Approved IAR CE Courses

For clients with highly appreciated investment real estate, the tax bill at sale can be the single biggest obstacle to portfolio diversification and estate planning. This session goes beyond the basics of the 1031 exchange to explore how the 721 UPREIT — a lesser-known but powerful structure — can help advisors move clients from active property ownership into institutional real estate while deferring capital gains taxes, simplifying estate transfer, and eliminating the landlord burden. Forum Investment Group's exchange specialists will walk through real client profiles, common ownership complications, and the key questions advisors should be asking before a property goes to market.

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

This two-hour course provides investment adviser representatives with a practical understanding of SEC Rule 206(4)-1 as it applies to advertising and investment performance. Participants will examine the definition of an advertisement, the general prohibitions applicable to all advertising, and the specific requirements governing gross, net, hypothetical, related, extracted, and predecessor performance. The course will also review pertinent SEC Risk Alerts, Frequently Asked Questions, and common examination findings involving performance advertising. In addition, attendees will learn how investment advisory firms and investment adviser representatives can implement effective review, approval, documentation, and recordkeeping procedures designed to reduce regulatory risk and support compliance with the Marketing 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.

Many clients enter retirement with well-funded portfolios, thoughtful income plans, and confidence that they have “done everything right.” Yet even a strong retirement plan can be dramatically reshaped by the realities of aging: home care, family caregiving, cognitive decline, housing transitions, assisted living, memory care, hospice, estate settlement, and emotionally difficult family decisions.

This one-hour CE program uses the fictitious case study, “The $3 Million Retirement Plan That Life Rewrote,” to examine how care needs can transform a financially secure retirement over time. Attendees will explore how proactive longevity planning can help advisors identify care-related risks, evaluate funding strategies, incorporate housing and home equity decisions, support family communication, and use a practical preparedness framework before a crisis limits the client’s options.

Planning for Single Women explores the unique financial planning challenges and opportunities facing single women—whether divorced, widowed, or single by choice. Join Heather Zack, JD, LLM, MSFP, CAP® to better understand key structural risks such as longevity, income disparities, and caregiving responsibilities, and provides actionable strategies for advisors to support this underserved and high-need client segment. Through engaging case studies, the presentation covers critical planning areas including Social Security optimization, estate planning, and tax considerations, while also addressing broader themes like financial literacy, workforce participation, and closing the gender wealth gap. The goal is to equip advisors with practical tools to deliver more holistic, empathetic, and effective guidance to single female clients.

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.

Planning for Wealth, Legacy, and Business Continuity examines modern estate planning and life insurance planning for financial advisors and insurance professionals. The course focuses on estate tax awareness, liquidity planning, beneficiary coordination, policy ownership, life insurance review, business continuity concerns, and the advisor’s role in identifying planning gaps and coordinating with attorneys, CPAs, trustees, and other professionals.