Kitces.com - Advancing Knowledge in Financial Planning

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Feb 16-17)

February 15, 2013 07:01 pm 2 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" - this week's issue focuses on practice management and career development, and starts off with an article highlighting the recent results of the FPA's Compensation and Staffing survey, which shows modest but steady gains for financial planners with strong growth for operations and compliance positions in advisory firms.

From there, we look at a number of articles focused on the development of newer planners, including a discussion by Mark Tibergien of the challenges of hiring new planners and training them, some coaching tips from Angie Herbers about how to train and develop newer planners, and some guidance from Dave Grant about the virtue of both being a mentor and seeking one out.

We also have a few articles on the tools of the practice, including a review of a new web-based software that can help clients reconstruct cost basis for legacy investment positions, a discussion of Schwab's new launch of 105 no-transaction-fee ETFs (which still have the same expense ratios as transaction-fee versions on other platforms), a review of Windows 8 and why advisors are expected to ultimately adopt it widely, a discussion of how to measure the ROI of your marketing efforts, and an article that provides a thoughtful reminder not to take your front-of-office look and staff for granted and remember that it's still the first impression most of your prospective clients will ever see.

We wrap up with two articles that look more broadly at the factors that determine success for an advisor, including one suggesting that maybe sheer passion isn't as important as we make it out to be and that honing your craft to be an expert is more important for success, and an interesting discussion suggesting that the key for success for sales, business development, and leadership is not in being an extrovert but instead a steady balance between introversion and extroversion. Enjoy the reading!

MailBag: The Impact Of The Phaseout Of Itemized Deductions (Pease Limitation) On AMT Exposure

February 14, 2013 12:04 pm 0 Comments CATEGORY: MailBag

Many readers of this blog contact me directly with questions and comments. While often the responses are very specific to a particular circumstance, occasionally the subject matter is general enough that it might be of interest to others as well. Accordingly, I will occasionally post a new "MailBag" article, presenting the question or comment (on a strictly anonymous basis!) and my response, in the hopes that the discussion may be useful food for thought.

In this week's MailBag, we look at a question about the interplay between the phaseout of itemized deductions for high income individuals (the so-called "Pease limitation") and potential exposure to the AMT.
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Is Variable Annuity Tax Deferral Worth Paying For Again?

February 13, 2013 12:02 pm 7 Comments CATEGORY: Annuities

Through the 1980s and 90s when tax rates were higher, variable annuities were a popular tool for tax deferral. However, since the late 1990s, the primary focus of the annuity industry has been on risk management instead, offering a series of living and death benefit features that have provided significant guarantees, but at a significant cost. When combined with tax rates that declined significantly with President Bush’s tax legislation in 2001 and 2003, the benefit of tax deferral associated with non-qualified annuities was simply no longer worth the cost.

In a significant shift, though, an emerging new generation of low cost variable annuities, combined with a significantly more progressive tax system since the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, may usher in a new era for the use of variable annuities, especially when the contracts can be used strategically as an asset location vehicle to shelter high-return but tax-inefficient investments. Consequently, while not long ago it was projected to take a decade or two for the benefits of tax deferral to offset the cost, it now can take as little as a year or two for higher income clients! The end result: it may once again be time to seriously consider the cost of variable annuities as an expense worth paying to harness the value of tax deferral.

Is Financial Planning Becoming Commoditized?

February 11, 2013 12:02 pm 5 Comments CATEGORY: Practice Management

As we enter the digital age, technology has been a driving force in putting pressure on many industries, taking any goods or services that could possibly be commoditized and driving their profit margins down to a sliver. In recent years, many have wondered whether financial planning may soon be impacted in a similar manner, especially given how software like TurboTax decimated the profitability of tax preparation services. After all, the commoditization has arguably already begun for some parts of the financial services industry, as costs have plummeted for trade execution and index investing and many software packages offer the ability to perform relatively sophisticated financial planning projections entirely for free.

