What is an Investment Policy Statement? The IPS provides the foundation for all future investment decisions to be made by an investor.It serves as a guidepost, identifying goals,creating a system and discipline for a decisions. A client said,"Once the trustees adopted the Investment Policy Statement,we found that we were making our decisions in a deliberate fashion,rather than in the "heat of battle."Since we'd already thought about how things would get done under a variety of circumstances,we no longer found ourselves getting emotional. Planning ahead makes it easier for all of us when the investment markets get turbulent." If you are an investment advisor, financial planner, stock broker, insurance agent, CPA or attorney advising your clients about their money,this innovative book will be a key tool for working with clients.

Creating an Investment Policy Statement

Business & Money

Norman M. Boone

Investing

FPA Press

The leading edge of the baby boomer wave will pass through age 68 this year. Retirement looms large for them and the 20-year generation that follows. Although many in the generation have saved to supplement their retirement, they will probably live longer in retirement than any previous generation, so they must grapple with questions about how to manage that money and make it last. The purpose of this book is to present the author's groundbreaking research into this topic, presenting new material as well as an update of the original research in a comprehensive, authoritative form.

Conserving Client Portfolios During Retirement

William P. Bengen, CFP

Personal Finance

This book focuses on the way to structure a practice to ensure financial planners are concentrating on their clients' needs. A specialist in financial life planning, Diliberto challenges the notion of asset centered financial planning in favor of the client centered approach. He uses stories, personal examples, and wisdom from his career to discuss how to plan holistically, asking the questions who is your client and what are their personal goals and needs? Not focused solely on the relationship with the client, Diliberto shines a bright light on the practice itself. He examines how a firm is structured, who is part of the financial planning team, compensation, and effective and reasonable marketing for the financial planning firm.

Financial Planning: The Next Step: A Practical Approach to Merging Your Clients' Money with Their Lives

Roy T. Diliberto, CFP

Each of us carries within our hearts a "dream of freedom" where lives feel fulfilled and are truly worthwhile. Financial planners offer clients the most comprehensive opportunity to discover and integrate a financial life plan that in fact melds meaning with money. No other professional can help the client unveil his or her most profound dreams and values, and then articulate a financial strategy that empowers successful implementation. The book empowers planners with the processes for connecting the client's dreams of freedom with the strategies of financial planning. It provides training in the Kinder Method(TM) of life planning and a skill set that can provide a consistent and successful process with clients, leading to that moment called "lighting the torch."

Lighting the Torch: The Kinder Method(TM) of Life Planning

George Kinder

Susan E Galvan

Nearly every day, an individual investor will approach his or her financial adviser for advice on a nontraditional "deal," delivering a prospectus, proxy statement, offering memorandum, or even term sheets. The advisers unenviable task is to sift through these massive documents to get the facts: which parties are taking which risks and receiving which benefits. Many times, these are not polished IPO prospectuses offered through brokers, but are more obscure investments that might contain contractual preferences for promoters, insiders, agents, or lenders. Such preferences can adversely affect the returns to an investor, even if the venture is wildly successful. This book is a reference tool designed to assist financial planners, financial consultants, licensed brokers, accountants, tax and estate attorneys, and other financial advisers in evaluating nontraditional investment materials, versus more traditional texts that are aimed at aiding professionals in drafting investment materials. It is also a valuable guide for investors themselves, who are seeking to enhance their portfolios by investing in nontraditional "deals," either private or public.

Understanding and Evaluating Prospectuses, Offering Documents, and Proxy Statements

David Schulte

Howard Marmorstein

William Trent

Thomas, Robinson

In recent years, the Financial Planning Association has created an extensive archive of information on financial planning topics. FPA, the organization on which thousands of financial planning professionals rely, has drawn from that archive and from up-to-the-minute observations from its financial planners to create this book to help you make smart financial decisions and realize your life's dreams. This book will provide you with basic guidance to establish and maintain your financial health. You'll learn how to organize your financial information and view your finances the way financial planning professionals do, as a series of interrelated considerations that work together to create your whole financial picture.

