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You may not have noticed, but over the summer a “Buckets” war broke out in the retirement income business. It seems that everyone has discovered “Buckets,” a reference to time-segmented asset allocation or “laddered” income-generation strategies.
In June of this year the non-profit National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) launched a retirement income-focused website called [...]

What factors stand in the way of independent advisors and broker-dealers maximizing their success in the retirement income and Rollover IRA markets? It’s a complicated question with multiple answers including the impact of potentially disruptive changes in the regulatory landscape.
One area that I am convinced will really matter is the quality of advisor-client communications. [...]

With so much upheaval in the economy one wonders about what changes may arise in the not too distant future. In that context let me offer two predictions:
Prediction Number One: All advisors will be deemed to be fiduciaries within 1-2 years.
There could be no development more disruptive to today’s financial products distribution landscape than [...]

At last week’s Structured Products Americas conference I spoke about the opportunities and challenges facing structured products providers (and distributors) as they set their focus on the U.S. Boomer retirement marketplace. The potential for structured products is simply enormous. As more advisors and their clients shift their attention to outcome-oriented investing strategies, the outlook for [...]

Last week an Ignites article by Hannah Glover highlighted a study of Boomer-directed websites that found that most companies’ retirement websites fail to live up to their sponsors’ advertising pitches. The report entitled, “Online Support for the New Retirement,” conducted by Practical Perspectives and Gallant Distribution Consulting, found retirement firms’ websites are typically, “…too scant, [...]

As someone who generally plays the role of interviewer, I’m appreciative of Senior Editor, Kerry Pechter, for the interview he conducted with me that appears in the December ‘07 issue of Annuity Market News. Kerry asked my about a variety of issues that are important to me including the state of the variable and fixed [...]

Today marks the introduction of my new interview series called America’s Elite Financial Advisors. I’m excited about these new series for many reasons but none more so than the opportunity to provide a platform to individuals who possess insights and knowledge that is too often insufficiently appreciated.
The subject of the inaugural interview [...]

One of the most enjoyable and enlightening conversations I’ve ever experienced occurred recently with Dallas Salisbury, President & CEO of Washington-based Employee Benefit Research Institute. For someone like me who is “hooked” on everything retirement income, listening to Salisbury’s answers caused me to reexamine many of my own strongly-held views on retirement-related issues.
Salisbury [...]

Back in April when readership of this magazine was much less than it is today, I published this interview with Transamerica’s Phil Eckman. Because many may have missed the opportunity to gain from Eckman’s vision and insights, I thought I’d share it with you today:
In this wide-ranging interview, Phil Eckman, CEO of Transamerica Retirement [...]

Apologies to OppenheimerFunds’ Kathleen Beichert, Chair of RIIA’s Research Committee as well as to RIIA’s research partners, Elvin Turner of Turner Consulting, and Larry Cohen of SRI-BI. Also, my sincere apology to JordenBurt’s Joan Boros.
A cut/past error earlier caused the contributions of these individuals at RIIA’s Annual Meeting to not be mentioned in yesterday’s article [...]

Since the formation of the Retirement Income Industry Association (RIIA) a number of initiatives of genuine importance to its members have been launched. One of the most important is an effort to develop sound principles for the creation of industry-wide standards for the development of retirement income calculators, tools and illustrations that promote various [...]

Summer’s over, September is upon us. That means I have to get back to work on this magazine; lots of interesting topics to be explored, and some fantastic interviews to publish! Tomorrow I’ll publish part one of a multi-part series on the efforts underway to remake annuity agents into Registered Investment Advisors.
One of the major [...]