Every once in a while a high profile public personality passes away with either an inadequate estate plan or a wonderful plan and it is an occasion for others to realize they have unfinished business with their own estate plan. This is an interesting article from The Trust Advisor.com worth reading. by Scott Martin, Senior [...]

by Melanie Waddell NASAA recently released its list of the top scams con artists use to trap unwary, or merely desperate, investors during these volatile economic times Advisors and investors beware: Even though Bernie Madoff is gone, economic uncertainty and volatile stock markets still breed con artists itching to trap the unwary or merely desperate. [...]

Don’t let a touch of “gold fever” sucker your clients into what very might well be the latest gold-plated investor scam. To help protect investors from such potential “golden cons,” the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority today issued an investor alert, “Gold” Stocks–Some Investments Mine Your Pocketbook, ostensibly to warn investors about investment scams that promote [...]

April 7, 2011 WASHINGTON –– Hiding income in offshore accounts, identity theft, return preparer fraud, and filing false or misleading tax forms top the annual list of “dirty dozen” tax scams in 2011, the Internal Revenue Service announced today. “The Dirty Dozen represents the worst of the worst tax scams,” IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said. [...]

Since this magazine is dedicated to Investor Education for Main Street America, it seems appropriate to refer our readers to a fine new publication created by the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors titled Pursuit of a Financial Advisor Field Guide. Where do I go? Where do I look? What do I ask? Finding qualified, [...]

The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council’s “Business Tax Index 2010” ranks the states from best to worst in terms of the costs of their tax systems on entrepreneurship and small business. The Index pulls together 16 different tax measures, and combines those into one tax score that allows the 50 states and District of Columbia [...]

Brian Harris, Senior Editor, Dimensional Fund Advisors Since the financial crisis hit in late 2008, the US monetary base has more than doubled, from about $800 billion in mid-2008 to about $2 trillion in November 2010.1 When the Federal Reserve announced a second round of quantitative easing (QE2), it raised investor concerns that such actions [...]

Staff – Journal of Accountancy Congress adjourned its year-end lame-duck session on Wednesday after passing legislative fixes for several pending tax issues, including the estate tax, the expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, an alternative minimum tax (AMT) patch, and extensions of many expired provisions. However, it failed to repeal the expanded Form [...]

by Bob Veres Dealing With US Debt If you want to watch something alarming, look at the U.S. Debt Clock (http://www.usdebtclock.org/), which calculates, second-by-second, America’s rising debt (approaching $14 trillion), federal spending (nearly $3.5 trillion a year) and budget deficit (roughly $1.3 trillion).  Second-by-second the numbers increase, and you can also watch (more slowly) the [...]

By Jon Coupal This fall has been especially frightening. There have been the little monsters at our doors on Halloween, the monstrous politicians invading our homes through the television, and there has been that property tax bill in the mail box. Fortunately, as a direct result of Proposition 13, which limits increases in a property’s [...]