Advancing Knowledge in Financial Planning
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0 Comments CATEGORY: Annuities
Annuity owners sometimes wish to make a change to a portion of their annuity holdings without facing adverse tax consequences - and under current law, this can be accomplished by exchanging part of the existing annuity for a new contract on a tax-free basis.
However, the recent private letter ruling 201038012 from the IRS may have unintentionally expanded the flexibility of partial annuity exchanges to the point that they might not just be used, but could be abused as well.
2 Comments CATEGORY: Planning Profession
As debate - and some confusion - continues regarding the CFP Board's proposed fee increase, the organization has made a new fact sheet available to help address many of the questions and concerns that have been raised. However, it seems that a few of the pressing questions from the planning community are not entirely answered.
11 Comments CATEGORY: Retirement Planning
In recent years, a little-known strategy of withdrawing from and reapplying for Social Security retirement benefits has been receiving increasing attention. So much, in fact, that it looks like the Federal government's Office of Management and Budget may soon be shutting the strategy down for good. However, the impact may not actually be very significant after all!
1 Comment CATEGORY: Investments
The news this week has been abuzz with Monday's Federal government auction of Treasury Inflation-protected Securities (TIPS) that resulted in a yield of -0.55%. Surely, an investor willingness to accept a negative return in exchange for inflation-protection means investors are panicked about an impending surge of inflation, right? Actually, no, in this case, it doesn't.
5 Comments CATEGORY: Planning Profession
Many planners report that the primary reason their clients choose to work with them is a foundation of trust built with that individual client, which subsequently blossoms forth into a bona fide planner-client relationship. Accordingly, many planners have recently begun to ask: why the CFP Board fee increase to support public awareness of the CFP marks, if that’s not how clients select their planners anyway?
2 Comments CATEGORY: General Planning
The President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB) recently released its recommendations on how to simplify the tax code and improve the implementation of tax policy. Embedded within the report are numerous recommendations that would impact our so-called "retirement crisis" in the U.S., and a few of the report's solutions highlight a surprisingly simple yet important reality: we're not always very rational about the decisions we make regarding retirement.
0 Comments CATEGORY: Taxes
It's difficult to go far in the world of financial planning these days without hearing a discussion about the "inevitability" of higher taxes in the future, leading to a broad range of tax planning strategies to dodge the anticipated increase in the income tax brackets. But in practice, it seems that we might be confusing the idea that the government will need to collect more tax dollars in the aggregate from us - a higher tax burden - with the belief that today's income tax brackets are at a low point that must rise. One does not, necessarily, lead to the other.Read More...
2 Comments CATEGORY: General Planning
We often find great value and pride in owning things - yet the reality is that in many situations, we actually don't get a lot of use out of much of what we own. Which starts to beg the question - maybe we should spend more time renting stuff we want to use (loanership) when we want to use it, rather than buying it (ownership).
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1 Comment CATEGORY: Retirement Planning
In a world where retirement planning is increasingly about not only the accumulation phase towards retirement, but the distribution phase in retirement, financial planners must deal with the practical realities of generating retirement cash flows for clients. And although most of us may have some policies in our practices about how we generate cash flows for clients, do any of us actually have a written withdrawal policy statement in place to determine the appropriate tactics and strategies for each particular client?
1 Comment CATEGORY: Investments
Today is October 19, 2011. It is the 23rd anniversary of the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987, and in a few months we will "celebrate" the 6-month anniversary of the May 6, 2010 Flash Crash. With our recent obsession about crashes, I've begun to wonder: what is it about market crashes that scares us so much?
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