Advisors archive
Every Advisors story, newest first. 898 stories
16 stories
- Practice management
The SEC just gave examiners a checklist for your annual review
The annual compliance review now has a published yardstick — firms that treat it as paperwork will feel it first.
- Recruiting & transitions
Morgan Stanley raises the growth bar and bids for its own succession
The first 2027 wirehouse plan lifts production hurdles 10% and prices a 30-year advisor's exit above the top of its own payout grid.
- Succession & selling a firm
ESOP bill clears the House; exit advice gets a rulebook
The Retire Through Ownership Act gives advisers a named valuation standard for the ESOP route, changing how a founder's options stack up against a buyer's letter of intent.
- Tax & estate planning
Bonus depreciation is a timing trade worth pricing, not a windfall
The Tax Foundation's three corrections give advisors the arithmetic for a year-end purchase conversation, and a reason to stop calling the writeoff a permanent cut.
- Recruiting & transitions
Ameriprise's $1.3B exit is a custodian decision, priced at 25 basis points
The Minneapolis team kept its clients and its fee schedule; everything else it now rents from one custodian.
- Practice management
NASAA holds its $15 rep fee flat; the ledger is the cost
The firm-level IARD waiver now runs through 2027, which fixes the cheap part of state registration while the per-representative workload keeps growing.
- Practice management
Advisors want client time; AI is buying back emails
Vanguard's 72% time priority gives practices the benchmark for judging where AI belongs, and the survey's usage data shows most are still a layer away from the client-facing hours they say they want.
- Tax & estate planning
Clients asking for a simple estate plan want control, not fewer documents
The advisor's real deliverable is a plan the family can run, with a written record that the tradeoffs were chosen rather than discovered.
- Practice management
The 5% foundation payout floor is now a client audit trigger
Average payout at the largest private foundations was 5.1% in 2024, handing advisors a benchmark and a warning for private foundation clients.
- Tax & estate planning
The beneficiary's clock sets inherited-IRA RMDs
A Slott Report mailbag answer ties the inherited-IRA divisor to the beneficiary's age and the Roth five-year rule to the owner's original contribution date.
- Practice management
Ask what the decision solved before you call it a mistake
Kitces and Richards would have advisors rebuild a client's reasoning before they rebuild the portfolio; the answer is what justifies the rewrite.
- The Advisor's Note
The 401(k) now starts income before the rollover
BlackRock's default embeds guaranteed income and private assets, moving the fall's tax checkpoints after the income decision.
- Tax & estate planning
The October decisions that set the withdrawal rate
Three dated checkpoints — an excess 2025 IRA contribution, a federal healthcare subsidy that needs a stress case, and a fraud deduction the House voted to restore — show why the fall calendar moves the spending plan more than an allocation call does.
- Practice management
Healthcare's fiscal trajectory belongs in every decumulation model
The Tax Foundation's fiscal math argues for stress-testing federal healthcare subsidies and the employer-coverage exclusion the way advisors already stress-test equity returns.
- Recruiting & transitions
Osaic's rebuild starts with the advisors it still has
More than a thousand registered reps left in the year consolidation ended, and the terms a sitting Osaic advisor can still negotiate are the part of the story that pays.
- Practice management
Claude for advisors hits the workflow wall
The connectors are the proof of concept, and the practices that never wrote down a baseline will have no way to know whether the tool moved anything.
15 stories
- Practice management
Ridgeline’s $250M raise matters to advisors for who wrote it
An invitation-only round led by the founder buys the platform time to finish the reconciliation build its RIA clients have already signed up for.
- Practice management
RIA buyers have more capital than ever; holding period now wins deals
Eight ways to fund an RIA acquisition, and the one term that decides whether the seller's team survives it: the buyer's return model.
- Tax & estate planning
A fraud tax fix that lands at the decumulation desk
The House's 408-17 vote restores a deduction fraud victims lost in 2018; the penalty waiver and one-year repayment window are the pieces advisors can plan around.
- Recruiting & transitions
28 advisors kept an $825 million book by staying put
An OSJ's move reprices the practices inside it; the advisors who stayed just published the math for everyone else.
