Retirement Income

Should we tell our clients we need their help to grow our business?

When it comes to value, you can’t deliver too much. Here are five ways to deliver even more value to your clients this week – without beating them over the head.

Your clients need a hero – one who can help them navigate the uncertain world and keep them on track to living their best lives no matter what circumstances they face. That hero should be their financial advisor.

Can we aggressively position assets today that have the potential for strong growth in the next 24 months when a tuition bill is due, without exposing those assets to market risk?

Here is some research on why our clients built a sizable portfolio while others had high income but little savings. I’ll address specifics on how to get savers to enjoy their money.

Silicon Valley Bank became the biggest US lender to fail in more than a decade, creating fears of contagion in tech and finance sectors in the US and around the world.

President Biden has proposed a $6.9 trillion budget that calls for reducing deficits and raising taxes on wealthy people and large corporations. There is a lot of spending in this budget that fuels inflation.

President Joe Biden is proposing a series of new tax increases on billionaires, rich investors and corporations in his latest proposal for how Congress should prioritize taxes and spending.

Here’s how to simplify your surge agenda and run a pre-surge dress rehearsal to defeat head trash and improve the client experience.

High-yield investors beware. Junk bonds that were financed at low, fixed rates will eventually mature and, according to Jeffrey Gundlach, weak issuers that cannot refinance at higher rates will default.

I will explain what ChatGPT is beyond the headlines, and its capabilities and limitations. I will then share a use case in wealth management and explore whether it will replace human financial advisors.

You know you have a non-ideal client when…

I took ChatGPT for a test drive by directing it to write an article summarizing important tax rule changes introduced by SECURE Act 2.0. The essay it produced was an epic failure.

Any of the variable spending strategies I analyzed will reduce sequence risk in retirement and allow for greater initial spending rates, potentially greater average spending amounts, and a generally more efficient spenddown of assets than the baseline constant inflation-adjusted spending rule.

Forget ChatGPT, going independent or podcasts. The hottest trend growth-oriented advisors must know is the rise of the fractional marketer.

There’s one strategy that is not only a great wealth-building solution but is also triple tax-advantaged…

For the first time in decades, Wall Street strategists are collectively pessimistic about the stock market over the coming year.

As we begin 2023 and you think about how you want to market your financial advisory business, my number one tip is this…

Being flexible with spending matters. My analysis shows that variable spending strategies – including floor-and-ceiling, guardrail, actuarial and other methods – can dramatically increase sustainable retirement spending.

In the final analysis, Dan's confidence borne of providing good financial advice for 17 years proved meaningless.

The asset management unit of JPMorgan Chase & Co. has wiped its ESG portfolios clean of their exposure to the Adani empire.

Research from Vanguard suggests that investing in commodities is the most powerful way to hedge against unexpected inflation.

Many investors believe that gold is a safe long-term investment that can be used to hedge against risk. But should you include this precious metal in your retirement portfolio?

If your clients still have jobs, this article will discuss what you can do to help them prepare for a possible layoff.

A gold IRA is one way to diversify your retirement portfolio. It can protect your savings from plummeting in the event of a stock market crash or high inflation.

The US was unseasonably hot in January, and it wasn’t just the weather.

Silver is more volatile, cheaper and more tightly linked with the industrial economy. Gold is more expensive and better for diversifying your portfolio overall.

Gold investors are betting the Fed will continue to be negligent with its monetary policy.

When it comes to the clients they serve, advisors need to think about the now and the new, not the next, and step up their offerings in key areas.

What can we, as advisors, do to promote healthy finances?

Every financial plan, regardless of the way in which it was created, requires ongoing monitoring. Here is one way advisors can measure the “funded status” of a plan to determine if adjustments are necessary.

With the consumer price index increasing during the last few years at a rate not seen for nearly 40 years, the investing challenge for the coming year is finding ways to generate real returns during exceptionally high inflation.

Although most of the SECURE 2.0 changes won’t take effect until 2024 or later, there are things that advisors should keep in mind, particularly for clients who fall into one of these three broad categories: retirees, savers, and small-business owners.

Let’s explore whether the CFP Board, the most powerful and prominent organization supporting the advisory profession, can do more to support the adoption of a full fiduciary standard. We’ll also ask whether the CFP Board actually owns the trademark for “certified financial planner,” as it claims.

Here are some places where the genuinely rich keep their money.

There are several ways to include philanthropic giving in your estate plan. Here are five common options.

The booming US residential solar market is at a crossroads.

In failing to hold all those who provide financial advice to a comprehensive fiduciary standard, the SEC enacted Reg BI to enforce a “best interest” standard. Do your clients understand what that means and its implications?

Like all trusts, a charitable trust is a legal entity that you create for the purpose of holding and managing assets. The trust is wholly separate from you. It owns any assets it holds, pays taxes and requires management just like any other legally recognized entity.

A parade of money managers who converted mutual funds into exchange-traded funds in a bid to ride rampant demand for the newer, easier-to-trade structures are discovering it may not be so simple to tap the ETF boom.

It is far easier to engage people and reach them at an emotional level with video than with any other medium.

It’s common for a mutual fund to outperform its benchmark over a short time horizon – a few years – as happened with Cathie Wood’s ARKK. But new research shows that mutual funds fail dismally when performance is measured over the long horizons that retirement-focused investors face.

The US government is exploring narrowly focused trade pacts on critical minerals with Japan and the UK, in addition to talks with the European Union, the latest salvo in its push to counter Chinese influence in key sectors, officials familiar with the matter said.

Suppose recession warnings, such as the yield curve and manufacturing surveys, prove prescient, as they reliably have. In that case, this will be a rough year for the Goldilocks soft-landing believers.

The federal budget deficit is widening rapidly, according to the latest estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, raising the risk of the Treasury running out of cash earlier than expected amid a debt-ceiling standoff.

Surveying your clients and prospects is essential, especially as we continue to confront a major shift in how we live our lives.

Few of us would sacrifice happiness at the altar of wealth. Financial advisors who add immeasurable value to their clients are focused on both.

The greening of red-state America, well underway in the Sun Belt, is now accelerating in the Midwest.