Ann Marsh

Americans need a financial plan to turn them around. They’ve been consuming too much and saving too little for the better part of two decades, Bill Gross, Pimco’s co-founder and co-chief investment officer, told a rapt audience of financial planners at the opening of the Schwab Impact 2011 conference in San Francisco this week.

The SEC has ordered FINRA to improve the way it handles documents submitted during SEC inspections. The order, issued Thursday as part of an administrative settlement between the two organizations, comes after the disclosure that the director of FINRA’s Kansas City Office in 2008 ordered the minutes of three meetings dating back to 2006 and 2007 to be altered hours before they were they were provided to the SEC’s Chicago Regional Office.

The leading provider of software for 250,000 finance professionals, Emerging Information Systems, announced today that it expects to be acquired by Zywave, a provider of on-demand software for the insurance industry.

Get ready to connect with far-flung colleagues: The FPA’s much-awaited new social networking site is live and picking up speed. Several thousand members worldwide are already connecting online, forming groups and developing their own self-directed platforms within the 24,000 member-strong organization.

Wells Fargo’s Rich Lowrie helped craft the tax proposal that’s driving political debate.

Around the time they turn 50, many people unconsciously begin to ratchet up their spending. Instead, prominent retirement planning scholar Alice P. Munnell thinks financial planners need to wage a campaign to get their clients to hit the pause button at this crucial midpoint in their lives.

The leadership of the CFP Board of Standards expressed serious concern Friday about proposals under consideration on Capitol Hill to regulate financial advisors via an entirely new regulatory body or FINRA. The role should properly stay with a better-funded and newly empowered SEC, according to the leaders of the CFP Board, speaking at a private media roundtable in San Diego.

“The referral whisperer,” aka Michael Brizz, held a group of 100 financial planners rapt today in San Diego when he insisted that “there are literally thousands of referrals in your client database today. Clearly the opportunity is huge.”

“It’s hard to approach someone" — a prospective employer, for example — and say, ‘I want to be an owner,’” confessed Brett Spencer, a 23-year-old masters student in financial planning from Texas Tech University.