The Encyclopedia of Financial Planning

Financial Planning Association

As the average age of America's workers rises, competent and ethical investment advice becomes even more critical to helping them reach their investment objectives.  The Pension Protection Act of 2006 has created new opportunities for financial advisers and clients alike, establishing, as it does, a safe harbor for professionals to market their services to plan participants, but it has also created some compliance challenges.  In response, the Financial Planning Association and Fiduciary360, a recognized leader in fiduciary issues, have collaborated to create a handbook that defines a range of best practices for the financial professional who is advising pension plan participants.  These best practices should help all parties comply with the spirit and letter of the new law, and to help the client better understand the fiduciary adviser's role in the sale of other financial products or services.     In an easy to implement handbook format, the new Prudent Practices for Fiduciary Advisers not only details practices and criteria, but lists suggested procedures, and substantiates each practice and criteria with citation of applicable laws, case law, and regulations.  It offers templates to help the adviser create the necessary disclosure documents and agreement letters.  It will be a book you'll want to keep available for reference long after your first reading.

Prudent Practices for Fiduciary Advisers

This book was written to help advisers in a variety of business life cycles make an intentional choice about the next decades of their careers. The title introduces a metaphor surrounding the proverbial conference room table. It suggests that as wealth increases in our society, wealth holders are demanding a different model for assembling their team of professional advisers. Team members will take specific seats at the table, next to or across from the wealth holder, based on the role they are best suited to play. As more and more advisers adopt authenticity in their selection, wealth holders will become savvier to those trying to disguise their underlying relationship goals. Advisers must be clear about where they're meant to sit and why. 
It's also about helping our clients get to the root of their intent. So much of financial services is focused on tax savings and tax elimination. Yet for people who have financial independence, that can't possibly be their ultimate goal for their wealth. How could it? Life has so much more to offer.
To help wealth holders find the true intent for their wealth requires deep discovery, skillful discovery. It requires conversations in which there isn't a single product idea, service mix, or technical strategy dangling in the back of the adviser's mind. The quality of the wealth holder's choices increases in direct proportion to the quality of discovery used to facilitate them. This is a discernment-based style of communication, which is the foundation of our teachings and of this book. We believe that soon there will be a discernment-based adviser at every planning table. In the Right Side of the Table model, successful advisers will embrace an abundance mentality, inviting additional advisers to the table to fill roles the core team isn't suited to play.
The opportunities for professional advisers are tremendous. The time has come to make an intentional and wise choice. Which is the right side of the table for you?

The Right Side of the Table: Where Do You Sit in the Minds of the Affluent?

Scott Fithian and Todd Fithian

I believe that financial planners are at the pinnacle of the financial services industry. We have been trained to connect people's resources to what matters most to them, but as leaders, we are missing some fantastic opportunities. Most allied professionals labor under an enormous burden to sell products, and they have never been effectively equipped to uncover the dreams of their clients. Financial planners can help them. The industry, though, is fragmented. Professionals in every specialty: accountants, stockbrokers, insurance agents, mortgage brokers, estate planning attorneys, and others jealously guard their clients. In some cases, that's entirely reasonable, but our fragmentation and suspicion don't serve clients very well.
 The solution, I believe, is for financial planners to take initiative to form informal alliances in their communities and equip each professional to build trust relationships with their clients. Financial planners have the skills, insights, and knowledge to transform allied professionals' business philosophies from sales to trust.
 I've had the opportunity to see the industry from both sides, as a successful but frustrated allied professional in the insurance business and as a CFP® practitioner, trained to clarify and fulfill people's dreams. I'm writing this book because I want to encourage financial planners to recognize the amazing opportunities to equip allied professionals and build alliances of encouragement and referrals. When this happens, each member of the alliance serves clients more effectively, each business grows, and everybody wins. I know. I've got my own alliance, and it works that way.
 In this book, we'll address the benefits, processes, and barriers to building these alliances. When these relationships are built, suspicions and jealousies melt away, and an alliance works beautifully. It's rewarding to refer clients to other professionals we trust, and it's fulfilling to hear clients call back to thank us for connecting them to another professional who met their specific need.

Allied for Success: Creating a Synergy of Specialists to Fulfill Our Clients' Dreams

Jim Munchbach

To date, most financial advisers for individual investors have operated as if taxes do not exist. This book offers a better way, a discussion of the after-tax valuation of assets held in one of four savings vehicles: tax-exempt accounts such as Roth IRAs, tax-deferred accounts such as 401ks, taxable accounts, and non-qualified tax-deferred annuities. By facing the reality that taxes exist and making reasonable adjustments, financial planners can better prepare their clients for the future, as well as add tangible value for clients through asset allocation and location options.

In the Presence of Taxes: Applications of After-tax Asset Valuations

William Reichenstein

PH.D.

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