Posts Tagged "compensation"

GIVEAWAY: Two Copies of QuickTax Standard from Intuit

Posted by Preet on Feb 17, 2010 | 51 comments

A representative for Intuit contacted me last night to offer up two copies of Intuit’s QuickTax Standard (handles up to 8 returns) for a giveaway on the blog. With the deadline for filing your taxes coming up I thought I would agree to the giveaway if they would explain exactly how they can guarantee the maximum refund possible. Their answer is as follows. Theoretically, if you follow the tax code to the letter, and you know about every possible credit and deduction available to you, you should end up with the same refund/amount owing no matter what method you use to prepare your taxes. In practice, the number can vary quite a lot. Variations in results tend to be...

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Guest Article: DSC Index Funds

Posted by Jim Stark on Feb 8, 2010 | 2 comments

This is a another guest article by Jim Stark. Jim Stark is a pseudonym for a practicing Canadian financial advisor. Why are there no DSC Index Funds?  On one hand, pretty much any advisor knows that there is no such thing as a DSC index fund and why that is so.  On the other hand, many retail investors probably never thought about it- and likely wouldn’t be able to accurately explain why this little wrinkle exists even if they did.  There’s likely a pretty severe disconnect on this- a topic that could have applications in the fields of practice management, ethics, client suitability and advisor ‘value propositions’ to name a few. (Note: there actually are DSC...

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The Financial Advisor Retirement Plan

Posted by Preet on Sep 8, 2009 | 3 comments

It is possible for an advisor to generate a $1 million bonus to themselves for relatively little work, and it probably happens more than it should. A not too uncommon retirement plan for some financial advisors (I don’t want to lump all financial advisors together, but clearly there are those out there that are less than scrupulous), is to switch firms a few years before retiring. Why? Because they get paid a bonus to transfer their client assets and they can then sell their clients to another advisor at the new firm a few years later. Advisor Compensation I’m going to use a hypothetical example, although I do know that a situation pretty much exactly like...

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