retirement problem in the early 1990s that he was trying to solve for, the irony that Bill first did his safe withdrawal rate studies to delve deeper than the rules of thumb that were popular at the time and then ended out having his 4% rule become a rule of thumb instead, how Bill integrated his 4% rule alongside his financial planning business, and why Bill didn't actually use the 4% safe withdrawal rate with his clients. He used 4.5% instead.

We also talked about Bill's own path as a financial planner, how he career changed into financial planning after first studying aerospace engineering and then spending his first career running the family soda bottling business, how a faithful media mention of NAPFA led Bill to launch his business from the start as an independent RIA in the early 1990s when it was not yet popular to do so, and how Bill was able to get traction in his early marketing as one of the only fee-only financial planners in his area, and why Bill decided from the start to maintain his firm is a lifestyle practice with no more than about 80 clients at any particular time.

And be certain to listen to the end where Bill shares what led him to ultimately decide to retire and sell his firm, why he believes the safe withdrawal rate today could be as high as 5% given the low-inflation environment, the reason Bill currently maintains a very conservative portfolio for his own assets as a retiree, and why Bill thinks that advisors should be more tactical with the asset allocation for their own retired clients.

So whether you’re interested in learning about how Bill transitioned from studying aerospace engineering to financial planning, how he became an early proponent of the fee-only model, or whether the 4% Rule still applies, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.

Implementing The WAVE Method To Build A Diversified Marketing Strategy

October 12, 2020 07:03 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Marketing

Growth is a real challenge for many advisory firms, from the advisor who got into the business to help people (not market to them), to the advisor who’s 'great' in front of prospects (with a strong ability to sell their value) but struggles to find prospects to get in front of in the first place. Often at best, advisors find one particular strategy that works at least ‘OK’ for them, and then focus all their time and energy there… and in the process, neglect (or never even attempt) the rest of the steps of a comprehensive marketing plan and doing what it takes to build a steady ongoing pipeline of prospects for growth.

In this guest post, Amy Parvaneh, Founder and CEO of Select Advisors Institute, explains the WAVE Method, a 12-step marketing plan created to apply the concept of diversification to advisor marketing strategy by engaging efforts across four categories: 1) Wealth Detection, 2) Asking For Referrals, 3) Visibility, and 4) Emailing Prospective Clients.

The Wealth Detection category is about advisors staying informed about their communities (through local magazines), and the areas relevant to their niche clients (through Google alerts), as well as creating a pipeline of potential business development leads (by taking notes on individuals and places encountered on a daily basis to ‘detect’ who has wealth or, better yet, money in motion).

Asking For Referrals focuses on using clients and Centers Of Influence (COIs) as primary referral sources, ideally with a systematic routine of asking for referrals regularly. Additionally, more passive strategies can be used to softly ‘Ask’ For Referrals, such as including a brief message in your email signature line or adding a call-to-action banner on your website that directs clients on where to go to “Give a Referral”.

The featured areas of Visibility that can help an advisor grow their business include Social Media Visibility, in which advisors post personalized and relevant content regularly to establish a captivated audience that wants to follow them; Humanized Visibility, in which advisors are encouraged to connect with others as much as possible either in person or virtually, through activities such as attending trade conferences, volunteering, and creating video content; and Public Relations efforts, in which advisors pitch and contribute content to editors or publishers of well-known media publications for brand-name affiliation.

Emailing Prospective Clients helps advisors connect directly with generating actionable leads ready to do business, and can include ‘cold’ emails that are targeted to commercially available lists, or specifically targeted people the advisor is interested in meeting. Alternatively, social media followers, such as connections on LinkedIn, can be reached by sending them a past post of interest (perhaps one that may have been featured on the advisor’s feed). Last, the production of an original, personalized newsletter can be an effective way to reach prospective clients (and then sending it outbound via email to ensure it gets in front of them!).

Ultimately, the key point is that there are many strategies available to advisors to market their firms, but that advisors don’t necessarily have to bet everything on one strategy, and instead, similar to investing, can diversify efforts across multiple areas. Just be certain to also engage in a periodic review of performance and results to understand what’s working!

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (October 10-11)

October 9, 2020 02:55 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 barely 2 months after Charles Schwab made waves by offering (MoneyGuidePro) financial planning software directly to their consumer clients for free, Bank of America is launching a similar solution, dubbed "Life Plan", that will be made available to their clients directly and provide them the opportunity to create and track progress towards their own goals (and then contact a Bank of America/Merrill Lynch human financial advisor if they want further advice).

Also in the news this week is the official closing of the "Schwabitrade" merger of Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade (but only the beginning of what is anticipated to be an 18 - 36 month integration process, and many open questions about exactly what TDA software and systems will remain, or not), and the revelation that Goldman Sachs has been quietly recruiting talent for what appears to be its own soon-to-be-launched RIA custody offering on the back of its recent Folio Financial RIA custodial acquisition earlier this summer.

