Advisors archive
Every Advisors story, newest first. 898 stories
9 stories
- Products & portfolios
Schwab opens its cash shelf to a yield-splitting product
Save's Market Savings puts principal-protected yield in front of more than 16,000 RIAs on Schwab's platform, and turns the sweep into something advisers can shop.
- Succession & selling a firm
The RIA deal dip is a seller's calendar problem
The 239 deals through September 22 put the year two ahead of last year's record pace and the quarter 19% behind it, a split that should shape a succession timeline.
- Practice management
A 45-year veteran is selling listening as a credential
The 100,000-advisor shortfall will keep getting answered with transition checks until firms decide the discovery conversation is worth training and screening for.
- Tax & estate planning
Lodging carries the per diem increase; meals stay put
The new substantiation rates pay more for the room and nothing extra for the plate, reshuffling which per-diem clients actually come out ahead.
- Products & portfolios
The 26% earnings quarter was a capex peak
Goldman strategists expect the AI buildout that delivered the gain to start charging for itself, leaving the trailing four quarters a poor basis for planning.
- Products & portfolios
The 4% rule sets the floor; the ratchet handles the upside
A mechanical 10% raise whenever the portfolio clears 150% of its starting value would let clients spend the upside the 4% rule leaves behind — if the trigger gets written down in advance.
- The Advisor's Note
Ameriprise’s retention check is now a recruiting benchmark
One-time, taxed cash is now measured against equity that gets priced at the next transaction, and this quarter’s moves show advisors doing that math.
- Succession & selling a firm
In RIA sales, the entity chart beats the multiple
The July 2025 tax law made the real number in a practice sale depend on a structure the owner chose years before any buyer called.
- Products & portfolios
The climate risk that pays is where clients live
Treat climate as a fund-selection question and you miss the planning decisions clients are about to make: where they live, whether to move, and whether the plan survives the answer.
10 stories
- Recruiting & transitions
Ameriprise pays advisors to stay, and prices the exit
Retention cash arrives once and is taxed once; the RIA equity it now competes with gets priced by the next transaction, and Ameriprise's own CEO has already written the test for which payment survives.
- Succession & selling a firm
A soft RIA deal quarter tells sellers about 2025, not 2027
DeVoe's 19% dip counts decisions made a year ago, which makes it a reading on timing rather than a reading on value.
- Practice management
The 15 million self-employed are the uncovered workers advisers can call
EIG's 76.2 million uncovered workers split into two prospect lists, and only one of them can be dialed directly.
- Succession & selling a firm
Dynasty broadens the RIA capital menu; the successor still goes unnamed
The capital menu answers how a founder gets paid; naming the successor is a different transaction, and the money does not touch it.
- Tax & estate planning
Entity structure has become an exit decision, not a formation one
The July 2025 law made 199A permanent and widened the QSBS exclusion, putting a structure the owner picked years ago back on the agenda with the bill arriving at the sale.
- Practice management
The internship is becoming advisory recruiting's cheapest fit test
Amplified's Externship drew more than 2,800 students this summer, and the firms folding it into their own programs are buying what a resume cannot show.
- Tax & estate planning
The 85-year-old's Roth conversion is a beneficiary question
Disability status, automatic for SSDI recipients, decides whether an inherited Roth pays out over ten years or a lifetime — which makes it conversion-planning input.
- Products & portfolios
Tax should be the last question in an equity-comp decision
The seven considerations are sound; the sequence most advisors inherit keeps a concentrated client holding.
- The Advisor's Note
Savvy has a 90-second demo and no published custody price
Its introducing-broker model leaves RIAs comparing a workflow number against unpublished clearing economics.
- Tax & estate planning
The succession gap is a price nobody wrote down
Founders who never put a number on the internal buyout do not avoid the sale; they hand the terms to whichever outside buyer drafts them first.
18 stories
- Products & portfolios
The 4% rule was a bond-yield artifact
A 2013 paper's challenge to the safe withdrawal rate still frames retirement-income conversations, and explains why a round number is the wrong thing to promise.
