The beneficiary's clock sets inherited-IRA RMDs
A Slott Report mailbag answer ties the inherited-IRA divisor to the beneficiary's age and the Roth five-year rule to the owner's original contribution date.
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Ask what the decision solved before you call it a mistake
Kitces and Richards would have advisors rebuild a client's reasoning before they rebuild the portfolio; the answer is what justifies the rewrite.
The 401(k) now starts income before the rollover
BlackRock's default embeds guaranteed income and private assets, moving the fall's tax checkpoints after the income decision.
The October decisions that set the withdrawal rate
Three dated checkpoints — an excess 2025 IRA contribution, a federal healthcare subsidy that needs a stress case, and a fraud deduction the House voted to restore — show why the fall calendar moves the spending plan more than an allocation call does.
Healthcare's fiscal trajectory belongs in every decumulation model
The Tax Foundation's fiscal math argues for stress-testing federal healthcare subsidies and the employer-coverage exclusion the way advisors already stress-test equity returns.
Osaic's rebuild starts with the advisors it still has
More than a thousand registered reps left in the year consolidation ended, and the terms a sitting Osaic advisor can still negotiate are the part of the story that pays.
Claude for advisors hits the workflow wall
The connectors are the proof of concept, and the practices that never wrote down a baseline will have no way to know whether the tool moved anything.
Ridgeline’s $250M raise matters to advisors for who wrote it
An invitation-only round led by the founder buys the platform time to finish the reconciliation build its RIA clients have already signed up for.
RIA buyers have more capital than ever; holding period now wins deals
Eight ways to fund an RIA acquisition, and the one term that decides whether the seller's team survives it: the buyer's return model.
A fraud tax fix that lands at the decumulation desk
The House's 408-17 vote restores a deduction fraud victims lost in 2018; the penalty waiver and one-year repayment window are the pieces advisors can plan around.
28 advisors kept an $825 million book by staying put
An OSJ's move reprices the practices inside it; the advisors who stayed just published the math for everyone else.
Rescinding 14a-8 turns client proxy voting into state-by-state diligence
If adopted, the SEC's proposal moves the gatekeeping of shareholder proposals to state law, and advisors who vote client proxies will feel it in every ESG engagement.
A 45.4% tax loss turns four of five tax fixes into a founder's playbook
Four of Financial Planning's five tax strategies presuppose a concentrated position, while the 1% drag everyone else pays is the harder problem to sell against.
SEC approves FINRA's outside-business rewrite and leaves firms the discretion that matters
Rule 3290 removes the paperwork on bartending and weekend refereeing and says broker-dealers need not supervise a dual registrant's RIA; how much of that relief survives is decided in each firm's compliance manual.
BlackRock's tailored 401(k) default moves the income call earlier
If a plan's default already carries guaranteed income and private assets, the rollover stops being where the decumulation conversation starts.
FMG Suite bets the follow-up email is the growth bottleneck
Seven launch partners route meeting recaps and prospect intake through one API layer; the practices whose records already agree will benefit most.
The last penalty-free exit for 2025 IRA contributions closes Oct. 15
Unwind the 2025 IRA contribution by October 15, or the 6% penalty repeats annually for as long as the excess remains in the account.
The RIA sale price hides in the owner's salary line
A buyer recast a seller's $1.5 million profit to $1.2 million in week six, and the missing $300,000 was the founder's own pay — the one add-back she never priced.
AI's five weeks come with an unquantified bill
The next split is between firms that can assure AI outputs and those that cannot.
The alternatives shelf splits into $2.8B pooled funds and $18,000 SPVs
The September 15 Form D batch holds both ends of the private market, and the diligence that matters now sits on the wrapper, not the manager.
Legacy Positions Are Fiduciary Work, Billable or Not
Rich Chen's guest post for Kitces maps the traps that turn a new client's concentrated stock into an exam finding — and puts the fee question squarely back in the firm's lap.
Merrill recruits again while Morgan Stanley makes a capacity pitch
Two wirehouses spent the same week describing opposite hiring strategies, and the difference tells advisors where a transition check is still on the table.
AI hands back five weeks a year; the error rate stays unquantified
AssetMark's survey puts adoption at 85% and the time savings at four hours a week, but the error rate it leaves unquantified—and the compliance hurdle firms keep naming—will decide the practice economics.
Retirement income's 8% adoption rate hides a reserve fund problem
Vanguard's decumulation survey shows where the income conversation should start: with the reserve fund clients already think they are running.
