April 26th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
Davis Janowski over at Investment News highlighted a few blogs in the financial adviser service space in his weekly column, Tech Bits. He identified a new blog called Money Bytes authored by Edmond J. Walters, CEO and Founder of eMoney Advisor, Inc. I had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Walters about eMoney at an FPA annual conference and I’m happy to see the product doing well in the adviser marketplace.
The first thing I did was hop over to Money Bytes and try to add an RSS feed to my Google Reader. Oops, no feed exists for the Money Bytes blog. Also conspicuously missing is the ability to leave comments on blog posts. Hmm. Does this really qualify as a “blog” in the Web 2.0 sense, or is it simply a standard advertising page supplied with weekly commentary?
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April 25th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
Financial advisers create large volumes of data due to the comprehensive nature of the financial planning process. Portions of the material generated include documents that can easily be searched, such as Word documents of financial plans, Excel worksheets with calculations, and email correspondence with clients and allied professionals.
There are also many types of documents that advisers do not generate, such as third party brokerage statements and insurance policies supplied by a client during the data-gathering process. Adviser firms are adopting paperless office practices in increasing numbers to reduce the amount of paper stored for all of these documents. However, paperless versions of these third party documents pose a problem to advisers as they cannot quickly be searched for information critical to the comprehensive financial plan.
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Posted in Practice Management, Technology | 1 Comment »
April 23rd, 2008 Bill Winterberg
This morning when I arrived at work I received a notification from the Financial Planning Association® (FPA®) regarding a new publication for its members. The booklet is titled A Financial Professional’s Guide to Working with Older Clients and is filled with quite a bit of information that nearly all financial professionals will find useful.
As an active member of the FPA and also a volunteer with AARP (see my former posts about working with Tax-Aide), I am pleased to see the collaboration between these two organizations. I can say with certainty that most CFP Board-registered education programs do not prepare students for the unique challenges of working with these diverse clients.
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April 17th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
As a busy financial planning professional, I send out many requests for meetings, conference calls, and other events throughout each week. Some are fairly easy to schedule, such as one-on-one time with a co-worker, but every so often there are times where I need to send a request to numerous individuals and make a futile attempt to work around their own busy schedules.
Fortunately, I have been able to avoid sending out a flurry of emails to attempt to schedule an event as I have come across two unique web utilities. I have been using Doodle for a while and recently discovered When Is Good through a recent Lifehacker post.
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Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
April 15th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
During the production of our quarterly reports earlier this month, I discovered an interesting property of our portfolio management software (PMS), dbCAMS+. The reports delivered to clients include a variety of information including a report showing the time weighted rate of return (TWR) for asset classes and the portfolio as a whole.
TWR Primer
Essentially a TWR report eliminates the effect of cash flows into and out of an investment and simply identifies the return of the underlying asset. Since cash flow is negated, TWR has become a useful measure when comparing investment managers’ performance, as they cannot control the inflow and outflow of cash within their managed assets.
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April 7th, 2008 Bill Winterberg
The Financial Planning Association (FPA®) Board of Directors recently approved changes to its membership structure, most notable of which is an increase of up to $100 in membership dues. The changes become effective on June 1, 2008.
Currently there are two main categories of FPA membership; Individual members and Institutional members. The Individual member category includes three segments:
- Financial Planner Members (CFP® certificants or former IAFP members)
- Members (individuals demonstrating a professional interest in financial planning)
- Students (individuals enrolled in a CFP Board-registered program)
Dues for the individual members currently range from $145/year for Students to $295/year for Members and Financial Planning Members.
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April 3rd, 2008 Bill Winterberg
I have invested many months in an attempt to make the production of quarterly reports much more of a turn-key process in my firm. I am happy to say that by lunchtime on April 2nd, I finished all the quarterly reports and associated workpapers that will be provided to the planners and, ultimately, to our clients. (Update, April 3: Well, I discovered errors within the reports, but they are due to a custom plugin to our Portfolio Management Software, dbCAMS. So for all intents and purposes, they are done, but I’ve had to go through additional steps to circumvent the plugin errors.)
This all started when I was first interviewing with the firm. Part of the negotiation process included a provision that I was not able to take vacation during the first two weeks of the month that followed the end of a quarter. The quarterly production cycle and associated work with fee calculations generated a lot of work and anxiety. Therefore, the owners requested that the Operations Manager be present in the office while this work was completed.
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Posted in Practice Management, Technology | 3 Comments »
