Just over a year into his life as an independent advisor, Mike Patton has discovered that it's time to look for more office space, with room for the receptionist he may have to hire one of these days.

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DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

Sometimes you have to relearn what you already know. A meeting with a prospective client reminded Mike Patton that you can’t approach every person the same way.

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

Globalization. We hear the term over and over nowadays yet it’s often hard to define succinctly because it encompasses myriad issues. At its core, globalization means to make worldwide, and as we know, virtually every industry—particularly financial services—is conducting business around the globe. As part of that financial services community, advisors—whether they’re attuned to it or not—are being touched more and more by globalization. Advisors’ failure to embrace and prepare for the ever-increasing changes that globalization will present to their businesses will ultimately determine their future success.

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

Mike Patton's “What's Important to You” document helps him understand the needs of prospective clients. In this post he offers suggestions for creating your own.

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

In the latest post Mike Patton takes readers through a typical week in the life of an independent advisor—client meetings, writing and distributing an electronic newsletter and shopping for insurance.

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

Ask any group of advisors what first attracted them to the profession or where they find the greatest job satisfaction and the most common answer is likely to be—helping people. That’s really what being an advisor is about—helping people plan for retirement, helping them plan their estates, helping them fund higher education for their children and grandchildren, and helping them plan their philanthropy.

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

No one need be extremely wealthy anymore to participate in charitable giving through donor advised funds (DAFs), but they can be, and some participants have endowed their DAFs with enough assets to easily support a foundation. Yet donor advised funds have become so easy to use, so liberal in what they accept as donated assets, and so great at helping donors vet organizations they’d like to gift to, that it’s tempting to abandon the idea of a foundation altogether.

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

We had some good discussions in this space over the past few weeks about the frequency of the advisor fee deduction. This week I’d like to focus on the source and structure of our fees. Where do you derive your fees from and how do you structure them? For instance, if you do financial planning, do you charge a fee for this service or not? If you do charge, what is the range of your fee and if you don’t charge, why not? If you manage client assets, how do you charge for this? Do you charge a percent of assets, commissions, or maybe a flat rate based on the account or relationship size? Here’s how I am doing this.

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

Demographers and journalists point out that, years ago, some folks believed wealth and leisure were connected in that the well-off would work less than 40 hours a week while the less well-off would pick up all the slack. Instead, it appears the opposite is happening.

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

Consciously or unconsciously, a son learns from his dad about work, money, family, relationships with women, and with other men, as well as how to make his way in the world. For good or ill, he will bear the effects of this experience for the rest of his life.

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

With the world bedeviled by random acts of terror, it’s ironic to be approaching a time of year when we normally look forward to being scared. Halloween ghoulies and ghosts aside, there’s a lot to learn from people’s attitudes toward what truly frightens them. Whether fear is thrilling and energizing, or paralyzes a person with nameless dread, can depend not only on its cause and intensity but also on that individual’s own personality (and perhaps his or her gender).

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

Any serious discussion about the management of wealth or how to invest should begin with a basic understanding of human behavior, of when and why people do things. This basic understanding includes two simple insights: that human behavior is measurable and that it is predictable.

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

Death. As a topic of conversation, it is obviously not a favorite for most people. Yet death, and its profound and multi-layered impact on unprepared families, must be discussed and addressed. Unfortunately, investors and/or advisors may choose to avoid it completely.

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

According to a recent U.S. Census Bureau report, the number of Americans covered by a government health insurance plan as of 2005 was 38.1 million, a number that represents no meaningful statistical change between 2004 and 2005.

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

Anxieties swirl around financial planning for baby boomers as they begin entering what have traditionally been known as the retirement years. Most advisors are now beginning to ask the question, “retiring to what?” Do clients plan to pursue retirement activities for which they have a latent or dormant passion? Will clients be able to live off the assets they’ve accumulated, or will they need to continue to work? How long will those assets last if they are no longer contributing to principal? Are they emotionally ready for the transition?

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com

On the morning of September 11, 2001, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson was scheduled to deliver a speech in which he was going to argue that the greatest threat facing this country was . . . a global pandemic. Five years later, that still may be true, but most can’t conceive of a global avian flu outbreak. Psychologists call this “cognitive bias,” the inability to take seriously something that’s far beyond our personal experiences. That remains the case with a global pandemic, despite comments like those made in the May issue of Investment Advisor by economist Milton Ezrati that “Right now . . . there are too many ifs to do anything from an investment strategy point of view.”

Sponsored By:

DWS Scudder, the U.S. retail brand name of Deutsche Asset Management, provides financial advisors with a comprehensive selection of innovative investment strategies.
www.dws-scudder.com