Approved IAR CE Courses

This course provides a structured approach to answering one of the most pressing financial questions: How much do I need to retire? Led by renowned retirement researcher Wade Pfau, the session explores essential retirement income styles, budgeting techniques, and financial planning strategies to ensure long-term security. Participants will learn how to calculate their Funded Ratio, identify potential risks, and align their assets with retirement goals. The course also covers contingency planning, legacy considerations, and practical strategies for underfunded retirements. By the end, attendees will be equipped with actionable insights to build a more confident and sustainable retirement plan.

Retirement account balances hit a record high, reaching $36.7 Trillion in the Second Quarterof 2023. This increased balance is excellent news for retirement account ownersand their beneficiaries. But sadly, retirement account balances could be lost to avoidabletaxes and penalties because of mistakes and/or unfamiliarity with the governing rules. Join retirement expert Denise Appleby as she explains how these mistakes are often madeand what you can do to protect your clients' IRAs. Topics Denise will cover includereal-life case studies and practical examples.

In this course, financial advisors can learn about in-depth life insurance policy review and then practice with realistic examples of life insurance documents and client scenarios. This course covers a general overview of the life insurance landscape and delves into the intricacies of reviewing term life insurance and 4 types of permanent life insurance. In each module, advisors can practice document reviews and answer knowledge reinforcement questions to help solidify the concepts. The course concludes with a capstone assessment for continuing education.

Financial planners can learn an immense amount of information about a client's circumstances by reviewing an individual income tax return. However, the reality is that the complexity of a tax return doesn't conform neatly to typical income tax planning strategies. In this whitepaperclass, we look, schedule-by-schedule as well as line-by-line to address key parts of an individual income tax return. Advisors will learn which schedules, lines, and sections should commonly be reviewed, as well as the sorts of critical information and tax planning strategies (or potential tax problems) that can be identified by reviewing a tax return.

While retirement-income guardrails offer a convenient and easy-to-understand framework foradvisors to explain when a client would need to make portfolio adjustments to facilitate spendingduring retirement, certain guardrail models come with major limitations. For example, withdrawalrate guardrails are a commonly used framework, but they do not always accurately reflect a client'sdynamic income sources and actual spending behaviors. Risk-based retirement-guardrails, on theother hand, have the benefits of communication and clarity, while modeling a client's retirementincome sources and spending patterns more realistically.

In this continuing education session, we review two blog articles: How To Register And Remain Registered With The SEC As An Internet Investment Adviser and DoL's Retirement Security Rule & PTE 2020-02 Amendment: What Advisers Need to Know Now About Giving Rollover Advice After Sept 23, 2024. In the first article, Chris Stanley explains the history of the Internet Adviser Exemption as a pathway to SEC registration and reviews the 2024 amendments to the rule. In the second article, Jacqueline Hummel reviews upcoming changes to the fiduciary standards for advisors providing investment advice to retirement investors under the final version of the Department of Labor's Retirement Security Rule.

You asked the clients for their estate planning documents, and they gave you 62 pages of Wills and trusts. As a financial advisor, you're expected to review the documents to help them understand whether their estate plan aligns with their goals. But it can take hours and hours to read through lengthy documents and translate legalese to English and provide recommendations. However, most estate planning documents have common elements that provide the core information that advisors need to know, and learning them provides a shortcut that allows advisors to review documents more quickly and spot the key issues.

This session explores how AI is transforming financial planning and what that means for the role of the advisor. Attendees will gain clarity on which aspects of planning are being automated such as analysis, modeling, and administrative tasks and where human expertise becomes even more valuable, including judgment, client communication, and behavioral coaching.