Financial planning

The Treasury Department and the IRS have loosened the “use it or lose it” rule for flexible spending arrangements for health care, allowing participants in health benefit plans to carry over up to $500 from their FSA from year to year.

The agency issued its annual inflation adjustments for more than 40 tax provisions, including the tax rate schedules, and other tax changes for 2014.

Eight leading managers of money-market mutual funds urged the SEC to alter the way it defines retail funds in proposed new rules for the industry.

At its most basic, relative strength is a ratio of stock or index price-to-market average or other indices.

Wealthy families' tangled needs can create a mess of inconsistencies and other problems.

The academic community is struggling to mint new financial planners as fast as the industry gobbles them up.

The changes to the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage program introduce credit underwriting criteria to the product for the first time, which until now only had been using actuarial standards in the decision making process, a reverse mortgage specialist said.

If a storm similar to Hurricane Sandy makes landfall, how many homeowners would default on their mortgage?

Pimco, the bond manager that started expanding into stocks four years ago, hired Virginie Maisonneuve from Schroders to lead the push after Neel Kashkari left in January.

With a Roth IRA conversion and a precise recharacterization, a client can report the right amount of income to fill up a low tax bracket each year.

Pimco's Bill Gross said that wealthy Americans, having reaped the benefits of favorable tax treatment, should be willing to pay a greater share to bolster the prospects of the working class.

With an anticipated spike in demand for advisors over the next few years, financial planning is one of the best industries to get into. Here are 30 standout schools for a career in planning.

There’s a major misperception of what a buy-and-hold investment strategy is, but it's what you buy and hold that makes all the difference.

Higher taxes on long-term capital gains may revive interest in like-kind exchanges of investment property.

LPL Financial broke out of its recruiting slump in the third quarter, adding 154 net new advisors, nearly five times as many as the previous quarter.

The processes used by the IRS to verify taxpayers’ income and withholding status are inadvertently resulting in the issuance of potentially fraudulent tax refunds, according to a new report.

A measure that would put the brakes on the Department of Labor's proposal to establish a fiduciary standard for advisors to retirement plans was approved by the U.S. House of Representatives in a largely party-line vote on Tuesday.

Rebalancing is simple, but not easy to do. With automated rebalanicing, little or no action is required to achieve even more consistent investment allocation.

A time management study showed Amerprise advisor Susan A. Riley-Hayes how she could maximize her staffing levels and fee structure.

The CFP Board’s highly publicized $36 million 'Let's Make a Plan' campaign may have misled consumers.