News About IRS And Tax

Monday, 10 September 2018

Step-By-Step Guide To Hiring A Great Client Service Associate

Given how much a good and efficient financial advisor must rely on a team for support, making a good decision on hiring a new client service associate is critical. Unfortunately, though, finding a good – or better yet, great – client service associate can be a real challenge, and getting it wrong with a hiring mistake is inconvenient at best (and disastrous at worst). Which makes finding the right client service associate – either to fill a vacant spot on the team or because you’ve reached capacity and need to expand further – a rather high stakes proposition.

In this guest post, practice management consultant Teresa Riccobuono of Simply Organized shares the most important factors for successfully hiring a great administrative employee, including developing not only an effective job description and also a functional job posting (which is not the same thing and can help save a tremendous amount of time). She also provides tips on how to give detailed instructions for candidates to submit their applications, where the best places are to post the opening, and some pitfalls to avoid in the process.

From there, Teresa gives guidance on what to do once the resumes start pouring in (because there are usually a lot of applicants for administrative positions), how to stay focused on the end-goal even in the initial phase when you may see a lot of resumes from unqualified candidates, and when to be critical (but not too critical!) in reviewing and screening resumes from qualified candidates.

Finally, Teresa walks through an actual interviewing process, from preliminary preparation, to setting up initial phone interviews, conducting face-to-face interviews (including some possible pitfalls and yellow lights to watch out for along the way), and ultimately making your final decision (and how to then let the others on your “short list” know that you’re moving forward with a different candidate).

While hiring may not ever be particularly easy (or enjoyable for advisors who set out to serve clients, not hire and manage people!), and it might turn out to be a better decision to outsource the process to a recruiter, there are strategies you can use if you’re doing the hiring process yourself to become more efficient and effective (and make the process a little less painful). By doing so, you can increase the odds of finding a great candidate, lessen the chances of making a hiring mistake, and get back to what it is you and your team do best… helping your clients!

Friday, 7 September 2018

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Sep 8-9)

Enjoy the current installment of “weekend reading for financial planners” – this week’s edition kicks off with the recent announcement that President Trump has issued an Executive Order for the IRS and Department of Labor to review (and ease) the rules around Multiple Employer [retirement] Plans (MEPs) as a way to expand small business access to employer retirement plans, ideally bringing down costs through greater economies of scale, and at the least giving 401(k)-centric advisors a new way to work with small business owners (by creating and offering their own Open MEP solution?!).

From there, we have several articles about advisor marketing this week, from a look at how it’s not enough to just have a good value proposition for clients if you can’t also explain the process you’ll use to achieve it and provide some “proof” (e.g., sample deliverables) to show your results, to how to engage in a formal “marketing makeover” for your firm (which starts with crafting your own one-page marketing “messaging brief” before you hire anyone to help you implement it, why it’s so important to keep asking “why” (literally, over and over again) to prospects to truly understand their needs, and the reason that advisory firms doing in-person seminar marketing are now turning to Facebook digital advertising as a more cost-effective path to get prospects to attend their seminars in the first place.

We also have a few practice management articles, including: how to think through different types of financial advisor business models based on what’s actually being provided to clients (e.g., investment-only, investments with some planning as needed, planning with some investments as needed, or financial consulting only); why it’s crucial for advisory firm owners to separate out their compensation for the work in the business from their profit distributions for the income from the business; what it takes to successfully take a 6-week sabbatical away from your own advisory firm; and the issues to consider when your multi-advisor partnership actually has to “vote a partner off the island” and remove a partner from the business (without collapsing the business itself in the process!).

We wrap up with three interesting articles, all around the theme of better understanding our own motivations and focus: the first explores fascinating research that finds one of the best ways to help people improve their situation is not for them to receive good advice but actually for them to give to others, which actually cements their own confidence in their knowledge and helps them formulate a specific plan of action (the one they’re recommending to others as well!); the second looks at how in the end, there really are no “natural born salespeople”, just people who have a natural desire to help others and learn the very learnable sales skills and conversations it takes to succeed; and a fascinating look at how the popular wisdom to “find and pursue your passion” is awful advice, because, in reality, passions are more likely to evolve from something we actively do, not be something that already exists that we decide to pursue and do more of (which means it’s better to just start doing something you’re interested in and let the passion develop, rather than trying to intuit your passion in the first place).

Enjoy the “light” reading!

My Clients Pay Me Through a Mobile Payment Service- What Does This Mean for My Taxes?

Running a business has changed dramatically in the last few years. For myself, one of the biggest shifts I’ve seen is the rise of mobile payments. When I first started as a freelancer, I remember having to prepare and format...

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source https://blog.turbotax.intuit.com/self-employed/my-clients-pay-me-through-a-mobile-payment-service-what-does-this-mean-for-my-taxes-41585/

Thursday, 6 September 2018

Why President Trump’s Executive Order on Multiple Employer Retirement Plans May Not Improve Access to Retirement Plans

Last week, President Trump signed an Executive Order which directed both the IRS and DOL to review certain rules regarding both required minimum distributions and the ways which small business can team up to offer retirement plans to their employees.

