What? I just stumbled across this new product from Salesforce.com. It appears the online CRM giant is jumping into our industry with both feet. This is great news.
I guess, technically, they have been in our industry for some time through the use of add-ons but now they are making a real push. They are releasing the version of their system that they co-developed with Merrill Lynch built specifically for wealth managers.
I’m in Aspen right now with my fiancee, doing our final wedding planning. We’re staying at the Hotel Jerome, home of the world famous J-Bar. We’re not facing the mountain so the view from the back window isn’t as spectacular as we’d hoped.
I’m doing this blog post over a mobile broadband technology called Evolution-Data Optimized (EV-DO), which is a wireless radio broadband standard that has been adopted by most major mobile phone service providers in the United States. It came pre-installed on my new laptop (more on that later) and I just hooked it up this morning.
I was out looking at laptops and computer hardware this weekend. I need a new laptop and I am going to need to build a couple of DVR’s over the next few months. After talking with my brothers recently and my dad I realized that most people really don’t know about all this stuff and it makes the purchase decision quite difficult. Answering the question “What do I need?” becomes quite difficult.
I’m sure many of your current client conversations touch on the state of the sub-prime housing market. I live in Nevada which was recently ranked the #1 most dangerous state to own real estate in America. So with many pundits saying the high-risk areas will drop 40-50%, it’s something I often ponder.
It is increasingly obvious in retrospect that there shouldn’t have been so many sub-prime buyers getting adjustable rate mortgages when interest rates were at historical lows. I mean, how could that not blow up? And who’s responsible for letting it happen? Congressman Ron Paul is placing the blame on the Federal Reserve.
“…capitalism is not to blame for the housing bubble, the Federal Reserve is. Specifically, Fed intervention in the economy– through the manipulation of interest rates and the creation of money– caused the artificial boom in mortgage lending.
I’m in the middle of preparing my taxes now. (Well… preparing an packet for my accountant at any rate.) And it struck me that I have no idea if I’ll be subject to alternative minimum tax this year. None.
I decided to do a post on this because I came across this ridiculous story that emphasizes how alternative minimum tax is broken. It’s about a couple that lost most of their retirement savings when tech stocks collapsed in 2001. They also owe AMT on “income” that never existed because they never sold the stocks. Now the IRS wants the phantom AMT money and, since they haven’t been able to pay, more than twice that in fees and penalties.
The CFP® board recently decided to rephrase their ethical standards. I think this is a good move but it really is just for marketing purposes. I don’t think it’s a move to be applauded and held high. You can read the proposed standards here.
The proposed standard says this:
…a CFP® professional “shall at all times place the interest of the client ahead of his or her own.” The new language would replace the standard of “reasonable and prudent professional judgment”
This sounds like a good idea and indeed would probably make my mom and dad feel better. However, I don’t think it will change the way a CFP® operates or make them any more honest than they already are (as a person).
On what is apparently a slow news day, Wall Street & Technology is talking about the extensive systems development and testing Nasdaq did just so they can offer shorter ticker symbols to companies as a marketing gimmick.
Though trading systems have recognized OTC stocks as having four-character symbols, Nasdaq said it will now offer one-, two- and three- character symbols to companies that switch their listings as well as those going public for the first time and to existing Nasdaq issuers.
I hope I’m not showing off my naiveté, but do companies really care about this kind of stuff? I mean this a forgivable marketing stunt from Nasdaq, who is obviously responding to increasing competitive pressure between the exchanges. But if I ever hear about a company actually taking advantage of this, and switching stock exchanges so they could get a better ticker symbol, I will break land speed records getting to a phone to short the stock.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised in this new era of authoritarianism which has given us illegal renditions, imprisonment without trial, and state sanctioned torture, but the IRS just set up a Whistleblower Office that gives you a cut of the profits if you inform on somebody not paying their taxes.
That’s right. If your employer, co-worker, landlord, neighbor or father-in-law is raking in fistfuls of cash and bypassing Uncle Sam, you can anonymously report the abuse to the IRS and snag a windfall from their dishonesty. As long as the total amount of tax fraud comes out to at least $2 million (including penalties, interest, and whatever else the government ultimately collects based on your report), you can get a 15 to 30 percent cut.
On the surface this may seem like a good idea. We’ll certainly uncover those dirty tax cheaters now. If you’ve got a secret off-shore account you better hope you never mentioned it to any of your in-laws, and divorces just got a lot more interesting. It certainly feels like justice is being done–everybody needs to pay their fair share after all, and there’s nobody to blame but yourself if somebody informs on you.
As I sent off my 2004 tax audit paperwork, I ran across a little article explaining the consequences of owning an annuity when you die. It’s not that this is news to me, I’ve known about the consequences to the heir for some time. It just reminded me about estate taxes and how offensive I find them.
I like to call estate tax what it really is, Death Tax. It’s what the government charges you for dying in this Country–their final hurrah as you go into the afterlife or just into the ground depending on your beliefs.
There’s an interesting phenomenon that Mike and I were talking about just last week. I didn’t think it had any relevance to wealth management until I came across this post in the Wall Street & Technology Blog:
Saxo Bank Sets Up Shop In Second Life
The Copenhagen-based online investment bank Saxo announced yesterday that it has set up an office in Second Life, the web-based virtual world developed by Linden Lab, San Francisco, in which users (called residents) live out their fantasy lives online and interact with each other through avatars — animated graphics that users design to represent themselves. Saxo plans to offer residents the ability to manage real-life portfolios from within the virtual world, and the bank may eventually create a market to trade virtual Linden dollars against real world currencies. So far, Saxo’s virtual office has a meeting space with links to the bank’s website, a live trading game for visitors and an auditorium that will be used for symposia and training modules.