Special Needs Financial Planning

When parents start the planning process for a child with special needs, they usually work under the perception that if they create a special needs trust, the child will be taken care of and the needs will be met. Unfortunately, creating a trust does not ensure that.

As coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to saturate the media, you may have also noted a significant rise in clients’ anxiety level about estate planning and their own mortality.

People in their 20s and 30s have relatively low levels of home ownership, net worth and real income.

The coronavirus is targeting those most vulnerable – people with disabilities or chronic illnesses. Advisors need to understand the challenges they face.

The single biggest barrier to establishing trust in a new relationship is the lack of reciprocity.

In a world at war with the coronavirus, your worst enemy is the game your mind plays with itself.

Short of losing a child, losing your spouse is the most painful event someone can experience. The sorrow is overwhelming and often times debilitating. It never goes away, but over time most people learn to peacefully co-exist with it.

The hedge fund firm Renaissance Technologies, founded by James Simons, has been an object of amazement, admiration, and envy for years, because of the incredibly high investment returns of its flagship Medallion fund. In a new book, author Gregory Zuckerman explains how Renaissance did it. He also shows how a key Renaissance employee used his riches to get Donald Trump elected president.

Few of us realize the anxiety-ridden mindset that drives prospects to seek a financial advisor. If they did, they would structure their initial meetings very differently.

There are several things a client can do to plan for long-term care costs that may be incurred as one ages. But for the large majority of clients for whom self-insuring is not an option, what are the alternatives?

Because you’re an expert on all things financial, you may believe you know what’s best for others – in their financial lives and otherwise. But it’s unlikely you do. The culprit is your inability to communicate effectively, as these “bloopers” illustrate.

Am I the only one who is growing concerned about the current trajectory of the financial planning profession?

Picking the wrong niche is one of the worst decisions you could make for your practice.

When is it appropriate to commence a guardian proceeding? What do I have to prove? What concerns should I have about bringing a proceeding? Can it be avoided?

Advisors often receive clients’ advance directives, such as durable powers of attorney and health care proxies, that were drafted in a different state, perhaps many years ago. Are those still valid?

To get CPAs to like you, there’s no more powerful tool than empathy. Here’s what is going on in the mind of the CPA when you approach them to be a source of referrals.

If you lapse into a lecture about the overwhelming evidence supporting passive investments, remember you might as well be showing the prospect an article about bird feeding.

You routinely engage in some practices that on the surface make sense. But you would gather more assets if you discarded them. Here are three examples.