Yeske Buie in the Media: FPA BE

Yeske Buie in the Media: FPA BE

Last week, Elissa and Dave participated in the FPA Annual Conference, the largest gathering of CFP® professionals and thought leaders in financial planning. At the conference, Elissa spoke on a panel to discuss best practices for internships and Dave spoke on a panel to discuss Retirement Realities and was a judge for an academic track jointly sponsored by the Academy of Financial Sciences and the Journal of Financial Planning. Both speaking engagements received media attention at the conference and highlight Elissa and Dave’s expertise in the profession.

Elissa’s panel was titled “Internships – The Best Practices Guide for Hiring, Managing, and Keeping Interns in Your Practice”. At Yeske Buie, we believe in supporting the pipeline of new financial planners and have given this support to over a dozen interns who have worked for the firm. Depending on the firm’s needs, we have hired interns to complete both financial planning and business management related projects. No matter the position, we strive to provide hands-on training, real experience, and mentoring opportunities to every student who walks in the door. As Elissa shared during her presentation, “It is so important to offer internships [in which] the students get actual exposure to what financial planning really is.”

As part of Yeske Buie’s internship program, financial planning interns are given the opportunity to draft insurance, beneficiary and estate templates, and start the process of creating or updating financial plans. They also get to sit in on different types of Client meetings. Similarly, our business management interns will also gain real experience as they work on projects related to social media, researching new software, learning about compliance, vendor management, marketing, business development, database management/clean-up, and more. We share a full description of our internship program in our piece titled: Yeske Buie’s Internship Program: Good for the Company and for the Intern.

Dave’s panel was titled “Retirement Realities” and he was joined by Marc Milic, CFP® and David Blanchett, PhD, CFA, CFP® Head of Retirement Research for Morningstar. The panelists discussed how to approach retirement planning in a way that meets the needs of individuals in today’s environment. Dave shared that at Yeske Buie, “One of the ways we’re handling the low-rate environment is that we hold more equities in retirement portfolios than most studies typically assume. When a client moves into retirement, whatever their stock-bond allocation has been, we move it to 70-30, and we only move that much into bonds because our thought is that we want to only use bonds as a stable reserve. A 30 percent allocation to bonds, along with allocations to dividend-paying equities, can create a bridge that can see retirement portfolios through market downturns.” In addition to the economic factors, the panelists agreed that human factors must also be considered. Dave shared, “With retirements lasting 30 or more years, a higher equity allocation also helps address inflation risk. The cost of living might double twice over the course of someone’s retirement. They’d better have some growth in that portfolio.” To close out their discussion, the planners noted their responsibility to provide Clients with grounded wisdom. Dave shared that, “”As financial planners, we are dealing with powerful forces in people’s lives.”

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