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1. The financial advisor must believe in being the go-to financial advisor of choice amongst the affluent in the community by staying on the top of all important matters, by being knowledgeable and helpful to clients. 2. The financial advisor must believe in personal capability to be the best advisor for the client by always being a great fiduciary who puts the interest of the client first. 3. The financial advisor must truly believe that a difference in being made in the lives of the clients by helping them achieve their financial goals. 4. The financial advisor must believe in the importance of personal financial decisions, and be an expert...

Daniel Satchkov

19 Jul 2018

Understanding the importance of SEO for financial advisors

A recent article from the Journal of Financial Planning places emphasis on the need for SEO in the marketing process for every financial advisor. The article acknowledges that this particular field of prospecting is widely untapped because “inbound marketing is still a largely ignored strategy from planners because the opportunities are so vast”. However, it does underline the fact that the times are changing and that sooner or later certain strategies including SEO will be more and more prominent and therefore should not be overlooked. After outlining the importance of the marketing strategy in question, the article goes further in depth by defining and explaining SEO. Moreover it explains the...

Daniel Satchkov

19 Jul 2018

How to adjust your client’s investment goals and risk tolerance for an ideal portfolio

Risk in itself is neither good nor bad, but it is extremely important that you understand what risk and how much of it you are taking. As advisors are adopting wealth management technology, they seem to be focused on the risk tolerance aspect of risk system implementation. If we look at guidelines by FINRA, the investment suitability definition goes far beyond risk tolerance: “…include the customer’s age, other investments, financial situation and needs, tax status, investment objectives, investment experience, investment time horizon, liquidity needs and risk tolerance.” From here, we see that risk tolerance (we underlined it) is only one of the aspects of investment constraints, but there many other...

Daniel Satchkov

18 Jul 2018

Your 1 minute case study on 401K Retirement Plans: A look at hidden fees

Welcome to another case study here at Larkspur-RiXtrema. Today, we are going to look at some of the hidden fees behind the LIFESPAN, INCORPORATED RETIREMENT SAVINGS PLAN. To reconcile the extra fees like record keeping fees, advisory fees, etc. with the 401kFiduciaryOptimizer, we have two different strategies to make sure we get a good and fair comparison. 1) The easiest way to make sure you are taking into account any extra fees or revenue sharing structures, we have a default assumption that already accounts for rev sharing! We take the 12b-1 fees of each fund and then subtract it against any savings from a suggest lower feed alternative fund. See...

Daniel Satchkov

17 Jul 2018

Advisors have a key role to play when it comes to helping clients ensure compliance.

SOURCE: planadviser.com A recent web seminar covered the topic of missing participants with Mercer experts Margaret Berger, principal, Princeton, New Jersey, Brian Kearney, principal, Washington, D.C., Norma Shaiara, principal, Washington, D.C. Dealing with missing participants is a big issue for defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) retirement plans. Sponsors of ongoing retirement plans (including frozen plans) may need to rethink their procedures for tracking down missing participants in light of the Department of Labor’s (DOL)’s expanded audit initiative and Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS)’s recent informal guidance. Over the last few years, Congress, the Governmental Accountability Office (GAO) and all three federal agencies that regulate retirement plans have been focusing on...