As an advisor helping a client with planning for their estates, clients expect you to provide advice in all areas. A directive to receive medical information is a small item, but one they should discuss with their attorney. They may not know to ask about it, if you don’t suggest doing so. Having a loved one is a condition that they cannot authorize the release of their medical information to a loved one is stressful. For a loved one not to know what is happening can be even more stressful. Don’t let small things in your planning process cause big problems.

Every retiree would like to know how their plans will work. If they could take a retirement test drive of their plans, they could have more confidence in the future. Retirement Test Drive is one of PlanLab®’s programs for just that purpose. It performs a detailed cash flow analysis incorporating expected incomes and expenditures and uses assets as you designate, for some of the expenditures as part of your plans. No software can accurately predict the future, but Retirement Test Drive lets you see how your plans, including your best assumptions and your objectives, might work.

First, you always want to take advantage of any employer match—it is free money. For example, if the employer matches $.50 for each dollar you contribute, that’s like earning 50% after taxes for each matched dollar. Regardless of economic conditions, you should always contribute up to the amount that the employer will match.

Advisors who helped their clients establish a retirement investment strategy based on time horizons, have clients who feel more secure this October. The economic crisis of 2008 has many retirees very concerned over what adjustments to make in their retirement plans. The Dow Jones has gone from over 14,000 in October 2007 to under 10,000 at the start of October 2008. Advisors’ phones are ringing with retirees wanting to know, “What do I do?” or “Should we reduce our retirement income?” But, advisors who helped their clients invest using time horizons and retirement phases are telling their clients, “No need to make any changes. Your retirement strategy was built to allow riskier investments to have plenty of time to recover – your plans do not have to be adjusted up and down with market changes.”

The current financial crisis is often described with sound bites such as “Executive Bail Out,” “Wall Street Bail Out,” “Credit Markets Collapse,” or “Failed Economic Problems.” None of these labels or sound bites helps the average person understand what is happening and, more importantly, how it affects them. Granted there are many pieces to this puzzle, but the one that may impact the average person the quickest is the collapse of the credit market.

Financial calculators and simple illustrations are one-sided solutions. All financial problems and solutions occur within the total financial situation of a household. Financial calculators and simple financial illustrations only consider a limited set of factors – just the factors that are relevant to the particular calculation. A cash flow analysis considers not only the benefits of the solution, but also the costs of the solution.

Looking for new sales techniques? Wish there were a course for you or your sales staff that really got back to the basics?
You need look no further than your child, or grandchild. Their sales skills come naturally. If you don’t believe this, think of the last time a child asked you for something and you tried to say no.

Many estate planners, as well as estate planning software, only show one side of the picture. The emphasis is on how much estate tax will be saved, and/or how much more the heirs will inherit. After all, that is the side of the picture almost every higher net worth individual is concerned.
What about the other [...]