Recently a quick assessment was posted on Life Health Pro by Maribeth Kuzmeski.  According to Kuzmeski, answering these 8 questions will tell you a lot about your marketing strategy for this year. 1) Do you have an up to date website? And does the site have a call to action to engage your prospects? 2) [...]

With commission falling almost 40% in the last 5 years advisors are having to work harder and harder to generate the same amount of revenue to operate their business, pay employees, and maintain their lifestyles.  I was just visiting with an advisor two weeks ago in his office, and he say “Jason, just 3 years [...]

While interest rates continue to hover around record lows, many investors and retirees are apprehensive about purchasing an annuity until the rates rise again. Waiting for the rates to return to a “normal” level may not be in the best interest of the investor. Although the fixed indexed annuity (FIA) products may not appear to [...]

There’s a reason so many folks buy these products. Where else are you going to get a guarantee for income for life without the potential of loss?   Evanston, IL, —Despite a difficult interest rate environment, income annuity sales grew almost 18% in fourth quarter and nearly 7% in 2011, according to estimates from the [...]

A survey of retirees asked “What is your greatest fear about retirement?” The most common answer given was “out living our money”. This is a major factor in why over 80% of annuities sold in 2010 had a guaranteed lifetime income rider attatched. There are more variaties of these riders today than ever before. This is [...]

Brett Arends recently wrote this piece for MarketWatch and I felt it was important to share.  He draws some uncanny parallels between the recent rise in gold prices and the rise of tech stocks in the 90′s and builder stocks in the 2000′s.  If his graph holds true, and so far it has, we could [...]

As more and more advisors begin using social media and digital marketing there are several things you need to do to be successful and several mistakes you need to avoid. Amy McIlwain, President of Financial Social Media, has outlined some of those pitfalls that we should all avoid when using social media to expand and [...]

The overall markets experienced significant peaks and valleys over the last decade, and many watched as their retirement accounts were decimated and built back up, only to lose value yet again.   As advisors, we sometimes shy away from talking with our clients about products that can help them truly diversify their investment portfolio while [...]

Everyday we are seeing a more and more people fleeing the volatility of the market to purchase fixed annuities. Although some of the more risk adverse clients are purchasing the traditional fixed annuities, but many are hedging their retirement by purchasing fixed indexed annuities.   There are many reasons why this is happening. Consumers now have a product where [...]

Worried that you’re or your clients’ are not saving enough to achieve the post-work life of your dreams? Let a retirement calculator give you a reality check.  Here are a couple of fast are free ways to help you determine what you should be saving for retirement. Faster Go to CNNMoney.com/retirement. Input a few numbers [...]