From there, we have several investment articles this week, including the news that Morgan Stanley is acquiring mutual fund manager Eaton Vance as the consolidation of asset managers continues (though the real story may be the fact that more than half of Eaton Vance assets are in Parametric's 'direct indexing' and ESG-customized portfolios as the 'next big thing' after mutual funds?), a recent industry survey finding that while only a small segment of clients are focused on ESG investing the ones who are appear to be far more likely to refer their financial advisor (who delivers well on social investing) to their own friends and family, and a recent investing poll finding that while new investing apps like Robinhood and Acorns have been highly controversial they may be single-handedly cutting the racial and age gaps in individual stock ownership (albeit with a concerning about of leverage and margin investing!).

We've also included a number of articles on the challenging theme of customization and personalization in the digitally based pandemic era, including a fresh look at how you scale the "special" of your advisory firm while maintaining personalization (hint: instead of providing customized advice for each different client, create a customized advice process for a unique type of client and then focus on serving that differentiated clientele), what it takes to create intimacy in a digital world (hint: it's all about personal connection), and the real-world challenges that remain in trying to create intimacy in a virtual environment (and why the future of the financial advice business may be all about the things that we can uniquely only do in an in-person relationship).

We wrap up with three interesting articles, all around the theme of learning and new ideas: the first looks at how new ideas and innovation occur within a business, where it's not enough to have a visionary or 'genius' who can create new ideas, but also the social 'butterflies' who help propagate new ideas across the company so they're actually implemented; the second explores a new research study finding that we're far more likely to learn lessons from our experiences when we control the decision about which path to pursue in the first place; and the last examines the awkwardness of feeling like a "noob" (newbie) when trying something out for the first time, and why even though it's natural to want to avoid those feelings of awkward "noobness", that in the end the only way we ever improve is to create (and then push through) those feelings of awkwardness on the path to learning something new!

Enjoy the 'light' reading!

Kitces & Carl Ep 44: Communicating New Advice Fees When Transitioning Clients From A Commission-Based Business Model

October 8, 2020 07:09 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Kitces & Carl Podcast

For much of its history, the financial advice industry has been dominated by a commission-based business model, where the comprehensive financial plan was a form of consultative selling that demonstrated to the prospective client their gaps (that the advisor’s products could fill). Given the one-off nature of the model, financial advisors would, in turn, need to gather as many clients as they possibly could in order to have a stable of existing clients with whom they do business again sometime down the road... often to a point where the advisor became overwhelmed with the number of individuals that they had to try to stay in touch with. However, as the nature of financial planning has become more about the relationship and ongoing advice rather than ‘just’ the transaction being implemented, additional business models (whether they be based on assets, income, a flat fee, or hourly) have evolved, giving advisors options to more effectively get paid for the ongoing advice relationship and providing ongoing comprehensive advice to their clients. Yet when an advisor has in the past primarily or only been compensated by commissions (that their clients don’t necessarily see), the transition to charging upfront or outright fees can be challenging. Which raises the question: what is the best way to communicate to clients when transitioning to a more fee-oriented business model?

In our 44^th episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss the key mindset shifts that advisors need to make in order to better serve their clients and themselves, how to present to clients who may not initially get why anything needs to change in the first place, and why, at the end of the day, most clients may not end out transitioning over... and why that’s okay!

The best way to navigate the transition to a more fee-based model depends on how the advisor comes to the proverbial commission/fee crossroads. One camp comes from the traditional brokerage model, and after years of accumulating a Rolodex of (sometimes hundreds of) clients find that they are starting to burn out, and want to get off the treadmill of having to continuously find new people to do business with and finding new products to offer. These advisors want to build a more focused business, with a smaller subset of their top “A” clients, and will often seek to transition legacy clients who they may have interacted with only a few times over the span of several years. In such circumstances, advisors will need to clearly lay out how the relationship will change, and all of the new (holistic) services that the clients who are staying will be getting on a regular basis.

The second type of advisor transitioning to a more fee-based model may have already started providing ongoing services, are proactive with their planning, and having regular meetings… but are getting buried in the volume because their (transactional high-volume) business model doesn’t match their (relationship-oriented lower-volume higher-touch) service model. In such instances, the conversation isn’t around all the services the advisor will be providing, but rather making sure that the fee structure is aligned with the work that’s being done so that it can continue to happen sustainably and scalably on an ongoing basis.

Ultimately, the key point is that the transition conversation isn’t about suddenly charging clients more and new fees, but instead doing a better job of aligning the advisor’s ongoing value to their ongoing business model, and aligning their ongoing business model to the advisor’s ongoing services. And, at the end of the day, it’s important to realize that many clients who hired an advisor for a more one-time transactional service will decide not to transition to a more ongoing relationship-based model, which may seem daunting at first blush but really means that the advisor will simply end out working fewer hours with a more focused clientele who really value what the advisor does and are willing to pay for it, ensuring the advisor can profitably serve the right relationships and charge what they are really worth!

