Wealth management

Americans' confidence in their ability to afford a comfortable retirement has recovered slightly from the record lows of the past five years, primarily among those participating in retirement plans, but overall their actual preparations for retirement haven't improved, according to a new survey.

A federal court may allow the convicted former chief of a telecommunications company to deduct more than $44 million from his taxes after he was forced to forfeit the amount of stock gains he realized from insider trading.

“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.

Entrepreneurs are the brightest, most focused and determined people I know. But it is also lonely for many of them.

The House Financial Services Committee has overwhelmingly approved bipartisan legislation that would remove a requirement for smaller public companies with less than $250 million in annual revenue from filing their financial statements in Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, format for five years.

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.

The American Institute of CPAs has written a letter to the Internal Revenue Service, asking the agency to postpone the effective dates for cost basis reporting for options and debt instruments.

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.

Check out the digital edition of the March 2014 issue of Accounting Today.

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

More firms are moving into wealth management

Strategies for maximizing investment efficiency

The Internal Revenue Service has released the long-awaited final instructions for the 3.8 percent Net Investment Income Tax that was included as part of the Affordable Care Act.

G2 FinTech focuses on a technology niche of helping accountants automate the process of tax preparation for financial firms that need to deal with complex transactions such as wash sales and straddles on a regular basis.

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.