Approved IAR CE Courses

Death is an unavoidable fact of life. Planning for death, however, not so much. Despite the many benefits of estate planning, clients still avoid this task, risking additional administrative costs, increased tax liabilities, and future family disagreements about their final wishes. In this webinar, Shelitha Smodic, CFP' shares insights from the latest research on why people hesitate to plan for their estate. This session explores the psychological and practical barriers that lead to estate planning hesitancy and provides tools advisors can use to help guide clients through these challenges. Attendees will learn how factors like mortality salience, life transitions, and even travel can create windows of opportunity for engagement in estate planning. Additionally, behavioral framing techniques, conversation starters, and tools for making estate planning more approachable and relevant for clients in different phases of life will be discussed.

This course provides investment advisory representatives with a comprehensive overview of retirement accounts commonly used in the United States. It covers the various types of retirement accounts, their tax implications, regulatory environment, and strategies for effective retirement planning. The course is designed to enhance the advisors' knowledge, enabling them to better assist clients in achieving their retirement goals while adhering to regulatory and ethical standards.

This course provides financial professionals with a clear, practical understanding of Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) and their role in today's investment landscape. Participants will explore how CLOs are structured, managed, and analyzed, with a focus on the unique opportunities and risks associated with CLO equity. Through data-driven insights and a real-world case study, the session highlights how CLO investments can enhance portfolio diversification and generate income. By the end of the course, attendees will gain the knowledge and confidence to better evaluate and discuss CLO strategies with clients and colleagues.

The class for investment adviser representatives focuses on compliance with the SEC's marketing rule, particularly for performance advertising. Key topics include creating compliant performance advertisements, understanding and adhering to rules regarding hypothetical and actual performance, and ensuring that advertisements are fair, balanced, and substantiated. The course emphasizes maintaining policies, procedures, and records to avoid SEC enforcement actions and the complexities of creating performance composites versus using representative accounts. Practical advice on balancing marketing objectives with compliance requirements and managing resources effectively for performance advertising is also provided.

This quiz will include a review of the following articles: Performance Advertising Guidelines For Investment Advisers Under the SEC's New Marketing Rule and IAR CE: Continuing Education Requirements For Investment Adviser Representatives And How Different States Adopt NASAA's Model Rule

Personal Life Insurance Planning examines the type of client data needed to determine minimum life insurance coverage requirements. It identifies the various lump-sum cash needs at the death of a breadwinner and provides guidelines to enable advisers to recommend life insurance in amounts that fully protect clients. It identifies typical surviving family income needs following a breadwinner's death. Advisers learn to calculate adequate survivor income and appropriate life insurance needed to provide required income. Social Security survivor benefits are discussed, including the Child's benefit, the Mother's or Father's benefit, and Widow's and Widower's benefit.

Given frequent news headlines on the (un)sustainability of the Social Security system, many working-age financial advisory clients might harbor doubts about receiving their full (or any of their) estimated Social Security benefits. In this session, we dive deep into data from the Social Security Board Of Trustees' Annual Report to clear up common misconceptions about the actual health of the Social Security system, review a range of policy options being considered to shore up Social Security for the rest of the century, and discuss how financial advisors can analyze the impact of these policies for both working-age, near-retirement, and already-retired clients, and ways to adapt financial planning assumptions to model the scenarios, providing clients with a more accurate picture of how they might (or might not) be affected.