Our list of "Best Conferences 2025!", and be sure to take advantage of the discount codes that several have offered to Nerd's Eye View readers! Best in: -Overall Planning: @FPANorCal -Technology: @t3techhub -Advanced Tax Planning: @AICPA Engage and more! bit.ly/4fisUpb

Truth is that everyone has the exact same number of hours to use during the day; breakthroughs in professional and personal fulfillment come not by making those hours more efficient, but by making more conscious decisions about how those hours are spent in the first place. Similar to saving enough money to gain financial independence, gaining agency over our time requires an intentional framework that regulates where one’s attention flows, to ensure that it is used in ways that best align time with goals, which in turn drives our growth, income, and happiness. kitc.es/4osR9Hb #timemanagement #advicers

The Case For Locking In 3% Real Returns: Why certain investors might be attracted to the availability of long-term Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) currently offering real yields nearing 3% kitc.es/4vR1rTX (Bob Elliott | Nonconsensus)

In this #WeekendReading, an SEC risk alert issued this week flags that a number of firms have been cited during recent examinations for failing to properly disclose certain fee arrangements, including how they handle (and receive revenue for) client cash holdings kitc.es/4vR1rTX (Kenneth Corbin | Barron's)

Why having two household incomes is not necessarily better than one, particularly given the ways in which real-world households tend to structure their expenses, and the potential to leverage the "non-linearity premium" to boost lifetime earnings for households with one earner instead of two. kitc.es/4ei5SzE

Even a small shift in retirement timing can change the market environment the retiree enters and, with it, the sustainability of the plan. Retirement timing may deserve a larger role in retirement planning than it is often given.   kitc.es/4frRasq #retirementplanning #advicers

Good discussion here... conferences (and industry media) highlight how larger advisory firms get higher multiples, and founders start to fixate on "well then how can we merge/acquire our way to be bigger and get that premium, too?" Except the caveat is that it isn't just literally a "size" boost. It's size AND the things that come with size WHEN it's well executed... tighter operational systems, continuity of leadership and management, depth of next generation talent, etc. Which are things you DON'T get if you just decide to mash together a bunch of firms to make them bigger but not actually integrated. The end result sometimes... now the founder owns a bigger, more complex, less integrated business, and spends more time doing things they don't even enjoy in the business. When the reality is that if they had 'just' focused on improving systems, team, tech, and organic growth of the business they already had, they could have also gotten bigger, and actually been able to earn that higher multiple? The headlines pull attention... who's feeling the allure of "if I just got bigger, I too could go for higher multiples..."? "Opinion: This is the most dangerous thing advisors hear at M&A conferences" kitc.es/4e0mOMp

Study of end consumers found that half of them did NOT use any kind of referral to find their advisor, as consumers use a wider range of other marketing channels to find an advisor instead. Our Kitces Research on Marketing finds similar results... looking at where advisors in the aggregate got their clients, only about 40% of clients found their way to their advisor through a referral from an existing client (while for some firms 100% of growth is referral-based, the growthiest firms actually rely on referrals the least, usually for only ~1/3rd of their organic growth, and those growthy firms often drive a LOT of growth from other non-referral channels)... "Wealthy investors are less referral-dependent than advisors think" kitc.es/442gU7w

The Tension Between Optimization And Creativity In Business: For many advisors, financial planning is more creative than technical, as it is centered on relationships and individual needs, not 'optimal' decisions. Similarly, many clients choose advisors not only due to their perceived competency, but also their unique personality. kitc.es/4dXaXP5 So, advisors may want to consider how they can further imbed their unique interests and strengths into the advisory firm offerings, trusting that it may be something which attracts clients, regardless of how 'optimal' it is. In this 192nd episode of Kitces & Carl, we discuss how creative advisors can build a business that is both fulfilling and successful. #podcast #financialadvisorpodcast

Is Altruist's corporate RIA a more attractive solution for breakaway advisors than the existing options? Is it worth getting deeper into mortgage planning and implementation with clients if the advisor can give them access to a better rate through a platform like Flourish Lending? Where is the line where technology starts to intrude on the (human) relationship between the client and advisor? Let us know your thoughts on this month's #AdvisorTech news: kitc.es/4ecosKP

The 4 stages that entrepreneurs pass through as they grow and scale their business – and the new kinds of knowledge expertise that advisors need to develop to best help their business owner clients overcome obstacles along the way: kitc.es/4g0L9Tw In this ‘hybrid’ video-based article, Michael Kitces and John Bowen, CEO and founder of CEG Worldwide and CEG Insights, map out the stages that entrepreneurs pass through as they grow and scale their business – and the new kinds of knowledge expertise that advisors need to develop to best help their business owner clients overcome obstacles along the way, along with some tools and resources for download in the link. ☝️

What Kind Of Niche Should You Create? How advisors can better understand the range of niche choices in order to pick the one that best suits them. Because the reality is that not all types of niches are the same in the first place. kitc.es/4dOBHkN  #niche #advicers