- Products & portfolios
Rescinding 14a-8 turns client proxy voting into state-by-state diligence
If adopted, the SEC's proposal moves the gatekeeping of shareholder proposals to state law, and advisors who vote client proxies will feel it in every ESG engagement.
- Products & portfolios
A 45.4% tax loss turns four of five tax fixes into a founder's playbook
Four of Financial Planning's five tax strategies presuppose a concentrated position, while the 1% drag everyone else pays is the harder problem to sell against.
- Practice management
SEC approves FINRA's outside-business rewrite and leaves firms the discretion that matters
Rule 3290 removes the paperwork on bartending and weekend refereeing and says broker-dealers need not supervise a dual registrant's RIA; how much of that relief survives is decided in each firm's compliance manual.
- Products & portfolios
BlackRock's tailored 401(k) default moves the income call earlier
If a plan's default already carries guaranteed income and private assets, the rollover stops being where the decumulation conversation starts.
- Practice management
FMG Suite bets the follow-up email is the growth bottleneck
Seven launch partners route meeting recaps and prospect intake through one API layer; the practices whose records already agree will benefit most.
- Tax & estate planning
The last penalty-free exit for 2025 IRA contributions closes Oct. 15
Unwind the 2025 IRA contribution by October 15, or the 6% penalty repeats annually for as long as the excess remains in the account.
- Succession & selling a firm
The RIA sale price hides in the owner's salary line
A buyer recast a seller's $1.5 million profit to $1.2 million in week six, and the missing $300,000 was the founder's own pay — the one add-back she never priced.
- The Advisor's Note
AI's five weeks come with an unquantified bill
The next split is between firms that can assure AI outputs and those that cannot.
- Products & portfolios
The alternatives shelf splits into $2.8B pooled funds and $18,000 SPVs
The September 15 Form D batch holds both ends of the private market, and the diligence that matters now sits on the wrapper, not the manager.
- Practice management
Legacy Positions Are Fiduciary Work, Billable or Not
Rich Chen's guest post for Kitces maps the traps that turn a new client's concentrated stock into an exam finding — and puts the fee question squarely back in the firm's lap.
- Recruiting & transitions
Merrill recruits again while Morgan Stanley makes a capacity pitch
Two wirehouses spent the same week describing opposite hiring strategies, and the difference tells advisors where a transition check is still on the table.
9 stories
- Practice management
AI hands back five weeks a year; the error rate stays unquantified
AssetMark's survey puts adoption at 85% and the time savings at four hours a week, but the error rate it leaves unquantified—and the compliance hurdle firms keep naming—will decide the practice economics.
- Tax & estate planning
Retirement income's 8% adoption rate hides a reserve fund problem
Vanguard's decumulation survey shows where the income conversation should start: with the reserve fund clients already think they are running.
- Products & portfolios
Crypto's Senate failure leaves advisers selling an asset with no statute
A 50-49 cloture loss kills the only bill that would have drawn a statutory line between digital commodities and digital securities, and the 403(b) trust-access rider that was riding on it needs a new vehicle.
- Tax & estate planning
The windfall that needs the most hours is often the smallest
The smallest windfall is often the one that needs the most hours; practices that schedule by asset size spend their scarcest resource on the client who needs it least.
- Practice management
Pave's $15M round prices advisor AI at the custodian layer
The advisory firms that wrote checks bought a cheaper portfolio-construction layer — and a position in the channel that sells it.
- Tax & estate planning
Protect the retirement floor before writing the tuition check
Tuition's inflation-adjusted climb is real but far flatter since 2010, and parents' retirement is the only side of the tradeoff with no way back.
- Recruiting & transitions
The UHNW recruiting pitch has stopped leading with the check
NewEdge's 22nd office adds $1.25 billion in client assets and eight people to a platform built for multi-generational books.
- Products & portfolios
The 10-year clears 5%, and cash becomes an active bet
With global benchmark yields at their highest since 2008, the default client allocation has become a duration position advisors have to defend.
- Practice management
Grow the team, then cut the book to fit it
Carolyn McClanahan spent years training successors who left, then shrank Life Planning Partners to 65 households and handed ownership to the employees who stayed.