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Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

The CIFPs 8^th National Con­fer­ence Review

By Marc Lam­on­tagne, CFP, R.F.P, FMA

This is my sec­ond con­sec­u­tive year attend­ing this con­fer­ence and once again the agenda was PACKED. Each day began about 7:30 am and typ­i­cally went to 6:00 pm, with din­ner start­ing pronto at 6:30. You clearly earn your CE cred­its and receive your money’s worth at this conference.

The agenda was a smor­gas­bord; enough to quench the thirst for nov­elty of 500 to 600 atten­dees. The high­light was undoubt­edly Her­mann F. Leinin­gen with RBC Global Asset Man­age­ment. Leinin­gen was very funny, and he man­aged to walk the audi­ence through sev­eral com­plex eco­nomic sce­nar­ios and sus­tain their interest!

Take away: Expect U.S. inter­est rates to stay low for at least the next nine months or until there is a jobs recov­ery, stocks are still trad­ing at the lower end of the band due to con­tin­ued global eco­nomic uncer­tainty, and the demand for oil from China and India has barely scratched the surface.

Like any con­fer­ence there were a few mutual fund com­pany “talk­ing heads,” although the more inter­est­ing mate­r­ial came from indus­try par­tic­i­pants such as Cary List, Pres­i­dent and CEO of the Finan­cial Plan­ners Stan­dards Coun­cil. List pre­sented some of the find­ings of their recent con­sumer sur­vey on the ben­e­fits of finan­cial plan­ning. This is news that all CFP pro­fes­sion­als will want to share with their clients and prospects. Shawn Bray­man, Pres­i­dent of Plan­Plus, offered us an overview of the top aca­d­e­mic and indus­try research in the field of finan­cial plan­ning. How­ever, he had so many fas­ci­nat­ing papers to dis­cuss, it was unfor­tu­nate he had only an hour to cover his mate­r­ial.  And yours truly gave a short pre­sen­ta­tion on the recent 2010 Advi­sor Sur­vey Report, con­clud­ing that the deliv­ery of finan­cial advice is not that dif­fer­ent between fee and com­mis­sion models.

Susan Wol­burg Jenah, Pres­i­dent & CEO of IIROC, pro­vided an update on the Client Rela­tion­ship Model (CRM) pro­pos­als that will impose greater dis­clo­sure on the indus­try in order to increase investor pro­tec­tion. How­ever, the CRM has dragged on for so long and mor­phed so many times, it is hard to believe it will ever mate­ri­al­ize. Asked by an attendee how the devel­op­ments on com­pen­sa­tion in the U.K. and Aus­tralia might affect us here, Wol­burg Jenah said that IIROC was keep­ing a close eye on devel­op­ments that could poten­tially influ­ence com­pen­sa­tion mod­els in Canada, although it is prefer­able that indus­try par­tic­i­pants “vol­un­tar­ily” assess how to bet­ter align the inter­ests of clients and advisors.

The final day ended at noon, but the morn­ing still had sev­eral excel­lent speak­ers such as Dr. Dale Orr, Jamie Golombek, and Kevin O’Brien, who filled the morn­ing with great nuggets of wisdom.

Take away: Dr. Orr from Eco­nomic Insight pro­vided his short-term pre­dic­tions for Canada’s econ­omy: neg­li­gi­ble infla­tion, the dol­lar will trade close to par or maybe even higher if the price of oil increases, short-term rates will be higher in Canada than the U.S. (again putting upward pres­sure on our dol­lar), expect the Bank of Canada pol­icy rate to increase by 25 basis-points at every fixed announce­ment date for the next three years until it reaches the tar­get of 4% to 4.5%, and finally, don’t expect to see a bal­anced fed­eral bud­get until 2014–2015.

Jamie Golombek from CIBC Pri­vate Wealth Man­age­ment, who always stages a grand show, regaled the audi­ence with sto­ries of cre­ative bro­kers who sup­pos­edly found loop­holes in the TFSA con­tri­bu­tion rules. He also offered sev­eral use­ful tax strate­gies, updates, and sug­ges­tions on advis­ing your clients based on recent tax court decisions.

Take away: Advi­sors should be rec­om­mend­ing to almost every client that they top up their TFSA con­tri­bu­tion room prior to mak­ing RRSP contributions.

And finally, cer­ti­fied finan­cial plan­ner Kevin O’Brien from Kevin O’Brien & Asso­ciates told the audi­ence his some­times funny, some­times heart­felt story of man­ag­ing his parent’s messy estate before he became an advi­sor. It affected his cur­rent approach to estate plan­ning so much that he pub­lished his story for other advi­sors to read in Where There’s a Will….There’s a Way.

Over­all, it was an excel­lent con­fer­ence, and I would highly rec­om­mend attend­ing CIFP 2011 to be held in Ottawa from June 5 to 8. Media arti­cles from some of the pre­sen­ta­tions are avail­able on the CIFP website.

Fall Con­fer­ence Alert!

There are two first-rate con­fer­ences com­ing up in the fall that I will attend and rec­om­mend as well worth the investment.

The first is the IAFP Annual Sym­po­sium in Banff from Sep­tem­ber 23 to 25, 2010. This one is par­tic­u­larly enjoy­able; it is more sym­po­sium than con­fer­ence because it is anchored by a sin­gle finan­cial plan­ning case study. All speak­ers are required to ref­er­ence this case study in their pre­sen­ta­tions and are encour­aged to pub­lish papers from their spe­cialty per­spec­tive. This cer­tainly elim­i­nates the dis­ori­en­ta­tion one can some­times feel lis­ten­ing to mul­ti­ple talk­ing heads on sev­eral diverse sub­jects at other con­fer­ences. This year the case study is about a retir­ing busi­ness owner who also hap­pens to be a finan­cial plan­ner (is this a coin­ci­dence?). The sym­po­sium cul­mi­nates with a half-day dis­cus­sion on the case study by the 125+ attendees.

The sec­ond is the Knowl­edge Bureau’s (KB) Dis­tin­guished Advi­sor Con­fer­ence in Orlando from Novem­ber 14 to 17, 2010. Knowl­edge Bureau fac­ulty speak­ers such as Richard Croft and Doug Nel­son are top notch and KB Pres­i­dent Eve­lyn Jacks obvi­ously used her time wisely recruit­ing the likes of Don Stew­art, CEO Sun Life Finan­cial, while she was a fel­low mem­ber of the Fed­eral Task Force on Finan­cial Lit­er­acy. The other com­pelling rea­son to attend is this: each day ends at the utterly civ­i­lized time of 1:30 pm, giv­ing atten­dees ample time to enjoy the sun and nearby ameni­ties with col­leagues and family.

Marc Lam­on­tagne, CFP, R.F.P., FMA is a fee-based finan­cial plan­ner with Ryan Lam­on­tagne Inc., fee-model prac­tice man­age­ment trainer, and author of To Fee or Not to Fee II — How to design a fee finan­cial advi­sory prac­tice.  www​.tofee​ornot​tofee​.com

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