We’re excited to finally announce the first UPDATE to our Kitces Advisor Services Map, featuring 128 more advisor service providers (bringing the total number up to 413 – though the number of total logos on the Map is even more, since so many providers offer services in multiple categories!). In January, we launched the inaugural Kitces Advisory Services Map (in collaboration with Joe Moss of AdvisorTech Book) to catalogue the vast landscape of service providers for financial advisors – from marketing to outsourced financial planning and investment management to legal and compliance support to operational and technology support to transitions and M&A to business coaches and consultants to turnkey platforms to do it all for you! The hope was to do for advisor services what we did for advisor technology with the Kitces AdvisorTech Map: Create a resource for advisors to find the tools and support they need to become better and more successful at what they do. The response to V1.0 of the Services Map was overwhelming – so much so, in fact, that it’s taken us nearly 6 months to work through the flood of new submissions from advisor services providers that we missed when we were researching the original Map. Going forward, we’ll be releasing new updates to the Services Map on a more regular monthly cadence as we do with our AdvisorTech Map. So if you know of (or are) an advisor service provider who isn’t on the Map – or if you are on the Map but would like to make a change to your logo, website, or category – feel free to fill out our submission form to get in the queue for next month’s update: kitc.es/4tm1B3R Looking for the Fintech Map? Discover technology solutions for RIAs and independent broker-dealers here: kitc.es/4rf0dPQ #advisortech #advisorserviceproviders #fintechmap #servicesmap

The role of comprehensive financial planning software has evolved greatly over the past 15 years. Adoption increased slightly from 93.1% in 2023 to 95.0% in 2025, while its functional importance score stayed essentially stable, rising modestly from 8.8 in 2023 to 8.9 in 2025. At the same time, the overall satisfaction ranking for the category slipped slightly from 8.3 in 2023 to 8.0 in 2025. In fact, most third-party providers experienced at least some decline from 2023 to 2025, with the exception of Asset-Map (rising from 7.6 to 7.9) and Moneytree (rising from 8.3 to 9.0). We look at this in greater detail in our latest AdvisorTech Study, available here: kitc.es/3BnX0tc

How Cash Flow Planning Is Different Than Budgeting: David Mozeika, founder of TOMORO, shares how he approaches financial planning from a cash flow perspective, treating income as an asset to be distributed based on a client's goals: kitc.es/4v1lfnC In this episode, we talk in-depth about how David treats cash flow planning not as a budgeting exercise but rather as an opportunity to default clients into saving rather than spending, how David uses what he calls a "cash flow reservoir" to hold client income. #cashflowplanning #FASuccess #financialadvisorpodcast

The starting point is to recognize that for Childfree clients who don't have children, 'just' coming up with someone to serve as attorney-in-fact, executor, and/or trustee, can be a remarkably difficult decision. kitc.es/4uzWxdu Because the focus of estate planning for Childfree clients is disproportionately focused on enjoying and utilizing their money while they are still alive (as there are no children to prioritize for an inheritance), traditional estate planning clauses like limiting distributions for HEMS (Health, Education, Maintenance, and Support) are unnecessarily limiting to trustees of Childfree clients' trusts. Dr. Jay Zigmont, founder of Childfree Wealth and Childfree Trust, explores how the unique circumstances of Childfree clients turn traditional estate (and long-term care) planning upside down, to the point that relying on traditional estate documents and their standard provisions can actually cause outright harm to the Childfree client's planning goals. #childfreeplanning #estateplanning #advicers

Doctors have the American Medical Association. Lawyers have the American Bar Association. Why joining a membership association like the FPA can have benefits for financial advisors: kitc.es/4e4GyNt In this guest post, financial advisor (and former Board of Directors member of both the FPA and the CFP Board) Dan Moisand discusses why membership associations are still as important as they ever were, and arguably even more so in the case of financial planning, where our recognized status as a profession is still developing in the eyes of the public, which can require a strong membership association to build credibility. #advicers #FPA

A growing base of retirement research finds that fewer and fewer people actually want a retirement of all leisure and no work. Thanks in large part to our “hedonic adaptation” abilities – where we quickly adjust to our new circumstances – retirement is actually boring for many!  If you assume, for a moment, that reaching the moment of “retirement” doesn’t actually mean the end of work, but merely the end of a current job or career – opening the door to a new type of work instead, what you end up with is 3 different “types” of retirement. kitc.es/4x7ojQp #retirementplanning #retirement #advicers

4 risks to retirement security, including those that can be mitigated through portfolio-based strategies (e.g., longevity and market risk) as well as those (including mortality and decision risk) that require different types of solutions from the advisory toolkit kitc.es/4vwk2o6 #WeekendReading (Chris Heye | Journal Of Financial Planning)

Why growth engines that once fueled the firm may stall as it scales ➡️3 growth strategies on building scalable processes to achieve double-digit growth: kitc.es/4uVdYpA Advisory firm founders often work tirelessly to develop processes for attracting good-fit clients. This painstaking effort to balance where viable prospects are with what the advisor is naturally inclined to do can eventually pay off in steady growth. Yet just as the firm begins to grow, these once-reliable pipelines often plateau. A key challenge is that many growth engines depend heavily on the founder's personal time and energy. Fortunately, there are several ways to reinvigorate foundational growth engines and make them scalable. #advicers #growth

A 2026 Client Intelligence Monitor report from Absolute Engagement  finds that while overall financial advisor client satisfaction is high, relatively lower levels of client engagement and willingness to make referrals suggest some firms might have room to grow not only by evaluating their client value propositions, but also by forging closer client relationships kitc.es/4vwk2o6 #WeekendReading (Rob Burgess | ThinkAdvisor)