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Judge Ends Camarda Case Against CFP Board – Time To Finally Fix The Fee-Only Compensation Definition?

July 8, 2015 07:40 pm 25 Comments CATEGORY: Industry News

This week, the controversial case between Jeff and Kim Camarda and the CFP Board came to a conclusion, with the judge granting the CFP Board’s motion for summary judgment to throw out the case altogether.

Yet within the CFP Board’s victory, numerous questions remain. The judge’s ruling itself has been sealed for 14 days, giving the CFP Board (and the Camardas) an opportunity to make the case for why it should remain private indefinitely… which means we may ultimately never know on what basis the CFP Board was declared victorious. Did the judge decide that the CFP Board really administered its disciplinary process appropriately, or ironically was the decision actually that the CFP Board isn’t accountable in a court of law at all… a win for the organization, but a frightening precedent for us as CFP certificants.

In any event, though, the conclusion to the lawsuit means that the CFP Board’s high-stakes gamble was avoided. And an end to the lawsuit – at least if it’s not appealed – finally gives the CFP Board an opportunity to update its still-problematic fee-only, commission-only, and overly expansive commission-and-fee compensation disclosure definitions… and hopefully in a manner that more constructively engages CFP stakeholders (unlike the CFP Board’s recent action to reduce the CFP experience requirement, which was implemented without any opportunity for public comment!).

CFP Board’s Reduced Experience Requirement Quietly Takes Effect With FPA And NAPFA Silence As Tacit Support?

July 7, 2015 07:01 am 20 Comments CATEGORY: Industry News

Last week, proposed changes to the Experience requirement for CFP certification quietly took effect, including both the elimination of the Capstone course requirement for CFP exam challengers, and more controversially a change to the definition of what constitutes “experience” for the 3-year requirement to include both direct and indirect support.

What’s significant about the new “indirect support” rule is that, by the CFP Board’s own statements, virtually any job in the entire financial services industry will now qualify as “financial planning experience”, including an employee benefits administrator, a compliance attorney, and even a journalist who simply writes about financial planning topics!

The change is even more significant given the CFP Board’s introduction of the 2-year “apprenticeship” option for the experience requirement in 2012… which means that over the past several years, the CFP experience requirement has slipped from “3 years of financial planning experience” to “2 years of financial planning experience, or 3 years of any job remotely related to the financial services industry”!

Sadly, while the CFP Board’s prior changes to the experience requirement in 2012 included a public comment period, this time the CFP Board acted unilaterally without stakeholder input, as it continues to push aggressively for growth in the number of CFP certificants. And notably, the FPA and NAPFA have remained remarkably silent about the change as well, suggesting the organizations either tacitly support cutting the experience requirement for CFP certificants, or that they have lost any ability as membership associations to hold the CFP Board accountable.

Ultimately, though, perhaps the most ironic aspect of the CFP Board’s change is the fact that it comes after 4+ years – and $40M+ in spending – on a public awareness campaign to communicate to the public that the CFP marks are the highest “gold standard” in financial planning… even as the CFP Board’s growth strategy makes it easier and easier to obtain that standard.

The Emergence Of The “Location-Independent” Virtual Financial Advisor

July 6, 2015 07:01 am 23 Comments CATEGORY: Practice Management

For its entire history, financial planning has been about sitting down across from clients, face-to-face, and talking them through solutions to their financial planning challenges. Finding clients was about in-person meetings, getting clients was about in-person meetings, and serving clients was about in-person meeting.

Yet the rise of technology is creating a new service model for financial planning – the “virtual” advisor, who uses web-based tools and technology to serve clients, regardless of where the client (or advisor) happens to be. And these “location-independent” advisors are able to serve new and different types of clientele, thanks to both the cost savings and efficiency of using technology in lieu of a traditional office, and the potential to craft an especially focused business serving a niche clientele that becomes feasible in the world of content and inbound marketing.

In point of fact, the growth of online financial advice (not just via "robo-advisor" but delivered by human advisors using technology) is already underway – fueling the growth of platforms from Personal Capital to Vanguard Personal Advisor Services – and an increasing number of existing advisors are beginning to use more technology tools to serve their clients as well. But as a new e-book entitled “The Virtual Advisor” by Alan Moore points out, the new location-independent virtual advisor model may be most appealing to the next generation of financial advisors, who will have the opportunity not to just create a life around the business of financial advice, but instead to create an advisory business around living their own great life.

