Approved IAR CE Courses

The objective of this 1-hour seminar is to provide attendees with advanced training on IRA Rollovers. The goal of this seminar is to teach the following topics: the IRA Rollover market, the regulatory landscape, reasons to roll over or not to roll over, methods of tax free transfers, Roth conversions, and beneficiary designations. Attendees will be given specific advanced knowledge that will allow them to better serve their clients and prospective clients regarding IRA Rollovers. This seminar will help add value to the attendees' overall perspective of how IRAs work.

More and more clients are enrolling in Medicare—and more and more are being blindsided by significantly higher Medicare premiums. In reality, the culprit is often IRMAA (Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount)—a little-understood Medicare surcharge that can dramatically increase Part B and Part D premiums for higher-income retirees.

Join nationally recognized CPA and tax expert Larry Pon as he helps financial planners understand one of the most overlooked retirement planning challenges. Larry will explain how IRMAA is calculated, the income events that can trigger premium increases, and the planning opportunities advisors can use to help clients avoid costly surprises.

You’ll also learn when an IRMAA determination can be challenged, how to properly complete Form SSA-44, and which life-changing events may qualify clients for a reduction in their Medicare premiums.

The irrevocable life insurance trust (ILIT) is one of the most widely used estate planning tools. Those who work in the estate planning field-or any professional who wants to extend his or her practice into this arena-should become knowledgeable about ILITs, and how and why they are used. The purpose of this course is to provide a general understanding of trusts and how they work, with a specific focus on irrevocable life insurance trusts. Along with an exploration of ILITs, the course explains collateral issues that might arise in their creation and operation including a number of important tax-related issues.

For over 20 years, the Internal Revenue Service has made a spring announcement of its Dirty Dozen list of scams and schemes. This course reviews the items on the 2025 Dirty Dozen list, explaining the nature of these schemes and their impact on taxpayers and tax professionals. You will see that the IRS is focused on fraud associated with certain highly promoted activities (CRATs, foreign treaties, captive insurance companies, and monetized installment sales), consumer-related fraud, and activities typically engaged in by high-net-worth individuals. 

This course examines how today's market structure has evolved, what that means for portfolio construction, and how investment adviser representatives can better evaluate diversification and portfolio risk. Our goal is to provide practical insights that they can apply in your own practice.

Clients often want to pay less tax, but effective tax planning rarely comes from focusing on a single-year tax bill. It requires advisors to understand how current decisions interact with future income, retirement distributions, charitable goals, estate transfers, and the client's broader financial plan.

In this live fireside chat, Jeffrey Levine will give investment adviser representatives and financial planners a practical framework for evaluating tax-planning opportunities across the client lifecycle. Attendees will examine how marginal rates, effective rates, adjusted gross income, and taxable income affect recommendations; how the timing of income, deductions, retirement contributions, Roth conversions, distributions, and asset transfers can influence lifetime tax outcomes; and how retirement and estate-planning decisions can create or eliminate planning opportunities.

The session will also address how advisors can communicate tax-planning observations, coordinate with tax and legal professionals, and use technology to analyze client scenarios without treating software output as a substitute for professional judgment. Through practical examples and guided engagement, attendees will leave better prepared to identify tax-planning considerations, evaluate tradeoffs, and integrate tax awareness into client recommendations.

For most financial advisors, compliance is simply something you 'have to do' to satisfy regulators while providing financial advice. But in practice, regulations are put in place to protect consumers, and understanding the principles that underlie those regulations can make it easier to adhere to the requirements. In this session, Chief Financial Planning Nerd Michael Kitces is joined by compliance experts Terria Heng, Max Schatzow, and Leila Shaver to discuss what RIAs need to keep in mind as they seek to create a positive culture of compliance, develop and operate within their compliance policies and procedures, and what to watch out for to minimize the risk of audit deficiencies when compliance reviews inevitably come.

This course, Key Variables in Retirement Portfolio Analysis, provides financial professionals with a deep understanding of the factors that impact retirement portfolio sustainability and income adequacy. Participants will explore critical concepts such as asset allocation, withdrawal strategies, inflation considerations, portfolio costs, and the role of required minimum distributions (RMDs) in retirement planning. Through data-driven analysis, the course examines how different withdrawal methods'fixed-dollar, percentage-based, and RMDs'affect portfolio longevity, as well as the importance of adjusting historical returns for realistic future projections. Additionally, attendees learn how equity exposure helps combat inflation and why cost sensitivity plays a crucial role in long-term financial success. By the end of the course, professionals are equipped with the practical knowledge needed to implement low-expense retirement income strategies and optimize portfolio management for clients while meeting requirements as fiduciaries.

This session uses a spouse's sudden transition into sole financial decision-making, brought on by a partner's incapacity, to explore the sequencing and psychological judgment that advanced-age planning demands. Early-career advisors typically default to leading with data collection and the financial plan, missing that a client who has never managed money independently may not be able to meaningfully engage with numbers until they feel emotionally oriented in their new reality. Participants will sketch their own approach to triaging simultaneous financial and emotional concerns, evaluate that approach against the case evidence, and rehearse client conversations where reframing and patience matter more than technical precision. By the end, participants should be able to recognize when a client isn't ready for the spreadsheet and sequence a planning relationship accordingly.

This session uses a business-owning client in his late 30s with a complex trust structure and a prenuptial agreement to expose a gap that appears in nearly every estate planning engagement: the difference between having documents and having an estate plan that is complete, funded, and actually works. Early-career advisors typically treat an executed estate plan as finished work; they review documents for content without verifying that assets are titled where the documents assume they are, and they miss the cascading legal consequences when that verification step is skipped. Participants will cross-reference document reviews, test them against a real titling gap discovered mid-engagement, and rehearse the client conversation that follows, uncovering a serious problem the client did not know existed. By the end, participants should be able to conduct a basic estate plan verification review, trace a titling gap through its downstream consequences, and communicate that finding to a client in plain language without triggering alarm.