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Determining Your 'Best' Retirement Income Strategy: Not Necessarily an Easy Task

"[Michael Kitces recently] examined possible 'best' strategies for a 65-year old couple 'trying to decide how much to spend for a 30-year retirement from their $1,000,000 portfolio, and how that portfolio should be invested.' ... [E]ven if simple strategies are chosen, care should be taken to make sure that they represent potentially best strategies.... While [he believes] that Michael chose these three strategies to illustrate how his process night work, [this author becomes] skeptical when someone tells me that I can spend 33% more in retirement if I simply increase my investment in equities from 50% to 100% (Strategy C vs. Strategy B)."

How Do You Measure the Best Retirement Income Strategy?

"[In] framing different retirement income strategies -- and the trade-offs they might entail -- it's important to give serious consideration to the measuring stick that will be used to evaluate the potential retirement outcomes. Because the 'best' retirement income strategy may be very different depending on whether you measure based on wealth, spending, probabilities of success, magnitudes of failure, or utility functions that weigh both the upside and downside risks!"

Advisor's Guide to DOL Fiduciary and the New Best Interests Contract Requirement

"Fiduciary advocates have lamented that the [DOL] conceded several major points ... However, it appears that in reality the DOL fiduciary rule concessions were a brilliantly executed strategy of conceding to the financial services industry the exact parts that didn't actually matter in the long run (while still reducing the risk of a legal challenge), yet keeping the key components that mattered the most: a requirement for Financial Institutions to adopt policies and procedures to mitigate material conflicts of interest and eliminate incentives that could compromise the objectivity of their advisors ... and a second requirement that clients can no longer be forced to waive 100% of their legal rights and accept mandatory arbitration, instead stipulating that while an individual client dispute may be required to go to arbitration, consumers must retain the right to pursue a class action lawsuit against a Financial Institution that fails to honor its aggregate fiduciary obligations."

Top Issue in 2016 for Advisers: The DOL Fiduciary Rule and the Best Interests Contract

"The rule has the potential to completely reshape the landscape of financial advice, force broker-dealers to reinvent themselves... and force financial services product manufacturers for the first time ever to compete solely on the merits of their products rather than the size of the commissions they can pay.... [T]here seems little doubt that 2016 will be a seminal transition year that sets the stage for how financial advice will be delivered in the coming decades -- a tremendous opportunity for advisors (and the companies serving them) who are prepared for the change, and the beginning of the end for those companies who have not positioned themselves for an advice-centric future."

Best Strategy for Portfolio Withdrawals?

"[W]hen such bucketing or decision-rules strategies are paired with simple rebalancing, ... the outcome is no better than merely managing the portfolio on a total-return basis alone.... [S]imple rebalancing already has an astonishingly powerful effect in helping to avoid unfavorable liquidations, as the process systematically ensures that the investments that are up (the most) are sold, and the ones that are down (the most) are held and, in fact, bought instead. This means advisors may not be giving rebalancing alone nearly the credit it deserves to accomplish similar -- or even better -- results than setting aside buckets and creating decision rules."

How Delaying Social Security Can Be the Best Long Term Investment or Annuity Money Can Buy

"The decision to delay Social Security isn't just about the value of delaying, but also about the money that must be spent from the portfolio to sustain spending in the meantime, and/or the decision to allocate money towards delaying Social Security and not towards other fixed income investments or a commercially available lifetime immediate annuity. Yet a deeper look reveals that when viewed from an investment perspective, the decision to delay Social Security actually represents an astonishingly valuable 'investment' return[.]"

Why Qualified Charitable Distributions from IRAs Are Often Not Best for Year-End Contributions

"[While Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs)] from IRAs do have favorable tax treatment, they are generally still less favorable than donating appreciated securities to satisfy charitable goals. While the former allows for entirely pre-tax charitable contributions (directly from an IRA), the latter effectively provides a 'double tax' benefit, as contributions are deductible (making them pre-tax) and donations of appreciated securities permanently avoid taxes on the associated capital gains."

Compensation Clawback Provisions as a Best Practice in Corporate Governance for Executive Compensation

"A company needs to be able to offer a level of certainty in compensation in order to recruit and retain executives. That is why companies usually strive for 'market' provisions. Interestingly, although institutional shareholders react positively to companies adoption of a clawback policy, they do not seem to make a distinction among the more severe and comprehensive policies and the less specific ones (at least so far). Institutional shareholders and the media have been giving companies 'good governance credit' for adopting almost any form of clawback."

Nebraska Healthy Families & Workplaces Act Takes Effect October 1, 2025; Action Needed by September 15, 2025

"Nebraska’s new Healthy Families & Workplaces Act requires most employers to provide paid sick leave to Nebraska employees starting October 1, 2025. Key requirements and action items are summarized [in this article]."

The Illinois Paid Leave for All Workers Act: Some Questions Remain, But Employers Should Start Considering Options

"[C]overed employers must allow all employees (full-time, part-time, and seasonal) to earn and use up to 40 hours of paid leave each year, which employees can use for any purpose.... [E]very employer will need [to] determine the best way for their organization to satisfy the Act's requirements, draft any new policies that are needed, carefully review and revise any existing paid time off policies to ensure compliance with the Act, post the required notice, and set up a system to comply with the Act's record-keeping requirements. Employees may begin using paid leave under the Act on March 31, 2024, or after the first 90 days of their employment (whichever is later)."