December 2008

Valuing the Economic Impact of the Worker, Retiree, and Employer Recovery Act of 2008

Posted on December 24, 2008 by Bill Winterberg in Taxes

H.R. 7327, the Worker, Retiree, and Employer Recovery Act of 2008, was signed by President Bush on December 23. The proposed bill, which in part offers a waiver of the 50% penalty for failing to take a minimum required distribution, has now become law.

Note that I write minimum required distribution, when most write required minimum distribution, commonly abbreviated RMD. Much of the tax information published by the IRS prior to 2008 referred to the distribution in the former state (MRD) which is how I learned it over the past decade. Alas, it appears the IRS has changed its references to the more common RMD beginning with 2008 publications.

I first blogged about the House passage of this bill here.

CFP Board Proactive Exam Communication

Posted on December 23, 2008 by Bill Winterberg in Professional Development

In response to several communication issues regarding the progress of the July 2008 exam results, CFP Board is releasing updates on its website regarding the 2-day CFP® Certification Examination.

The most recent exam was held November 21-22, 2008. On December 22, CFP Board issued the following statement:

Potentially problematic exam questions have been reviewed by our psychometricians and subject matter experts, and scoring dispositions for these items have been determined, with scoring modifications where appropriate. These modifications are being applied to generate individual score reports.

Click here to view the latest updates regarding the November CFP® Certification Examination.

Yes, Twitter Can Help Financial Planners

Posted on December 19, 2008 by Bill Winterberg in Technology

Back in May I wrote about joining the Twitter bandwagon to see whether or not this new social media outlet had any relevance to my daily responsibilities. After about 400 updates in my Twitter profile, I struck gold.

Over the last week, our firm has been implementing tax loss harvesting strategies across our entire book of assets. As one might imagine, there are many, many individual trades to identify, submit, track, and confirm, as we want to ensure that all activity is executed without errors for our clients.

Explore the Independent Advisor Technology Forum

Posted on December 14, 2008 by Bill Winterberg in Efficiency, Practice Management, Technology

04/18/2012 UPDATE: The Independent Advisor Tech Forum is no more, as the domain registration has expired. Still, you can get great information on advisor technology right here! Subscribe today.

In Friday’s Tech Bits column on InvestmentNews, Davis Janowski highlighted a new technology-oriented website targeted “for financial advisors affiliated with a broker dealer and/or wirehouse who are interested in becoming independent.”

Click here to visit Independent Advisor Tech Forum. (link removed)

Independent Advisor Tech Forum is a collaborative effort spearheaded by several technology vendors in the independent adviser space. The list of participants is a genuine who’s who of big players in the technology space for CRM, paperless office, and performance reporting. Here’s a short list of who’s involved:

Bruckenstein’s Picks for Best of Technology 2008

Posted on December 12, 2008 by Bill Winterberg in Technology

When you have 2 minutes, go read Joel Bruckenstein’s “The Best of Technology 2008” article at MorningstarAdvisor.

Click here for The Best of Technology 2008.

A tip when you read articles from MorningstarAdvisor: hit “Print” so you don’t have to click on the 1-2-3-4 page links at the bottom. Get the whole article on one screen with the print preview. The 4-page split posts are starting to annoy me.

Back to the technology picks. Bruckenstein’s hardware pick for 2008: a wireless keyboard/mouse combo from Logitech. He cites a minimum productivity improvement of 5%.

Really? A keyboard/mouse combo? Did dual-monitors make the cut, or did the pick have to be something reviewed in 2008? I think the minimum productivity improvement of an additional monitor starts at 10%.

Changes to RMD Law Passes House

Posted on December 11, 2008 by Bill Winterberg in Taxes

Update 12/24/08: Want to know the economic impact of the RMD waiver? Read this post on FPPad.com.

Late on Wednesday December 10, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 7327, the Worker, Retiree and Employer Recovery Act of 2008. See the main House.gov press release here. This bill suspends the 50% excise tax assessed when a taxpayer fails to take minimum required distributions from a retirement account. (See Senate vote update below)

I first wrote about potential changes to the RMD laws in this FPPad post, Are You Ramping Up for Potential RMD Changes? It wasn’t clear if the changes to the RMD requirements were going to apply for the 2008 tax year, so depending on what Congress did, there may have been a potential opportunity to delay distributions if they had not yet been taken.

The bill that passed waives the 50% penalty for tax year 2009. Therefore, as of today, there’s no reason why an RMD for 2008 should be delayed any longer. The waiver of the penalty does not apply for tax year 2008.

Bulk Trading, Tax Training, and Career Planning

Posted on December 9, 2008 by Bill Winterberg in General

Updates will be rather sparse for the rest of the week, both to FPPad and to Twitter.

Bulk Trading

So far for the week, I’ve coordinated a bulk trading effort at our firm to capture losses in taxable accounts where we can execute orders across the entire book of business. We have multiple custodians, so I’ve had to build some flexibility in the trading techniques to ensure compatibility with the custodians’ preferences. Still, we’ll be executing almost 20% of last year’s annual trading volume in just a day. Not bad considering we don’t have the luxury of Tamarac or iRebal.

Tax Training

Increase Adviser Productivity At Least 10%

Posted on December 9, 2008 by Bill Winterberg in Efficiency, Technology

Monday’s Wall Street Journal has a short column extolling the benefits of using multiple monitors on a computer.

The article, titled When More Is More by Michael Totty can be viewed by clicking here.

From the article:

Paccar has added multimonitor setups for material planners on its manufacturing lines, who have to manage demand for production parts using information on inventories inside and outside the company. Because of limited desk space and falling prices of displays, planners received two larger widescreen monitors instead of the three-screen setup in the call center. The ability to manage more rapidly changing information has produced a 10% to 20% boost in productivity, Mr. Quinn says.

FPPad Turns 100!

Posted on December 8, 2008 by Bill Winterberg in General

Just a little over 10 months ago, I launched FPPad.com with the help a study group partner, Ben Gilbert. Now here we are at 100 posts (hey, that’s a lot for one guy with a full time operations job and many outside interests!).

I must be honest: it’s challenging for me to make time to put together content for the blog. More often than not, I try to provide some insight or thought-provoking questions when covering developments in the financial planning technology space.

I don’t have all the answers, but I try to offer solutions to problems that matter to a financial planner’s bottom line. Hopefully you find FPPad to be a unique resource of technical and operations information on financial planning in the gigantic blogoshpere. If so, be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed.

Get the Financial Planning 2008 Software Survey

Posted on December 4, 2008 by Bill Winterberg in Technology

Financial Planning magazine conducts an annual survey of its readers to gauge the different types of technology in use by financial planners and advisers. 2008 marks the second year of the survey, and Joel P. Bruckenstein published an overview of the results and a comparison to last year’s survey information.

Click here to view Bruckenstein’s review of Financial Planning’s 2008 Software Survey.

Here’s my 30-second take if you don’t have time to read the entire review:

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FPPad

Valuing the Economic Impact of the Worker, Retiree, and Employer Recovery Act of 2008

CFP Board Proactive Exam Communication

Yes, Twitter Can Help Financial Planners

Explore the Independent Advisor Technology Forum

Bruckenstein’s Picks for Best of Technology 2008

Changes to RMD Law Passes House

Bulk Trading, Tax Training, and Career Planning

Increase Adviser Productivity At Least 10%

FPPad Turns 100!

Get the Financial Planning 2008 Software Survey

Bill Winterberg’s Tweets

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