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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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...
