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Performance LTC From John Hancock – The First Participating Long-Term Care Insurance Policy?

April 27, 2016 07:01 am 26 Comments CATEGORY: Insurance

Despite being around for nearly 40 years, and enjoying preferential tax treatment for nearly half that time period, long-term care insurance has struggled to gain momentum in the marketplace. In fact, low interest rates, coupled with low lapse rates, and rising longevity, have come together to drive up long-term care insurance premiums significantly, leading LTC insurance purchases to decline nearly 70% from their peak in 2002.

However, a new approach to long-term care insurance pricing – the Performance LTC policy from John Hancock – is aiming to bring LTCI premiums down. Ironically, the new policies have eliminated any kind of pricing “guarantee” to prevent premiums from rising, but combined that change with an opportunity for policyowners to benefit if investment and claims results are favorable in the future, by accumulating “Flex Credits” that, like dividends from a participating life insurance policy, can be used to reduce future premiums and even allow LTC premiums to vanish, altogether.

The good news of this structure is that it is uniquely suited to benefit if interest rates rise in the future (unlike hybrid life/LTC or annuity/LTC policyowners who may suffer in a higher rate environment). The bad news, however, is that because Hancock is not actually a mutual insurance company, it will still face a fundamental conflict of interest in deciding how much to pay as a Flex Credit to policyowners, versus a dividend to shareholders. Nonetheless, though, the reality is that by allowing LTC insurance premiums more flexibility, Performance LTC may still potentially be less expensive LTCI coverage in the long run!

The 4 Skill Domains For Financial Advisor Mastery

April 25, 2016 07:01 am 8 Comments CATEGORY: Personal/Career Development

In the early years of financial planning, the reality was that most advisors only needed one skill to be “successful”: the ability to sell, and get clients. After all, when advisors are solely compensated by commissions, if you can’t keep finding new prospective clients to sell to – and actually sell something to them – your income will quickly go to zero.

As financial advisors have shifted to the AUM model though, and the recurring revenue it supports, the requisite entry level skillset has shifted. Now for many advisors, the key abilities are technical competency to give the right advice, and empathy skills to form and deepen the client relationship. Sales and business development comes later, if at all.

And as advisory firms have grown, for many the emerging skills gap is in the area of management, from training and developing other staff members, to the overall execution of the business.

From the career track perspective, what this means is that for financial advisors to progress in their own careers, it becomes necessary to expand their expertise across more and more of the domains – generally at least three of the four. And for advisory firms themselves, the four skill domains may provide a helpful roadmap to consider where the firm should invest resources to improve the team for the future!

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Apr 23-24)

April 22, 2016 02:44 pm 1 Comment CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" - this week's edition kicks off with the announcement that United Capital is launching a white-label service for advisors called FinLife Partners, intended to offer a form of turnkey financial planning platform that includes United Capital's proprietary financial planning tools, along with a bundled and integrated technology stack of CRM, financial planning software, and more (the solution that United Capital built internally for its own advisors over the past several years!). Also in the news this week was the big release of G4, the newest version of the MoneyGuidePro financial planning software, which has gone through a significant redesign to be able to better facilitate client conversations as an interactive planning tool.

From there, we have several practice management articles this week, including a look at how focusing on "best practices" often leads to just chasing fads and being stuck in the past rather than building towards the future, why it's time for the traditional advisor "elevator pitch" to die (or at least, be substantially reinvented), how the ongoing evolution of advisory firms is making them structure and operate more like large accounting firms, and the emerging battle for the advisor desktop as advisor platforms increasingly position themselves as being first and foremost a technology platform.

We also have a few more technical articles this week, including: the latest research on Millennials, and how they may not actually be risk-averse investors after all (but they do appear to be real-estate and debt averse!); an in-depth look at the growing awareness that the typical risk tolerance questionnaire may be doing a remarkably poor job of actually measuring true client risk tolerance; and a great explainer and analysis on whole life insurance, how it really works, and when it's appropriate (or not) to use.

We wrap up with three interesting articles, all around the theme of a growing focus on consumer spending behaviors: the first is a profile of Peter Adeney, also known as the blogger "Mr. Money Mustache", who has built a tremendous blogging platform around the idea that thrifty living isn't about self-denial but being a better global citizen; the second is a fascinating interview with four men, who have incomes varying from the poverty line to over $1,000,000/year, about their financial challenges and goals (and the fact that all of them, regardless of income, are hoping to double or triple their income to meet their goals in the next 10 years!); and the last is a fascinating "confessional" article from a writer who makes a good middle-class income, but is living from paycheck to paycheck, along with as many as 47% of other Americans who couldn't afford a $400 emergency expense without going into debt, but due to taboos of talking about money and debt are so ashamed it's difficult to even talk about the problem, much less get some help.

Enjoy the "light" reading!

Why The DoL Fiduciary Rule Won’t Kill Annuities, It Will Make Them Stronger!