- Practice management
The fee case built on gross returns is the weakest one
A Journal of Financial Planning paper inventories what planners actually deliver, and that list is a stronger client conversation than any performance comparison.
- Practice management
A goals-based plan pays most when the client ranks the goals
The 2015 Blanchett paper prices the conversation most practices run informally: which goals get funded, and in what order.
- Practice management
FPA wants “financial planner” protected before it has defined the bar
A protected title would flow into every bio page, pitch deck and conference badge where the phrase is used as a claim, tested against standards the association has yet to write.
- Tax & estate planning
Stevens's bill would add a claiming age advisors must price
The bill names no eligible occupations and no reduction for filing at 60, leaving advisors to gather the paper and price the trade-off before the list exists.
- Succession & selling a firm
The successor is a buyer, and the terms are missing
Edward Jones and Morning Consult found that 86% of junior advisors want to inherit a retiring founder's practice, while only 38% of senior advisors anticipating a transition within five years have named a successor—a gap that reads as a documentation failure and prices like an offer left unwritten.
- Tax & estate planning
The hospital question is the cheapest test of an aging book
Noticing decline is the easy half; a power of attorney the custodian will actually accept is what keeps a client's account out of guardianship.
- Practice management
Consolidation stalls on the calendar and the calculator, not the client
Three studies show advisers chasing household assets without the hours or the numbers to back the pitch clients never hear.
- Practice management
Savvy's new platform has 150 users, no outside clients and no price
For an RIA weighing custodians, the introducing-broker model moves revenue rather than assets, and the terms that would decide the switch stay unpublished until a 2027 onboarding window.
- Tax & estate planning
The wealth transfer's 6% retention number is a segmentation problem
A survey of 1,008 future inheritors finds the children already have advisers, which makes next-generation engagement a matter of adding households before the estate settles, not after.
- Practice management
NASAA's fee waiver settles the cheapest line in the budget
The firm-level IARD waiver runs through 2027 and the rep fee holds at $15, leaving the compliance hours that scale with headcount as the real cost of state registration.
- Practice management
Savvy's custody pitch is software over Fidelity's rails
Comparing platforms means pricing the workflow above clearing—and asking what the 90-second number includes.
- Recruiting & transitions
UBS freezes the grid and bets stability beats a check
As Morgan Stanley raises thresholds 10% and Cresset pulls a $4 billion UBS team, UBS's 2027 plan bets a compounding annual payout can beat an upfront check.
- Recruiting & transitions
UBS holds the grid and prices what leaving costs
An unchanged 2027 payout grid and a funded 25% growth bonus leave UBS advisors comparing a cash advance against a repayment obligation — and force competing RIAs and recruiters to quote the whole move.
- Practice management
The Muse Selloff Prices the Part of Advice an App Can Do
Tuesday's tape marked down Schwab, Ameriprise and Raymond James over one consumer app — and the layer it threatens is the layer most practices still bill for.
- Tax & estate planning
The NUA trade is won on cost basis, not tax rates
Specific identification can shrink the ordinary-income piece of an appreciated employer-stock position, provided per-share purchase records survive.
- Practice management
The rollover memo works best when it says stay put
The CFP Board's rollover framework turns the advisor's built-in fee conflict into a written, client-specific analysis, and the firms that run it at every separation event will convert more of them.
- Products & portfolios
$85,000 sleeve is the new front door
Series vehicles that fill in five days are making master structures and administrators, not deal flow, the gate that controls alternatives in advisor accounts.
3 stories
- Recruiting & transitions
Schwab's fourth Ameriprise raid reprices the breakaway math
Four teams and $10 billion or more out of Ameriprise this year make the Schwab-Dynasty playbook the template for any advisor weighing independence, custodian and package structure at once.
- Products & portfolios
US slips to No. 24, and 22% is the planning number
Natixis's Global Retirement Index hands advisors a client-facing reason to put a benefit-cut line inside every income plan they write.
- Succession & selling a firm
Buyers still pay up. They want the file first
Deal counts fell 9% while seller assets climbed 88%, and the gap between those two numbers is where a founder's pitch and the premium get decided.