Financial planning

With the new school year underway, clients are focusing on the best ways to use their 529 plan dollars. Don't let them make these mistakes.

On your to-do list: Decide on a holiday gift suitable for all clients that’s not cheap but won’t break your budget, that travels well, that can be used at home or in the office, that suits their special dietary needs and won’t clash with their upholstery. Here are some tips to help with your holiday shopping.

Spousal benefits are the meat and potatoes of Social Security planning. Have you helped your clients maximize their situation?

They’ve been called egotistic, impatient and self-entitled -- and they have a notoriously bad reputation when it comes to saving -- but advisors want them.

Program to focus on marketplace risks, 2014 SEC enforcement priorities and other topics.

Rules, as they say, are made to be broken. Yet as financial planning has grown as a profession, collective thinking has coalesced around a few solid pieces of advice. A panel at the Morningstar Investment Conference on Friday set out to debunk some of those rules and establish new guidelines. Here are a few of the biggest myths they tackled.

These income-generating equities tend to behave differently from other stocks. They may deserve a portfolio allocation of their own.

Schade replaces the San Francisco firm's co-founder and chief executive, Brodie Cobb, who suffered serious injuries in a bicycle accident last year.

Almost half of the advisors in a new FPA study say they don't have a retirement plan; even more fail on business and succession plans.

The enhanced site allows advisors to alter certain components of their profiles at will -- though not their disciplinary history.

Here's how to help clients maximize both the charitable and tax benefits of any donation.

Investment advisors will play a critical role in helping the nearly 80 million baby boomers and future generations develop a sustainable plan for retirement, a pair of senators said on Wednesday.

Expansion-minded Savant Capital Management has bolstered its presence in the vibrant Chicago metropolitan market, acquiring Paragon Advisors, a $150 million firm in Naperville, Ill.

Looking to expand your team and boost performance? Executive search veterans Kathy Freeman Godfrey and Jeff Warren have a few suggestions.

A big LPL practice with $3.7 billion in assets under management is picking up a $300 million Chicago-area firm.

Even as the SEC is contemplating an expansion of fiduciary rules to include broker-dealers who operate in the retail space, some advocates argue that the regulatory interpretation of the responsibilities under a fiduciary standard has strayed from common-law precedent and become dangerously diluted.

A new HighTower project tries to determine whether the aggregated opinions of advisors and staff can offer meaningful insight into portfolio allocations.

The convicted Ponzi schemer, now serving a 150-year prison sentence, says in an interview with MarketWatch that his defrauded clients should have probed more.

World economic growth will pick up next year, paced by improvements in the U.S. and the euro area, Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer of Pimco, said in an interview.

NetVEST, which is returning to LPL, has approximately $200 million in client assets and specializes in establishing revocable and irrevocable trusts. The firm had been affiliated with Ameriprise for the past year; but had been with LPL for almost 20 years before that, however.