April 21, 2016 01:09 pm 48 Comments CATEGORY: Annuities

Periscope Office Hours Cover Image April 19 Why DoL Fiduciary Wont Kill Annuities

Annuity products have long been the domain of annuity agents who earn substantial commissions, while the adoption of annuity products by fiduciary RIAs has been sluggish at best, ostensibly due to some combination of a dislike of available annuity products, and the lack of any commissions to incentivize their use. Yet now with the DoL fiduciary rule, there are new pressures coming that may compress annuity commissions... raising the question of whether annuity products will even survive in the long run without commission compensation to support them.

In this week’s #OfficeHours with @MichaelKitces, my Tuesday 1PM EST broadcast via Periscope, we look at how the DoL fiduciary rule may impact annuity companies and annuity product design in the coming years, and whether it's really the beginning of the end of annuity products.

Yet a deeper look reveals that the changing incentives for annuity companies may not kill annuity products at all, and in fact may actually drive annuity products to get better in the future. After all, when an annuity company can't pay a hefty commission to incentivize agents to sell it, their own remaining choice is to actually design a good product, and then market and educate advisors on how to use it appropriate - in a manner that meets their own fiduciary requirements. In addition, annuity companies will also face new pressures to be more transparent and less "gimmicky" with their product design, as anything less will drive away fiduciary advisors who will fear they can't do sufficient due diligence to manage their own liability exposure.

Of course, the biggest caveat is that the new DoL fiduciary rules only apply to retirement accounts, which means non-qualified annuities won't face any of these pressures. Yet given that the concentration of retirement dollars that would buy annuities are held in retirement accounts, the opportunity for annuity companies is to figure out how to step up and create fiduciary-ready products... which in turn may only further increase the regulatory pressure on the SEC, FINRA, and state insurance regulators to improve the standards for non-qualified annuities to match the new fiduciary world for IRAs!

Who Should File-And-Suspend For Social Security Benefits By The April 29 Deadline?

April 20, 2016 07:01 am 30 Comments CATEGORY: Retirement Planning

Last fall, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 changed the rules to eliminate two popular Social Security claiming strategies for married couples: File-and-Suspend, and Restricted Application.

Fortunately, the new rules didn’t take effect immediately, but the first transition – the elimination of File-and-Suspend – will apply for anyone who first requests for a voluntary suspension of benefits on April 30 or later. As a result, anyone who wants to be “grandfathered” under the old (current, and more favorable) rules has less than two weeks to complete their Social Security application and suspension request by the April 29 deadline!

As a result, anyone who has at least met the full retirement age of 66, and is not yet age 70, should be considering whether to submit a file-and-suspend request by April 29. Notably, the tactic is a moot point for anyone who has already claimed benefits, or who doesn’t plan to delay benefits going forward. Nor is file-and-suspend relevant for widows (who don’t need file-and-suspend to coordinate between retirement and survivor benefits), nor for divorcees (who rely on the Restricted Application strategy instead, which remains available after April 29 for anyone who was born in 1953 or prior).

Nonetheless, for married couples (and some parents with children) who are in the age 66-70 window and have not yet claimed their benefits, but where one person could activate a spousal or dependent child benefit for someone else while delaying their own benefit, only a small time window remains to submit a File-and-Suspend request before the rules are changed forever! And arguably, anyone who is single and doesn’t care about spousal benefits, but simply wants to preserve the right to “undo” and reinstate their delay decision in the next few years, may want to consider submitting a request to File-and-Suspend by April 29 as well!

Is Financial Life Management (FinLife) Going To Replace Financial Planning and Wealth Management?

April 18, 2016 07:01 am 18 Comments CATEGORY: Marketing

As the world of financial advice continues to evolve, so too does everything from the services we provide to clients, the business models by which we operate, and the labels that we use to describe ourselves. The past 50 years alone we witnessed transitions from insurance agents and stockbrokers, to financial advisors and financial consultants, to financial planners, and now wealth managers.

And now the ongoing crisis of differentiation appears to be spurring the next evolution for financial advisors, towards an ever-more-holistic model that United Capital’s Joe Duran has dubbed “Financial Life Management” instead. In this ‘new’ approach, advisors would be increasingly focused around client advice in regards to work and employment, and spending behaviors – which research finds is, from the consumer’s perspective, the real focus of their “financial life story” (and not their savings and investment portfolios!).

Of course, the caveat is that most financial advisors have limited skills and even fewer tools to support clients when it comes to areas like managing their human capital and providing guidance on spending and household cash flow. Yet in this gap is the very opportunity for firms to differentiate themselves by going deeper into a new type of service model. Including firms like United Capital that may offer a platform (e.g., FinLife Partners) to deliver on the FinLife value proposition.

Ultimately, it remains to be seen if “Financial Life Management” really becomes the new term du jour that supplants financial planning and wealth management, but arguably the time really has come for the next stage of advisor evolution. And “FinLife” seems as good a label as any to capture the ever-more-holistic focus for the future of financial advice!