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (July 4-5)

July 3, 2015 02:47 pm 22 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" - this week's edition kicks off with a look at TD Ameritrade's efforts to expand its Amerivest managed account into a full-fledged "hybrid" advisor solution (robo-technology plus TD Ameritrade retail branch advisors), raising the question of whether, given that Amerivest already has over $11B of AUM, it may become the largest "robo" solution by 2016. Also in the news this week was a discussion of how Schwab and Fidelity have been 'passing through' a portion of the shareholder service fees of certain no-transaction-fee mutual funds to large RIAs on their platforms, and whether doing so creates untenable conflicts of interest for RIAs that will end out being compensated more for using those funds in client portfolios over any others.

From there, we have several practice management articles this week, from a discussion of how to improve client review meetings by systematically implementing a pre-meeting survey to ensure the meeting is focused on what clients want to talk about the most, to the importance of creating standard processes in an advisory firm to cut down on potential advice mistakes, along with an article on how to get more insight from the results of your client surveys by discussing the responses with your client advisory board, and a look at some common 'myths' in web-based marketing for advisors and how to overcome them.

There are also a few more technical-competency articles this week, from a look at whether today's lifetime annuity products should be replaced with a "tontine" structure that was popular hundreds of years ago, to the portfolio design mistakes that some advisors may unwittingly be making (e.g., having clients hold a mortgage paying 4% interest while keeping a portfolio allocation in bonds paying only 2%!), to whether Deferred Income Annuities should have a role not just in planning for extended retirement longevity but also as a pre-retirement vehicle.

We wrap up with three interesting articles: the first is a discussion from industry commentator about why he thinks "the AUM fee is toast" and that advisors will increasingly migrate towards retainer-style fee structures; the second is a retrospective look at the CFP Board as it celebrates its 30th anniversary as an organization managing the CFP marks since it was spun off from the College for Financial Planning in 1985; and the last is a great summary article of "37 ways to upgrade your practice" that has a number of tweaks you could take and implement now in your advisory firm during the slower summer months.

Enjoy the reading, and happy Fourth of July!

Claiming Social Security Benefits And Other New Opportunities For Same-Sex Married Couples

July 1, 2015 07:01 am 14 Comments CATEGORY: General Planning

While the case of United States v. Windsor in 2013 required the Federal government to recognize the marriage of a same-sex couple if the marriage was legal where performed, states were not required to permit same-sex marriage, nor were they required to recognize legal marriages of same-sex couples performed elsewhere. However, with last week’s Supreme Court decision in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, states are now required to permit same-sex couples to be married, and furthermore must recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and jurisdictions.

The Supreme Court’s decision creates several immediate new planning opportunities for same-sex married couples, particularly those who were previously married in another state but have been recently living in a state that did not recognize (or one of the 13 that outright banned) their marriage. Those couples will now be able to do everything from filing joint income tax returns, to benefit from the marital deduction for state estate and inheritance tax purposes, to get divorced if the couple decides to separate. In fact, for many such couples, a major planning issue will simply be unwinding the strategies previously in place to handle the fact that their marriage wasn't recognized, but are no longer necessary!

Perhaps most financially significant, though, is that same-sex married couples will now be able to claim spousal and survivor benefits as a married couple, regardless of their current state of residence. This creates both immediate Social Security claiming opportunities for some same-sex couples, and the need to plan more proactively for a same-sex married couples’ Social Security benefits in the future, as all the claiming strategies for married couples – including file-and-suspend and restricted application – are now available.

On the other hand, the Supreme Court decision actually makes financial planning for same-sex couples far simpler in the future – or at least, no more complicated than the conversations that arise when any couple is considering whether to marry, and how it might impact them from income tax planning to financial aid to estate planning and everything in between. In fact, as the legal differences for marriage between same-sex and heterosexual couples shrink to almost nothing, it remains to be seen whether LGBT planning will even remain as a distinct ‘niche’ amongst financial advisors - as while potential discrimination against gays and lesbians remains an issue, equal marital rights appears to be eliminating most of the need or relevance of ‘specialized’ LGBT financial planning in the first place?