Planning and Advice

Creating a circle of trust

Testamentary trusts can be a useful tool in creating an estate plan, and ensuring that spouses who remarry, children from previous marriages and disabled children are all looked after. They are established through a will and become effective upon death. A trust requires three people: The settlor is the creator of the trust, who transfers […]

By Akua Carmichael |April 10, 2010

5 min read

Life

Advising the ultra rich

Throughout my career as an advisor I’ve been fortunate to work with many high-net-worth prospects and clients. Affluent business people, professionals and families are an interesting and challenging breed. They have incredible drive and are confident and demanding of both themselves and their advisors. They can differ, however, in how they relate to advisors and […]

By David Wm. Brown |April 8, 2010

3 min read

Planning and Advice

Landing high-net-worth clients

Like Ahab’s white whale, the high-net-worth investor looms large in the back of advisors’ minds — seemingly just out of grasp for many of them. A few tweaks to your business model and a couple more years of referrals and you’ll be there, you tell yourself. But if that’s really what you think, you’re probably […]

By Mark Noble |April 7, 2010

13 min read

Planning and Advice

Advising the ultra rich

April 7, 2010

3 min read

Applause for Steadyhand

Many people have approached me in the past suggesting that I am unduly critical of active products and strategies. Perhaps not too surprisingly, I counter that perhaps it is THEY who are unduly critical of passive products and strategies. I wouldn’t mind active strategies at all if they were as cheap, pure, broadly diversified and […]

3 min read

EMDs must protect the process

For many exempt market dealers (EMDs), especially those never registered before, there are a host of unfamiliar obligations that must be met, many of which are straightforward and administrative in nature (in many cases, third-party service providers offer cost-effective means of addressing many of these tasks). Other tasks and obligations, such as suitability assessment and […]

3 min read

Defining fiduciary duty

A recent meeting of industry minds at York University explored the idea of imposing a fiduciary duty upon financial advisors. Noting many other professions, including doctors and lawyers, require that standard, the gathering was meant to get the attention of regulators and lead to creation of commensurate rules. According to one advisor in attendance, the […]

3 min read

Bull markets ruin good planning

A client of mine sells security systems. Whenever he has potential customers call him about buying a home alarm, he asks them when they were robbed. He knows most people take home security seriously after they’ve had a break-in. Human nature is like that. We only prepare for risks after they’ve hit close to home. […]

4 min read

Hitting the HNW jackpot

Every now and then I’ll buy a lottery ticket and dream of winning millions. If I had $10 million, I’d hang out in my house on the Riviera, drive into town in my hot Italian car to pick up some wine and cheese… wait, I’d have a hot Italian butler do that for me. It’s […]

6 min read