Globe Advisor

When clients create estate plans, the focus is often on who gets which assets. But clients also need to consider an estate fund and how to pay liabilities, expenses and final taxes due upon death. “They don’t anticipate the magnitude of the tax bill,” says Tanya Butler, TEP, a trust and estate practitioner at Touchstone Legal Inc. in Dartmouth, N.S. “They don’t think about the expenses, such as preparing a property to sell.” Deanne Gage of Globe Advisor speaks with experts on the strategies advisors and their clients should use to pay off these matters.

When many advisors started out decades ago, they couldn’t have imagined building a practice with a reach extending thousands of kilometres from home, serving clients in multiple provinces or territories. “There’s a mutual benefit to financial advisors to have this wide pool of potential clients across the country they can identify and work with, and likewise from a client standpoint to have access to a financial advisor they like and want to work with whom could be located in Vancouver or Halifax,” says Jonathan Rivard, a financial advisor with Edward Jones, who is located in downtown Toronto, but has clients throughout Ontario as well as in British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec.

Money manager Stan Wong isn’t the type of investor who hangs on to a stock, for better or worse. “I would never want to stay married to a stock or a company because circumstances can change,” says Mr. Wong, a portfolio manager and senior wealth advisor with the Stan Wong Group at Scotia Wealth Management in Toronto. He’s more of an active trader seeking stocks that have carved out competitive advantages in their industries or operate with few competitors. Here’s what he’s been buying and selling.

The holy grail of financial advice may be offering personalization at scale, but so far technology has come up short when it comes to providing it. Kendra Thompson, founder of financial services consulting firm Epok Advice, says that’s partly why years of the “sky-is-falling rhetoric” around robo-advice hasn’t been borne out. Most people still want human advice at some point. She’s optimistic about new technology that allows advisors to anticipate client needs and target advice to a broader client base.

Growing up, Tiffany L Harding, a wealth strategist at Richardson Wealth in Toronto, experienced a huge contrast between her mom’s scarcity mindset and her dad’s carefree attitude toward money. “I saw money as freedom, providing you with opportunities and the ability to make choices,” Ms. Harding says. She spoke with Brenda Bouw about her decision to move out of her mother’s house as a teenager, what motivated her to earn her own money, and how her life experiences help her connect with clients. Listen to the podcast here: https://lnkd.in/gCZqg2uT

Bonds are back, or so the theory went. As central banks embark on what’s perceived as an interest-rate cutting cycle, bond values should be experiencing a significant lift, powering client portfolios. Yet, bond yields have remained much the same as they were in January. “What if inflation is stickier than thought?” says Diana Orlic CFP, FMA, CIWM, CIM with the Orlic Harding Cooke Wealth Management Group at Richardson Wealth. “What if it starts to climb? What if they can’t lower rates?” Joel Schlesinger reports on alternative bond strategies.

Offering a suite of services under one umbrella can be a goal for many advisory practices. But for advisors in growth mode, knowing when to invest in hiring team members and when to partner with external experts may be a challenge. Jason Heath, managing director at Objective Financial Partners Inc., says it’s not always a simple decision – especially for newer or smaller firms. “Each hire is a pretty big jump in terms of capacity, in terms of availability of time,” he says. Helen Burnett-Nichols explains.

In the mid-2000s, a new longevity product hit the Canadian market: a segregated fund that came with the standard maturity and death benefits, plus an additional benefit – guaranteed income for life. While guaranteed minimum withdrawal benefits (GMWBs) have mostly fallen out of favour, writes Jason M. Pereira, advisors should know how they work for clients who still hold them. More recently, a new twist on old-fashioned annuities known as advanced life deferred annuities (ALDAs) has hit the market, albeit slowly. In the second article of a four-part series, Mr. Pereira breaks down how these two options fit into the decumulation toolkit.

Some financial services firms are taking cues from the public sector and tightening rules on remote work. “At the end of the day, our job is front-facing, so we knew we were coming back to the office,” says John Iaconetti, CFP, a financial advisor with The McClelland Financial Group of Assante Capital Management Ltd. The mandates are varied, with some advisors reporting to the office five days a week and others saying their firms have left hybrid work policies discretionary. Despite the variation, Daniel Reale-Chin writes, advisors say the way they conduct client meetings, run events and build relationships has changed. 

More private equity funds are becoming available to qualified investors, and several of these funds tap into the “secondary” market – that is, private equity firms selling a chunk of their funds to secondary investors. “In the past two years, we’ve seen a decline in mergers and acquisitions and public market exit activity, reducing distributions to private equity limited partners (LPs),” says Nadim Vasanji, managing director at Northleaf Capital Partners in Toronto. “As a result, LPs are increasingly turning to secondaries as a tool for portfolio management and liquidity generation.”