News About IRS And Tax

Wednesday, 3 October 2018

Student Loan Options When You’re Self-Employed

Student loans can be a huge financial burden when you first start working, especially if you are self-employed. As if the challenges of self-employment weren’t enough, you have student loan payments on top of it! Paying off your student loans is...

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source https://blog.turbotax.intuit.com/self-employed/student-loan-options-when-youre-self-employed-24079/

I Only Received One Paycheck from My Summer Side-Gig. Am I Self-Employed?

During college, I had a job every summer. After my freshman and sophomore years, there were full-time internships with companies that issued me a Form W-2 and offered benefits, and in those years I reported my income from my W-2...

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source https://blog.turbotax.intuit.com/self-employed/i-only-received-one-paycheck-from-my-summer-side-gig-am-i-self-employed-41533/

How Birth Year Shapes A Generational Experience In Stock Market Investing

One of the fundamental principles of long-term investing is the recognition that, while markets may go up and down and be volatile in the short-term, eventually the volatility tends to average out into favorable long-term growth rates. Accordingly, the conventional wisdom in the face of market volatility is simply to keep invested and stay the course. Of course, those who are approaching or transitioning into retirement need to be cognizant not to draw down the portfolio too much waiting for those returns to average out – a phenomenon known as sequence of return risk – but as long as investors stay a little flexible on their retirement goals, and spend reasonably conservatively, that sequence of return risk can generally be managed.

However, the fact that investors will for the most part simply have to accept whatever returns the market gives – and in whatever sequence it provides them – means that different generations of investors may have substantively different experiences with long-term investing, simply based on whatever happens to occur during their particular investment sequence, and the ‘investment cards’ they’re dealt.

In turn, this effect is further amplified by the fact that early investment experiences often shape a lifetime of investment behavior – from Baby Boomers that experienced favorable market returns coinciding with the rise of the 401(k) and have stuck with markets during their difficult years, to late Gen X’ers and Millennials who have had to wait as much as a decade or more simply to see the markets recover to where they started when they first begin investing (hearkening back to the experience of a Lost Generation of investors after the Great Depression who never returned to stocks after the scarring experience of the crash of 1929 and its slow recovery during the Great Depression). And in fact, a growing volume of data on investor behavior is suggesting that younger investors are indeed far more skeptical of stock markets and long-term investing… a challenge that may not necessarily reverse itself even as the market improves (just as the bull market of the 1950s and 60s didn’t necessarily win back Depression-era investors).

The fact that the generational timing of young adulthood – and the market returns that coincide with it – may have such a long-term behavioral influence notably also extends to financial advisors themselves, as Baby Boomer advisors in their early 60s today saw a raging bull market for the first 20 years of building their careers, while younger Gen X and older Millennial advisors have had to wait 10-15 years just to see the markets recover to where they invested their first clients! Which raises the question of whether advisor attitudes about the value of providing investment management, and the active vs. passive debate, may also be heavily shaped by the advisor’s generational experience and the timing of when they happened to launch their advisor career?

Ultimately, though, the key point is simply to recognize that mere birth year may actually be responsible for a far more outsized portion of our lifetime investment behavior and experience than is commonly acknowledged. As even if a long-term portfolio can mathematically recover from almost any sequence of returns, it doesn’t mean that certain generations of investors – and advisors – will behaviorally do so themselves, based on whatever early-years’ experience the market happens to give them during their formative years?

Tuesday, 2 October 2018

#FASuccess Ep 092: Taking More Vacation Time By Standardizing Workflows And Processes In Your Advisor CRM with Jennifer Goldman

Welcome back to the 91st episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.

This week’s guest is Jennifer Goldman.

Jennifer runs an eponymous practice management consulting firm based in Boston that works intimately with half a dozen advisory firms at a time on their operations, technology, workflows, and processes. What’s unique about Jennifer, though, is that, before she began working as a practice management consultant on operations issues, she had a career as a financial advisor herself and then transitioned to operations leadership roles at two more advisory firms before eventually deciding to go out on her own as a consultant to work with even more advisory firms and operations.

In this episode, we talk in depth about what it really means to adopt and implement workflows and processes in your advisory firm. Why an advisor CRM system should operate as the central hub of the advisory business, the 100-client capacity and 5 employee capacity in multi-advisory firms that eventually forces every growing advisory business to start formally adopting standardized processes and procedures, and why exactly it’s so important to do so in order to sustainably grow and scale an advisory business, or simply to finally find the time to take a vacation as an advisory firm founder.

