From the career advice offered by the disciples of personal branding to the business guidance promoted by the world’s inspirational speakers, it seems that everyone is telling us to sell ourselves as an expert. The business pundits tell us how we can be millionaires if we just write reports and ebooks which demonstrate our knowledge, and create blogs and websites from which to sell our works. All fine in theory, but what most leave out, however, is the nitty gritty detail on just how to build a website, promote it and draw the seekers of our expertise in our direction, details which Julie Arnold addresses in her new Pathways course, a complete guide to building a successful Internet business. Read more…
In an effort to capitalize on opportunities in the retirement market, Bank of America Corp. plans to spend between $15 million and $20 million on a new marketing campaign over the next four months.
The “help2retire” campaign, which launched Monday, will include print and television advertising as well as billboards nationally. The print ads will launch this week and the television ads are expected later this month. Bank of America said that the campaign encourages individuals to work with a Merrill Lynch advisor to find areas of their lives that they “wish to put an end to” when they retire.
Among the slogans in the campaign are: Help2Retire confusion surrounding Roth IRA conversions, Help2Retire rush hour, and Help2Retire the rat race.
The company would not say how large a percentage of its overall marketing budget it is spending on this campaign. Read more….
Wealth managers have taken a large revenue hit during the economic downturn. Assets under management fell precipitously during the past year, and clients increasingly placed more of their remaining holdings in low-margin products. At the same time, operating costs increased, as clients demanded more advice and firms tried to counter poor portfolio performance with greater levels of service. As a result, Wealth managers project that 2010 profit margins could fall as much as 75% below their 2007 peak, according to the 2009 Wealth Segment Economics Survey, done by The VIP Forum.
In the past, firms had a steadily growing base of assets under management and could afford to serve clients across a broad range of wealth segments with the same services. However, the crisis starkly revealed the vulnerability of a service model that doesn’t effectively align client value with actual cost-to-serve.
Recent research by The Corporate Executive Board’s VIP Forum, an industry group comprised of wealth-management firms, identified that leading firms have begun to move away from a generic, expensive “one size fits all” model that perpetuates “overservice” towards a more carefully calibrated “give-get” service model. This research also points to the following best-practice strategies for helping wealth managers effectively implement a “give-get” model: Read more…
There was a time when a woman’s road to financial security ran straight down the aisle and into the arms of a husband. It’s the plot of just about every Marilyn Monroe movie; girl meets boy, girl hopes to cash in big.
Who holds the purse strings in the modern marriage?
But times have changed.
A new study by the Pew Research Center shows that it’s not the wives who get the biggest economic boost from marriage. It’s the husbands.
The reason: Women have entered the workforce in a big way in the past 40 years. And they’re outpacing men in education and income growth.
The numbers, according to Pew, don’t lie. Median household income has risen 60 percent for married men and women since 1970. Single men have seen a 16 percent increase. Read more…
The past 10 years made up an absolutely horrendous decade for stocks — the worst calendar decade in recorded history,in fact. However, one strategy handily beat the broad market,enabling investors to build real wealth, instead ofexperiencing losses even before factoring in the cost of inflation. Before I get to that, let’s consider the extent of the damage suffered by broadly diversified stock investors: Read more….
Money isn’t everything, according to a group of affluent Americans surveyed by Merrill Lynch Wealth Management. Focusing on family and friends, it turns out, gained in importance through the recession.
Just over half of retired respondents with at least $250,000 to invest said they wished they had focused more on their “life goals” than on “the numbers,” according to the firm’s Affluent Insights Quarterly, released today. In fact the leading response was wishing they had given more thought to how they wanted to live in retirement (38 percent) followed by wishing they had worked with a financial adviser earlier (23 percent) and given up more luxuries to reach their retirement goals (18 percent).
“The feeling is you should always absolutely have a plan, but the plan is not what we propeller heads think,” Sallie Krawcheck, president of Bank of America Global Wealth & Investment Management, which includes Merrill, told Bucks. “We as an industry talk to our clients about numbers, numbers, numbers. For us risk is standard deviation; for our clients it’s what if I have a health event that affects my life and my financials?”
Such surveys on how the recession has affected behavior are becoming increasingly common. PNC Wealth Management released a similar survey on Monday. Read more…
If this doesn’t give Democrats the spine to pass tough financial regulations, they don’t deserve to be in the majority. From The WSJ:
Major US, banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their people about $145 billion for 2009, a record sum that indicates how compensation is climbing despite fury over Wall Street’s pay culture.
An analysis by The Wall Street Journal shows that executives, traders, investment bankers, money managers and others at 38 top financial companies can expect to earn nearly 18 percent more than they did in 2008 — and slightly more than in the record year of 2007. . .
Whether they directly took bail-out money or not, none of these Wall Street wizards would have survived without taxpayer funds, which kept the entire system from collapse. Yet, they are shameless enough to pay themselves more than they made in 2007, before the bottom fell out.
If Congress can’t stand up against this, the whole lot of them should be run off.
Want more money? Want more financial peace of mind?
Here’s the secret technique: Get a plan.
Yeah, I know, that’s awfully simplistic. For some of you, planning is second nature. You have a detailed budget and plan for everything, right down to the 10-year plan for that row of hedges in your side yard.
Then there’s the other extreme, the folks whose level of financial organization involves knowing where to go to pay the overdue bill in person after the electric company shuts them. Read more…