Insurable Interest Canadian Insurance Blog

What You Need to Know More than 1.3 million client households have been served by the MoneyGuide planning platform. Expanding use of Salesforce delivers artificial intelligence-derived planning insights at scale. Advisory offerings need to resonate with younger clients who stand to earn and inherit significant wealth. Some 2 1/2 years after Edward Jones announced plans to provide its 19,500 advisors with access to the MoneyGuide planning platform, more than 1.3 million client households have been served by the tool, according to Lena Haas, head of wealth management advice and solutions. That is more than twice the projected uptake at this stage, Haas recently told ThinkAdvisor, and it’s strong evidence that a healthy culture of internal “coopetition” is driving tech adoption and fostering a planning-first service mindset at the firm. Haas said she expects the vast majority of the firm’s 8 million-plus client households to eventually come to embrace the planning toolset, driven by advisor advocacy and organic market demand for more holistic financial planning services that go beyond investment management. “It’s been really special to see how our advisors are talking about the tools internally and inspiring one another to engage in this planning-first approach,” Haas said. “They are embracing...

Two financial advisors with a $700 million book of business at Bank of America Private Bank have moved to LPL Financial’s high-net-worth-focused employee affiliation channel to start a firm called BrookBridge Private Wealth. The Long Island, New York-based team consists of veteran private client advisor John Duane and portfolio manager Gregory Giantsos, who have been working together since 2015. Duane has been a part of the financial industry for 30 years, including 25 years in private banking, while Giantsos joined the industry in 2012 as a portfolio manager. They offer a range of high-end wealth management services, including investment management, financial planning and custom lending solutions to their private wealth clientele. At Bank of America, their client base included business owners, nonprofit organizations, foundations, professionals and executives. In a statement, the pair said the move to LPL’s HNW employee channel, known as LPL Private Wealth Management, will allow them to offer expanded services to additional client segments. “Our goal is to help clients use their wealth to live the life they want to live,” Duane said. “Our clients run the spectrum, from business owners, to families, to organizations, to folks in the media industry. We aim to help each client...

What You Need to Know An emergency fund can provide breathing room while assessing the situation. Securing health insurance on a spouse’s policy is often the cheapest and best option. Clients may consider getting into consulting or starting a business. Retirement planning is likely one of the main areas of focus in your work with clients. They rely on you to help them plan, save and invest for a comfortable retirement. In most cases, they likely have an age, or an age range, in mind to move forward into retirement. Things don’t always go as planned. Sometimes, clients will face an unplanned early retirement due to a job loss, a medical situation or other unforeseen circumstances. If this happens later in their working years, between about 55 and 65, there are some key decisions to be made. Here are several steps to best navigate this situation. Emergency Fund Part of ongoing planning should include maintaining a sufficient emergency fund. This will certainly not get clients through an unplanned retirement, but this money can provide some breathing room as they assess the initial impact of the situation and plan for the future. Financial experts typically suggest having at least six months’...

These are cases where the IRS has received third-party information — such as through W-2 and 1099 filings — indicating these people received income above $400,000 but failed to file a tax return. The separate campaign that was expanded in September is concentrated on taxpayers with more than $1 million in income and more than $250,000 in recognized tax debt. After collecting $38 million from more than 175 initial cases, the IRS expanded the effort last fall to around 1,600 cases. Nearly 80% of these 1,600 millionaires with delinquent tax debt have now made a payment, according to the IRS, leading to over $1.1 billion recovered. This is an additional $100 million since July, when Treasury and IRS announced reaching the $1 billion milestone. Credit: Adobe Stock 

What You Need to Know Firms must prioritize their ability to deliver the same level of service to clients. Details are crucial to avoiding costly and time-consuming missteps. Many of the best deals can be ones that you don’t complete. Acquiring a financial advisory practice requires taking a long, hard look at the firm you may be buying. Perhaps more importantly, you should start by looking in the mirror. The ultimate success of mergers-and-acquisition-based growth — especially at the financial advisor firm level — requires an honest assessment of readiness, a precise alignment of interests across all parties and prioritizing your team’s ability to deliver the same level of service to clients. Due diligence should not just be a careful review of the potential purchase. Instead, as a savvy buyer, you should use this process to ascertain if this path will lead you to your desired destination. Yes, inorganic growth presents incredible opportunities — enhancing valuations and providing access to additional talent as well as potential new services.  However, to paraphrase a parable often employed to keep you from following the crowd, just because everyone else is acquiring financial advisory practices doesn’t mean you should, too.  That said, and if this is a strategy that your...

But it was also the most polarizing of the proposals: About twice as many Democrats supported the policy as Republicans. Voters say they they trust Harris more than Trump on housing costs, an issue where the former president once had an edge over President Joe Biden. Overall, 46% of swing-state voters said they trust Trump more on taxes than Harris, who’s trusted by 44%. But Harris has greatly improved the Democrats’ standing on the issue, narrowing a deficit that was as high as 16 percentage points when Biden led the ticket. Trump’s proposals — and, to a lesser extent, the competing plans from Harris — would come with a budget-busting price tag. A Bloomberg review of all Trump’s tax proposals estimates that they would add more than $10.5 trillion to the national debt over 10 years. Harris’ would add about $2 trillion, which she’s said she’d offset with higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy. “These policies, on paper, are pretty popular,” said Eli Yokley, U.S. politics analyst for Morning Consult. “The long-term effects of them I don’t think voters think about.” While Harris is still putting out details of her tax plans, many of them mirror policies previously proposed...