Coordinating Social Security Couples’ Benefits For The Self-Employed: The False Promise Of Salary-Splitting

October 7, 2020 07:05 am 7 Comments CATEGORY: Retirement Planning

For many financial advisors, Social Security retirement benefits are often an integral part of their clients’ retirement strategies to provide income. However, married couples not only have their own retirement benefits that are calculated based on each person’s individual’s work history (assuming they have the requisite 40 quarter-credits of earnings) available to them, but can also take advantage of spousal benefits when an individual’s spouse has a work history that leads to a benefit greater than their own retirement benefit. While the spousal benefit is often advantageous to the extent that the work history of an individual’s spouse leads to a greater benefit than the individual’s own retirement benefit, it does lend to potential strategies for married couples to maximize total Social Security benefits that are not available to single individuals.

The amount of an individual’s Social Security retirement benefit that would be received at Full Retirement Age (FRA; 66 for individuals born in 1954 and thus reaching that age in 2020) is the Primary Insurance Amount (PIA) and is calculated based on a formula that takes a certain percentage of the wage-inflation-adjusted average of the worker’s highest 35 years of FICA- or SECA-taxed earnings (i.e., the Average Indexed Monthly Earnings, or AIME). While the retirement benefit is equal to the PIA when a worker claims their benefit at FRA, benefits are reduced if they begin prior to the worker reaching FRA and increased if taken later (up to age 70). By contrast, an individual’s spousal benefit is equal to 50% of their spouse’s PIA. The spousal benefit is not adjusted if the working spouse claims the benefit early (e.g., if the working spouse begins taking retirement benefits before reaching FRA), but the spousal benefit is adjusted lower if the non-/lower-earning spouse claiming the benefit does so before their own FRA.

A business owner who is married may have the flexibility to hire their spouse and 'transfer' a portion of their salary between themselves and their spouses (assuming that the spouse actually provides services to the company to earn a salary in the first place). While this can serve to increase the couple’s combined retirement benefits, it often results in lower combined overall Social Security benefits for the couple! Notably, without shifting any salary, the non-/lower-earning spouse is already entitled to a spousal benefit. Accordingly, shifting salary away from the higher-earning spouse will often reduce their PIA right away (unless they already have 35 years of higher wage-inflation-adjusted earnings or, after the split, they continue to have earnings in excess of the maximum amount subject to FICA taxes for the year), while the benefit that the non-/lower-earning spouse would be entitled to won’t increase until their own retirement benefits exceed the spousal benefit that they would have received absent any changes.

In situations where a married worker receives compensation higher than the maximum amount subject to FICA taxes, cumulative Social Security benefits to the couple can potentially be increased by splitting the business owner’s salary between spouses. The caveat, though, is that by shifting the higher-than-FICA-maximum compensation to a lower-earning spouse, there can be a significant increase in annual FICA tax liability. In many – and perhaps, most – cases, the downside of the increase in FICA taxes will more than offset any cumulative increase in potential Social Security benefits. Thus, such an approach typically does not benefit a couple.

There are, however, situations where splitting the business owner spouse’s salary can make sense. One such situation is when a worker’s annual compensation will not be included in one of their top-35 years in calculating their Social Security AIME. If such is the case, and the worker’s compensation to be split is below the maximum amount subject to FICA, it may be possible to increase the spouse’s retirement benefit such that it exceeds their spousal benefit, thus netting a higher overall Social Security benefit for the couple (and without impacting the total FICA tax due)! Additionally, shifting compensation from a higher-earning spouse to their lower-earning partner will result in increasing the lower earner’s PIA. And with a higher PIA, calculated from the AIME based on the lower earner's own work history, the individual’s retirement benefit will be commensurately higher, with the flexibility to claim those benefits as retirement benefits whenever they desire (versus being required to wait until the higher-earning spouse decides to claim their own benefit, which would only then allow them to claim their spousal benefit). And while the net retirement benefit amount may not be higher, it may be the couple’s particular situation where flexibility to claim the benefits is more important.

Another situation where salary splitting may make sense for a married couple is if one spouse earns less than the other, but their own retirement benefit is already close to, equal to, or greater than their spousal benefit. In such circumstances, less (or potentially none) of the additional compensation received by the spouse will be ‘wasted’ by only increasing their own retirement benefit to equal their already-existing spousal benefit. Thus, salary shifting in this instance would potentially result in increasing the lower-earning spouse’s own retirement benefit such that the couple’s net Social Security benefits would be greater.

Ultimately, the key point is that to the extent a spouse can be legitimately hired for providing services to a working spouse's company, salary-splitting strategies can be considered (or avoided) as a way to help the couple optimize their Social Security benefits, and offer some timing flexibility for spouses who may feel constrained by the rules of claiming spousal benefits. However, financial advisors should be aware of the potential limitations that these strategies have, especially because of the role that spousal benefits play in a couple’s total Social Security benefit.