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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%.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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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Financial Thrift from Andy Rooney

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Bill Winterberg in General

In case you missed it, here are some tips to be thrifty from the master of thrift, Andy Rooney.

I don’t imagine advisers would consider giving these tips to clients that may need to reduce their spending habits. I guess there’s more than one way to ensure a portfolio isn’t spent down during retirement.

(Hat tip: JD Drake)

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Free AdvisorMax Access for Advisers

Posted on December 2, 2008 by Bill Winterberg in Practice Management

AdvisorMax is now FREE for financial advisers!

Previously available through an annual subscription, AdvisorMax is an emerging online source for quality practice management articles as well as moderated discussion boards featuring a variety of subjects.

I’ve posted content several times to the Discussion Forums, but traffic to the forums fell off considerably since the summer (likely when the initial free 1-year subscriptions expired). Hopefully traffic will return to the site now that there is no subscription fee for access to content.

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Can PersonalRIA Service the Middle-Market?

Posted on December 2, 2008 by Bill Winterberg in Software

I stumbled across a company called PersonalRIA back in September. I found it through the TechCrunch50 Conference, a venue created where the best start-ups launch their ideas and proposals in front of the industry’s most influential VCs, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs and press. Coincidentally, TechCrunch50 is where I learned about DropBox, the completely awesome and innovative file backup, sync, and sharing platform that I use all the time.

For more on TechCrunch50, visit their website: http://www.techcrunch50.com

Below is the presentation of the PersonalRIA platform presented at TechCrunch50.

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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

Financial Thrift from Andy Rooney

Free AdvisorMax Access for Advisers

Can PersonalRIA Service the Middle-Market?

Top Posts at FPPad for November 2008

Bill Winterberg’s Tweets

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