World of Finances

When somebody says the word movement to me, the first thing I think about is Zumba. I wish I could tell you why, but alas I cant.

Today, I want to talk about a movement that is near and dear to me. A movement that includes one of my most loved investing tools the Roth IRA.

But first, a back story..

Last week, I was asked to speak at my alma mater, SIU Carbondale.

I was talking to soon-to-be graduating seniors, giving them some tips on investing and saving once they hit the real world.

When I reached the investing portion of my speech, I had taken a poll of the crowd, asking them how many of them had heard of the Roth IRA.

This isn’t the first time that I have spoken to a class of college students and this isn’t the first time that I have asked this same question.

I’ve always had at least a few participants answer yes.

To my complete surprise, of the 50 plus attendees not a single one raised their hand.

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We discussed earlier in the week just how the corporate blog scores over social networking sites. We also told you why, despite the widespread promulgation of Facebook, Twitter and their ilk, theres really no competition with corporate blogging and the latter would continue to work well it its given role. Here are a few more reasons, just in case you werent convinced yet.

Through your corporate blog, you can gauge how to talk to customers and clients in terms of what a given product means to them. It gives you a chance to communicate with consumers on your corporate blog sans the boardroom management lingo, so don’t fritter that away by posting jargon-laden corporate write-ups. It’s a feedback tool like no other, keeps you grounded, and helps you reconnect with your customer base, and perhaps improve your future marketing communications.

Saying this probably opens us to the argument: if blogs have to reach to audiences through Facebook and Twitter, then why bother blogging in the first place?

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When the CARD Act was getting passed, the banks moaned over how having to deal with tighter consumer protection laws was going to kill their business. It turns out that those fears might have been a tad overblown. A new report from Nilson shows that since the legislation was enacted, profits at most of the credit card issuers actually shot up.

Among the provisions in the Act were items like banks werent allowed to raise interest rates on existing balances, payments had to be applied to balances with the highest interest-rate first,and they couldnt change around the date your bill was due. It had to be the same every month. Pretty sensible stuff, right?

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Believe it or not, that startling statement is true, according to a preliminary finding from IN Adviser Solutions’ first-ever study of Succession Planning in the financial advisory business.

Of the advisers that have participated in the survey so far, 74% have indicated that they have never conducted a formal third-party evaluation of their firm.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they haven’t done some back-of-the-napkin calculations to roughly estimate what their practices are worth. But the simple fact is that most financial advisers who earn a living advising on the net-worth and assets of others are not truly aware of the value of their own firms (and quite possibly their largest and most valuable personal asset.)

It’s more than just an ironic finding, of course. It’s one that may be indicative of a broader theme in the advice industry.

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