Financial planning

“Blind luck” is how Jack Johns characterized his 16 percent profit on something he read about on the Internet called Master Limited Partnerships. Johns, a retired postal worker from Rincon, Georgia, said he sold his MLP investments within a year because he realized he didn’t really know what he’d bought.

The Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards is working on several new initiatives to provide greater academic support for the financial planning profession, including a new Ph.D. program and academic journal, along with the possible establishment of a Center for Financial Planning.

Charitable donations typically drop off after the surge at the end of the year, and soon after that clients can compile their list of their contributions from the previous year so they can provide this information to their accountants.

The Bitcoin world reacted with a mixture of acceptance and resignation to a Newsweek magazine report that the creator of the digital currency is a 64-year-old Japanese-American man living in the Los Angeles area.

When Accounting Today and Cetera Financial Specialists set about identifying leading CPA wealth managers for our Seeking Success project, we chose firms whose revenue growth from wealth management was higher than for their other services. But we could have chosen other measures, such as growth in assets under management, or number of new clients.

A roundup of financial planning news from the previous month.

New methods of investing can keep clients on track

Fewer retirees are expected to receive spousal or survivor benefits from Social Security and private employer-sponsored pension plans in the future, increasing their economic vulnerability, according to a new government report.

The United States ranked near the bottom of the top 20 countries in term of retirement security, according to a new report.

Investors have proven to be sophisticated enough to dismiss implausible explanations from companies of their quarterly earnings results, according to a new study.

A blue ribbon panel of public policy experts has released a set of recommendations to address the problem of underfunded public pensions.

Forty-five percent of the 1,000 investors in a recent survey expect to receive a tax refund, and among them, 61 percent plan to save or invest the money, according to a poll by TD Ameritrade

Global assets under management are expected to rise to approximately $102 trillion by 2020, with nearly 50 percent of them in North America, according to a new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The Internal Revenue Service has filed documents in U.S. Tax Court claiming that Michael Jackson’s estate has severely undervalued his image and music catalog, telling the pop star’s executors that the estate owes an extra $505 million in taxes, plus $197 million in penalties.

Successful CPA wealth managers share their onboarding secrets.

A roundup of financial planning news from the previous month.

The building blocks of a successful FP practice

Congress voted in December 2010 to let wealthy Americans make tax-free gifts of as much as $5 million—and the money flowed.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued new rules providing an automatic extension of time for certain estates without a filing requirement to elect portability of the decedent’s unused exclusion amount for the benefit of the decedent’s surviving spouse.

Despite a wave of accounting scandals at Chinese companies, a 58 percent majority of capital markets executives at investment banks believe the number of U.S. IPOs from China-based businesses will increase in 2014, according to a new survey by the accounting and consulting firm BDO USA LLP.