We also talk about Jennifer’s operation consulting process with firms, that starts with formalizing the roles and responsibilities of everyone in the firm, and then goes to a technology audit of all the tools the advisory firm already has, and only then begins to focus on how to better integrate the available technology tools, recognizing that in today’s environment, the real blocking point for most firms on technology is not a need to get better tech tools, but simply a need to adopt better systems and processes to use the technology the firm already has.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Jennifer shares her own journey of building a consulting practice into a multi-consultant business, and why she ultimately decided to scale the business back to his solo consulting firm, not because it wasn’t feasible to scale the consulting business, but simply because in the end, she wanted to right-size the business to let her spend less time managing people and more time working with the advisory firm clients that she wanted to work with in the first place. A lesson I think that is particularly relevant for any advisor who finds themselves unhappy in a successful business because they’re spending more time in management and less time with clients than they ever expected when they first launched the firm.
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source https://www.kitces.com/blog/jennifer-goldman-consulting-operations-practice-management-workflow-process-advisor-crm-tech-consultant/

Monday, 1 October 2018

Breast Cancer Awareness Month: Donations and Tax Deductions

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. And because it’s the most common cancer among women in America, getting involved in the effort to fight breast cancer can have a tremendous impact and becoming more informed about breast cancer is easier than...

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source https://blog.turbotax.intuit.com/tax-deductions-and-credits-2/breast-cancer-awareness-month-donations-and-tax-deductions-20335/

Celebrating Our Intuit and TurboTax Employees During Hispanic Heritage Month

This post can be found en Español here. We continue celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month at Intuit TurboTax! This week we spoke with three team members about the role and impact of family in their lives. Many Latinos define their identity...

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source https://blog.turbotax.intuit.com/announcements/celebrating-our-intuit-and-turbotax-employees-during-hispanic-heritage-month-41716/

The Latest In Financial Advisor #FinTech (October 2018)

Welcome to the October 2018 issue of the Latest News in Financial Advisor #FinTech – where we look at the big news, announcements, and underlying trends and developments that are emerging in the world of technology solutions for financial advisors and wealth management!

This month’s edition kicks off with the big news that private equity firm Warburg Pincus is investing a whopping $33M into Facet Wealth, a new advisory firm upstart that aims not to build “robo” tools to compete with advisory firms, but a tech-savvy advisor platform to service “smaller” mass affluent clientele that they buy from existing advisory firms who may want to sell a portion of their book of clients to free up space (and/or to generate additional capital) to grow further upmarket. At least, if the clients will actually be willing to convert from an in-person advisor to one of Facet’s virtual CFP professionals, and from an industry-standard AUM fee to Facet’s complexity-based monthly retainer fee instead.

From there, the latest highlights also include a number of interesting advisor technology announcements, including:

Zoe Financial raises a $2M seed round to create a new lead generation platform for (a subset of highly vetted) advisors to reach more affluent clients;
SmartAsset reinvents the next generation of BrightScope’s controversial Advisor Pages as it aims to scale up interest in its SmartAdvisor lead generation service;
Mineral Interactive wins the XYPN FinTech competition as one of three finalists all focused on making the holistic data-gathering and onboarding process for financial planners more efficient;
ScratchWorks announces “Season 2” of its FinTech accelerator program replete with Shark-Tank-style pitch sessions to its founders (and funders).

Read the analysis about these announcements in this month’s column and a discussion of more trends in advisor technology, including the launch of MoneyGuidePro’s new G5 platform (which goes even deeper into retirement income planning but conspicuously skips out on building its own PFM portal to compete with eMoney Advisor), Personal Capital’s launch of its own tax-savvy retirement income planning tool for its advisors and clients, the rise of student loan repayment planning software tools for advisors, and a look at whether Schwab’s recent launch of new Digital Account Opening tools may signal the beginning of the end of independent digital advice platforms as RIA custodians themselves finally upgrade their technology and expand to encompass more and more digital onboarding capabilities themselves.

And be certain to read to the end, where we have provided an update to our popular new “Financial Advisor FinTech Solutions Map” as well!

I hope you’re continuing to find this new column on financial advisor technology to be helpful! Please share your comments at the end and let me know what you think!

*And for #AdvisorTech companies who want to submit their tech announcements for consideration in future issues, please submit to TechNews@kitces.com!