In this week’s #OfficeHours with @MichaelKitces, my Tuesday 1PM EST broadcast via Periscope and guest hosted this week by Jeff Levine, we discuss what multiple employer retirement plans are, how President Trumps recent Executive Order might improve retirement plan access for employee’s of small businesses, and why these proposed changes might ultimately have unintended consequences.

Wednesday, 5 September 2018

Why (Prudent) Spending Rates Matter More Than Savings Rates

The media provides no shortage of articles giving recommendations of how much households should save to afford retirement, from rules of thumb like “save 10% to 15% of your annual income” to more detailed research studies providing “precise” savings guidelines based on age, income level, and targeted retirement income replacement rates. The caveat to all of these tools, though, is that they presume the household has flexible discretionary dollars available to save in the first place.

Yet in reality, most households struggle to save because there is no money left at the end of the month to save in the first place. Because technically their problem isn’t a savings rate that’s too low; it’s a spending rate that’s too high, in one or more categories, that is causing all of the available household income to be consumed before the end of the month is even reached!

And sadly, there is remarkably little guidance available to households about what a prudent spending rate should be in the first place. In some of the largest categories, that tend to be financed with debt – e.g., homes and automobiles – lender guidelines place some restriction on the maximum amount of spending in each of those key categories. With the caveat that lenders don’t lend based on what is prudent for the borrower, but what will result in a permissible level of defaults and losses for the lender. Or stated more simply, borrowing guidelines are based on what the lender believes will extract the maximal amount of interest with an acceptable level of defaults… despite the fact that many of those borrowers will be in over their heads and struggling just to make their repayments!

A somewhat better data set for households to evaluate the prudence of their spending comes from comparing an individual’s spending to the Consumer Expenditure Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which details what households spend in various categories, segmented by income level (as fixed expenses not surprisingly consume far more of a lower-income household’s budget than those with higher income levels).

Of course, comparing one’s spending by category to average spending rates (by income level) still doesn’t necessarily reveal what is prudent and what a household should spend, especially when recognizing that the national savings rate is already a dismally low 3.2% (which means comparing to CES data in the end simply compares to a national set of households that already are spending “too much” and not saving enough!).

Nonetheless, focusing on spending rates at least puts the focus back on what households can control – what they spend, and what they earn – rather than focusing on or criticizing a savings rate that ultimately is more a result of other decisions than a decision unto itself. And also helps to recognize that for most middle-income households where spending is challenging, it is actually far better to focus on housing and transportation costs than trying to trim vacations, clothing, lattes and avocado toast from the budget.

But the question still remains: what is a prudent spending rate for typical household expenses, and how do you figure out what is or is not an appropriate amount to spend in the first place (that “lives within your means” and leaves an available dollar amount of savings left over)?

Tuesday, 4 September 2018

How to Get Your Financial Resolutions Back on Track

Did you ever try to lose weight this year? Maybe some of you succeeded, but for most of us, what seems like a good idea at the beginning falls off our list of priorities. New Year’s resolutions are much the...

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source https://blog.turbotax.intuit.com/income-and-investments/how-to-get-your-financial-resolutions-back-on-track-41523/

#FASuccess Ep 088: Learning A More Genuine Sales Conversation Approach To Better Turn Prospects Into Clients with Nancy Bleeke

Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the 88th episode of the “Financial Advisor Success” podcast. My guest on today’s podcast is Nancy Bleeke. Nancy is the founder of Sales Pro Insider, a sales training platform for financial advisors that teaches how to better turn prospects into actual clients. What’s unique about Nancy, though, is her somewhat non-traditional sales training approach, which isn’t about pushing features and benefits and going for the hard close, but simply about having a structure to the conversation that occurs in an approach talk with the prospect to ultimately help them make a decision or take an action at the end. Because the reality is, even if you’re in the business to get paid for your advice and not to sell your company’s products, you still have to sell someone on the reason why they should hire you and pay your fee in the first place.

In this episode, we talk in depth about Nancy’s WIIFT structure to the sales conversation, which is both focusing on the “what’s in it for them” of the WIIFT acronym, but also a five-step conversation process of wait and prepare, initiate, investigate, facilitate, then consolidate. The importance of asking more questions to really understand a prospect’s context so that you can refine and right-size the information that you give them, and the dangers of giving prospects more information than they actually need in a manner that can just put them into analysis paralysis instead of helping to motivate them to take an action or make a decision.

We also talk about the actual key questions to ask a prospect throughout the meeting process. From setting an agenda with them in advance of every meeting to ensure you’re really discussing what they want to discuss, asking what it is that brought them to the meeting to begin understanding what their real problems, opportunities, wants, and needs are, asking prospects for feedback about how your services and proposal sound to them as you describe it to them, and being certain at the end of a meeting to actually ask for their business and making it crystal clear what the next step would be in order for them to proceed.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Nancy explains why the biggest and most common problem that financial advisors make in trying to get new clients is our tendency to try to convince clients that they need a financial plan in the first place, instead of listening to what they actually want and need and relating the benefits of financial planning to their problems and concerns.

So whether you’re interested in learning about building a more effective framework around your conversations with clients, how to demonstrate your expertise in a way that builds trust, or how to structure meetings to increase conversion rates, then we hope that you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.