Wealth management

Irvin Feld was a rock-and-roll promoter who purchased “The Greatest Show on Earth” in 1967. He created a promotion company to manage the Ringling Bros. Circus, along with Disney on Ice and monster truck shows, but none of his shows have been as eventful as what’s happened between his two children the last few years.

I hate mixed messages but it seems there is finally some good news on the employment front. According to the Department of Labor this morning, non-farm payroll employment added 244,000 jobs in April, with the private sector seeing job growth of 268,000. While that figure exceeded expectations, the unemployment rate rose to 9%. Some experts explained that increase to the people who weren’t looking for jobs now resuming their job-hunt. …

Carson Wealth Management Group announced Monday it will become an independent RIA in July, but will further expand by added a broker-dealer arm later this year.

Adding a care manager to your estate planning team can benefit both you and your client.

Under the new tax law, married couples have a $10 million estate-tax exclusion-no planning necessary.

Estate plans work great when someone dies—but it's when clients live into old age that planning gets hard.

A defined benefit cash balance plan is ideal for high income business owners.

To give its 3,000-plus independent advisors an edge, Fidelity Investments introduced the Business Development and Marketing Planning Toolkit, an interactive PDF that advisors, firms and advisor teams can use to better define themselves, identify exactly the type of clients they want to attract and retain and, perhaps most important, ensure their customers know enough about them and their services to provide a meaningful referral to potential new clients.

An uptick in mergers and acquisition among investment advisory firms at the end of last year suggests that the pace will increase, according to a study by Pershing Advisor Solutions, a unit of BNY Mellon. However, there were fewer deals, and they took longer to complete in last year, compared to the peak in 2007.

“Clearly, a lot of the same fundamental, structural changes to the industry continue to drive M&A,” says David DeVoe, managing director of strategic business development for Schwab Advisor Services.

The San Francisco company tells investors to think ahead to 2011 taxes, as filing deadline has just passed.

SEI finds that talking about money may still be taboo.

The Michael Jackson Estate has featured fireworks since very shortly after Michael died on June 25, 2009. His mother, Katherine Jackson, was not happy about non-family members, including attorney John Branca and music executive John McClain, being named as executors of his estate. So she hired lawyers and challenged the executors in probate court. They fought … and fought … and fought.

Schwab announced that since it launched Schwab Advisor University in June, over 5,600 RIA employees from more than 2,500 firms participated in its online courses to help improve firm operations.