Wealth management

Successful CPA wealth managers share their onboarding secrets.

A roundup of financial planning news from the previous month.

The building blocks of a successful FP practice

Congress voted in December 2010 to let wealthy Americans make tax-free gifts of as much as $5 million—and the money flowed.

President Obama introduced a new retirement savings vehicle that he called a “MyRA” in his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, and the White House has followed up with more details on Wednesday about it.

While President Obama mentioned taxes a number of times in his State of the Union speech last night, the details were scant.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department have brought civil and criminal charges against a Chicago accountant who used his wife’s trading account to short-sell shares in the health care information company where he was director of internal audit ahead of the public release of the company’s financial results, earning more than a quarter-million dollars in profits.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued new rules providing an automatic extension of time for certain estates without a filing requirement to elect portability of the decedent’s unused exclusion amount for the benefit of the decedent’s surviving spouse.

The Internal Revenue Service has posted a final version of the form for computing the 3.8 percent Net Investment Income Tax that was mandated as part of the Affordable Care Act.

The U.S. Departments of Treasury and Education are partnering with accounting and tax software developer Intuit to raise awareness of income-driven repayment plans and other repayment options for federal student loan borrowers.

Despite a wave of accounting scandals at Chinese companies, a 58 percent majority of capital markets executives at investment banks believe the number of U.S. IPOs from China-based businesses will increase in 2014, according to a new survey by the accounting and consulting firm BDO USA LLP.

The American Institute of CPAs has issued additional guidance for CPAs who offer personal financial planning services, issuing practice standards that apply the AICPA's code of professional conduct to the PFP arena.

The Internal Revenue Service has released a set of proposed regulations to prevent abuses of the partnership basis adjustment rules, disallowing partnership loss transfers to avoid some of the abuses uncovered by the Enron scandal.

The Internal Revenue Service has decided to postpone a change it had planned for this year to limit the number of e-file signature authorization documents for filing Form 1041 estate and trust tax returns to a single 1041 return rather than multiple returns.

Cetera Financial Group, which has a strong presence in the accounting market, was acquired Thursday by RCS Capital for $1.15 billion in cash, making RCAP the nation’s second-largest independent broker-dealer by advisor count.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has delayed until July 1, 2014, the date on which the first set of municipal advisors will be required to register under final rules issued by the commission.

Many investors are strongly affected by a company's corporate social responsibility whether they know it or not, according to a new study by a group of accounting professors, and should take into account a company’s CSR record when picking stocks.

Lyle Benson, founder of L.K. Benson & Co. and chairman of the AICPA's PFP Section, discusses how tax planning is becoming a more important part of a client's overall financial planning, in an interview with Accounting Today editor-in-chief Daniel Hood.

The Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, Inc. is planning to move to computer-based testing for its CFP Certification Examination, starting in November.

Many considered Dec. 31, 2013, the final date for year-end tax planning, but there are numerous planning actions that you can take in 2014 retroactive to 2013. Here’s a quick and easy guide to help you with your planning.