Crypto's Senate failure leaves advisers selling an asset with no statute
A 50-49 cloture loss kills the only bill that would have drawn a statutory line between digital commodities and digital securities, and the 403(b) trust-access rider that was riding on it needs a new vehicle.
The windfall that needs the most hours is often the smallest
The smallest windfall is often the one that needs the most hours; practices that schedule by asset size spend their scarcest resource on the client who needs it least.
Pave's $15M round prices advisor AI at the custodian layer
The advisory firms that wrote checks bought a cheaper portfolio-construction layer — and a position in the channel that sells it.
Protect the retirement floor before writing the tuition check
Tuition's inflation-adjusted climb is real but far flatter since 2010, and parents' retirement is the only side of the tradeoff with no way back.
The UHNW recruiting pitch has stopped leading with the check
NewEdge's 22nd office adds $1.25 billion in client assets and eight people to a platform built for multi-generational books.
The 10-year clears 5%, and cash becomes an active bet
With global benchmark yields at their highest since 2008, the default client allocation has become a duration position advisors have to defend.
Grow the team, then cut the book to fit it
Carolyn McClanahan spent years training successors who left, then shrank Life Planning Partners to 65 households and handed ownership to the employees who stayed.
Schwab prices AI at $240 a seat
The custodian's Claude integration turns AI into a custody line item, and the process work will cost more than the license.
Six Modern Wealth advisors left as it acquired $710 million in assets
Consolidators can buy a book; the week showed they cannot buy the advisors who run it, and the recruiting market is repricing on that difference.
Schwab's Claude exclusive puts a $4,800 AI seat on 16,000 RIAs
The custodian's first-mover integration costs an advisor $240 a year per seat, plus process work nobody has budgeted yet.
Anthropic's advisor suite hands the AI edge to firms with clean permissions
Nine integrations bundled into a single install make the assistant easy to switch on, and the practices that audit access rights first will be the ones that get the capacity gain.
Anthropic pitches advisers a tool that doubles as model-portfolio distribution
The pitch is capacity, but the shelf inside the tool is where BlackRock's $300 billion book gets its front door.
A UBS team ran the LPL math and chose Raymond James
A two-year search that weighed Rockefeller and LPL ended at Raymond James' employee channel, the clearest recent test of West Coast recruiting economics.
The Roth conversion screen should start with taxable assets
Slott's negative list reorders the conversion conversation: three of the five disqualifiers are answered with a balance sheet, not a projection.
Career changers cost more up front and less in churn
Kitces Research puts new-graduate turnover at two to five times the career-changer rate, which makes the salary premium that scares firms off the cheaper half of the trade.
Anthropic's advisor list will be won on fees, not logos
The AI firm is making wealth managers submit pricing and service proposals, giving independent practices a rare shot at pre-IPO wealth that private banks used to control.
The AI race moves to what happens after the meeting
Salesforce's Agentic Advisor turns meeting output into prioritized action, and the practices that wire it into owned tasks first will consolidate assets and compound referrals before smaller rivals can afford the integration.
AI adoption is collapsing fund lineup diversification
Managers buying the same models and the same datasets leave advisors holding one bet under five tickers, and the overlap check is now the job.
Anthropic's adviser list will be won on fees, not logos
The AI firm asked wealth managers to put pricing and services on paper, handing independent practices a rare look-in on the windfalls its employees are about to receive.
The IRS security checklist doubles as a marketing asset
Six controls the IRS wants owned and documented are the evidence file a client’s attorney, accountant or bank eventually asks to see.
Luminary's $22 million round is a bet on the estate-document layer
The raise is small against a claimed $500 billion in client assets supported; the real wager is whether advisors come to treat Luminary as the place those documents live.
Kahan built a pro bono channel, not a gesture
Twenty-five years on, the replicable piece of the 9/11 volunteer effort is the plumbing that put willing planners in front of families who needed them.
DOL's overtime exemption turns on duties, not titles
The administrative exemption is determined by documented job duties and a salary level the fact sheet only points to elsewhere; a typical RIA back office has written down neither.
Mariner's $175 million bot budget is a supervision purchase
At $250,000 a bot, the AI gap in wealth management is now a data-custody and review-standard problem.
Mariner's $175M bot bet is a headcount purchase
At $250,000 per bot over five years, Mariner is budgeting capacity rather than software, and the deployment work is where the plan will be won or lost.
Advisers grade their own recruiting a C, and they are right
Cerulli counts 35% of advisers retiring within a decade, which is why the entry-level pitch has to be training and a path, not a payout grid.