Yet the reality is that financial planning itself may remain remarkably resistant to commoditization for the foreseeable future, for the simple reason that financial planning is incredibly customized and unique to the needs and complex circumstances of the client, and outcomes can still vary greatly depending on the expertise and the skillset of the planner (unlike tax preparation, where ultimately the outcomes are exactly the same because all clients and their preparers both have to follow the same IRS guidelines). In fact, arguably the greatest challenge in financial planning is not that services are so nearly identical from one planning firm to the next that the only competitive factor is price (as occurs in commoditized markets), but instead that the planning experience is still so different amongst firms that consumers struggle to determine which planner would be the best fit in the first place!

Nonetheless, the caveat is that for advisors who have linked the profitability and success of their businesses to a commoditized service, such as charging a fee just to gather data and do financial planning software projections, or charge an assets-under-management fee just to provide strategic passive asset allocation using index funds, the pressure is on to step up and deliver a greater value. Ironically, in the end that means not only is financial planning not being commoditized in a manner that makes financial planners irrelevant, but the reality may be that it's about to get even more competitive with more financial planners than ever, as an increasing number of advisors realize the components of what they provide have become commoditized and that they must step up to provide a deeper, higher quality of financial planning advice and services for their businesses to survive and thrive!

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Feb 9-10)

February 8, 2013 06:01 pm 1 Comment CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" - this week's issues starts off with the big regulatory news of the week - that FINRA may be backing away from its efforts to regulate investment advisers - along with two articles about being a good financial planning professional: the first indirectly suggests that perhaps life insurance needs to be recognized as its own profession (with its own professional designation, the CLU); and the other notes that fiduciaries might be trying to hard to get clients by using fiduciary as a tool for instilling fear, uncertainty, and doubt, instead of trying to get clients by acting like a fiduciary in a way that demonstrates leadership and helps clients with their decision-making process.

From there, we look at a series of articles this week about blogging and more generally about using content to attract prospective clients and grow your business as a financial advisor. The first article highlights an advisor interviewed at the recent TD Ameritrade conference who's bringing in $2M per month of AUM purely from blogging in targeted niches; the second looks at how blogging is evolving, noting that while short blog posts are often popular it may be the longer blog posts that really demonstrate your expertise to clients; the third providing a fantastic list of topic ideas for advisors (you'll never have writer's/blogger's block again!), and the last providing some useful tips about how to distribute your blog content so it's read more widely and grows an audience.

Beyond the blogging articles, there's a great piece about how to set good investment defaults with clients so that they will more often make good decisions (or at least need to go further out of their way to make bad ones), an interesting look at how Gen Y advisors may be leaning increasingly towards wirehouses out of a desire for a more structured career environment, a strange-but-true article highlighting research that finds clients may be more inclined to engage in risky financial decisions if they are touched on the shoulder by a woman, and a NY Times discussion of how economics research is beginning to focus on not just the objective economic data but also the subjective data on happiness, raising the question of whether in the future we'll look at Gross Domestic Happiness alongside the country's Gross Domestic Product?

We wrap up with a lighter article from the Harvard Business Review, which serves as a reminder that one of the greatest technology tools to enhance business efficiency and productivity, not to mention client service, was actually invented almost 140 years ago: it's called a telephone, and it's time we picked it up a little more often to just talk to clients (or staff), and perhaps rely a little less on all the email back-and-forth Enjoy the reading!

News Highlight – FINRA Backing Away From Push To Oversee Investment Advisers?

February 7, 2013 03:39 pm 4 Comments CATEGORY: Industry News

In a surprising interview article just released today by Reuters reporter Suzanne Barlyn, FINRA Chairman and CEO Rick Ketchum goes on record stating that he sees "no sign [FINRA] can convince lawmakers in Washington to support a change in the way [investment] advisers are regulated anytime soon."

Ketchum attributes this primarily to the leadership changes in the House Financial Services Committee after the 2012 election, as Representative Jeb Hensarling has taken over for Representative Spencer Bachus (it was Bachus who had put forth the 2012 legislation that was widely viewed as paving the way for FINRA to regulate investment advisers). The matter was further complicated by the lack of clear support from the SEC.

The bottom line - Ketchum believes that continuing to push FINRA as overseer of investment advisers will make no progress in the foreseeable future, so it's backing off.Read More...