Financial planning

Americans, particularly Baby Boomers, are more nervous about and unprepared for their retirement today than at any time in history. Survey after survey has found that people are delaying their retirements, planning to work during their retirement and scaling back expectations for their golden years. Here are 12 not-so-cheery facts that Baby Boomers and their financial advisors need to appreciate and address in the coming year to ensure they're properly prepared for the retirement they've always envisioned.

The nation’s estimated 17,600 bank advisors are as diverse as the U.S. itself. Here are 12 who were profiled in our magazine this year, each with different investment philosophies, market niches, and business development approaches. Their interests, too, are just as varied, making each producer stand out on many levels.

The time for watching and waiting is over. Twitter is a culture phenomenon and more and more financial advisors are setting up Twitter profiles and testing the waters to connect with existing clients, promote their services to potential new clients and share industry news and insight with their peers. Whether you are new to Twitter or seasoned vet, here are 10 tips provided by TJ Gilsenan, Web-Savvy Advisor, to help financial advisors get the most out of the platform:

Here are a dozen gifts (plus one) which could ruin your holiday spirit -- and pocketbook -- if FINRA decides you have crossed the line and been too generous.

Before putting a bow on 2011, advisors and their clients should take the time to nail down these four key aspects of their finances to ensure financial planning success in 2012, according to M&I, a part of the BMO Financial Group. Everyone wants to save money and prepare themselves and their families for the future. But that can only happen if clients establish well-defined goals and take the necessary steps to put advisors’ strategic advice to work. Here are the Top 4 end-of-year financial planning tasks every client needs to complete:

UBS zeroes in on five events that will happen in the upcoming year, five that may and five that won’t.

Shrinking margins in the independent broker-dealer space have prompted another independent broker-dealer, Seattle-based Pacific West Financial Group, to close its doors.

The latest "safe haven" for investors appears to be, once again, gold. But this time, the avenue they’re taking to get the bullion into their portfolios is the exchange-traded fund.

Here are this year’s best bank-based financial advisors and the secrets to their success.

With the holidays fast approaching, Deutsche Bank Wealth Management has come up with a holiday wish list for its "true love,” the financial markets. For the most part, the Deutsche Bank crew doesn’t believe they’re dreaming and predicts most of these wishes will come true 2012. Do you? Here’s an interactive slideshow counting down the 12 wishes they and most wealth managers are hoping for in the New Year.

2011 is winding to a close and financial planners and their clients are already making adjustments to their portfolios and plotting the strategies they intend to deploy to increase their wealth and buffer their retirement savings. To this end, the Financial Planning Association of San Francisco has offered up its Top 12 Financial Planning Strategies for 2012. Take a gander at this interactive slideshow detailing the best tactics for you and your clients next year.

Your clients can have homeowners' insurance that monitors for leaks or fires - and even file claims on their behalf.

The average price tag for a data breach now is $7.2 million. How are you supposed to value the loss when your crown jewels – trading algorithms – get put on data sticks or uploaded to remote servers, as happened to Goldman Sachs? Or you have to face down billions in verified losses, because you couldn’t control “unauthorized trading,” as occurred to UBS? And if you're a financial advisor or smaller advisory firm, how do you safeguard data while also taking advantage of social media and mobile devices to service your clients? The National Security Agency has begun providing Wall Street banks with intelligence on foreign hackers, a sign that financial sabotage from abroad is imminent, if not already in progress, in the estimation of Booz Allen Hamilton. Here are the Top 10 Financial Services Cyber Security Trends to act on in 2012 and recommendations on what to do about them, from senior vice president Bill Wansley.

Most people never do the type of research required to get into the right career in the first place. So we’re here to help with a package of articles to help you determine your own profile.

The Best. The Brightest. And the Secrets of Their Success.

The Best. The Brightest. And the Secrets of Their Success.

On Wall Street identified the most prolific asset managers under 40, and these five came out on top for the regional firms.

It seems more and more common lately that when you turn on the T.V. or open your Internet browser there is breaking news of some sort of disaster. From direct financial disasters such as market volatilities to weather related disasters like floods, tornados and fires, to even more large-scale disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis and nuclear crisis; disasters are unavoidable. But how prepared are you to deal with a major disaster, or other unexpected events that can trigger change? Here are 10 steps that should help you and your firm build a disaster recovery plan so you can be prepared should the unimaginable arise:

Asset management firms recorded average profitability of 28% through 2010 and the first half of 2011, according to a new McKinsey report, and independent asset managers will control two-thirds of all assets under management by 2015. Here are five business imperatives successful wealth management firms will need to heed over the next three years:

Every recognized profession has its top colleges. Medical and law schools in the U.S. date back to the 18th century. As a much more recent profession, financial planning has spent much of the last four decades developing its own system of education and professional certification. As many of the current crop of planners near retirement, they don't have to look too far to figure out where the next generation will come from. The answer is in all the schools. Not only has the number of programs been on the rise - up 15% since the past year and a half, according to the CFP Board - but enrollment in the programs themselves has generally been increasing, too. With so many CFP Board-registered programs out there, Financial Planning focused on 10 worthy institutions. We talked to veteran planners and industry leaders to get a sense of which 10 programs belonged in an overview. Our list is not a ranking. Like this survey itself, the information we've gathered is just a starting point. Think of it as Financial Planning Education 101, an introduction.