Good financial advice is hard to find — and it’s getting harder. The ranks of financial advisers are shrinking as the profession goes through a rocky transition brought on by difficult financial markets and tougher regulation. We should wind up with a more professional industry a few years from now, but current problems underscore the [...] [...more]
Brightscope, which made a splash two years ago with its online performance measurement tools for 401(k) plans, is launching a free service to help people research and shop for financial advisers. Brightscope’s new service could give a needed jolt of transparency to the financial advisory field, where finding an adviser is often a hit-and-miss process [...] [...more]
This is the first of four excerpts from my new book, The Hard Times Guide to Retirement Security (Bloomberg Press/John Wiley and Sons, June, 2010). “The nature of any human being, certainly anyone on Wall Street, is ‘the better deal you give the customer, the worse deal it is for you.’” –Bernard Madoff, convicted Wall [...] [...more]
The final financial regulations reform bill could still surface with a rule requiring stock brokers and insurance agents to act in the best interest of clients–the so-called fiduciary rule that currently covers Registered Investment Advisers. The bill passed earlier by the House of Representatives included a fiduciary standard; the Senate bill approved last week does [...] [...more]
Financial advisers come in an alphabet soup of designations–CFPs, CPAs, CLUs, CFAs–and they’re all very happy to advise you. You can find advisers working for big brokerage companies, banks, insurance companies and small independent firms. But there really are just two types of financial advisers: those who–by law–work for their clients, and those who really [...] [...more]
