Insecure IRAs

I was appointed the finance correspondent for Senior Life Advisor, an online magazine for investors near or in retirement. The articles for Senior Life Advisor were designed to offer actionable information as well as items of interest about economics, investing and personal finance.

With the recently enacted Secure Act, Congress decided that, starting in 2020, IRAs and other tax-favored retirement accounts are for retirement and not for passing wealth onto heirs. The act makes significant changes to IRA proceeds that are disbursed to trusts. IRA trusts are a staple of estate planning because they allow individuals to control how their money is distributed and used after their death and to reduce taxes. Talk to just about any wealth advisor and they will tell you the Secure Act turns IRA trust planning upside down and that if you own one, it needs immediate review. They are right. If you haven’t called your accountant, attorney or wealth advisor, put it on your to-do list.

Amazon Summits A Dow That No Longer Exists

At the end of February Walgreen’s Boots Alliance was unceremoniously removed from the vaunted Dow Jones Industrial Index and Amazon

Financial Institutions Feeling the Crunch in Countdown to CECL Implementation

I was retained by Big Four accounting and consulting firm KPMG to assist them in their thought leadership efforts centered on changing accounting regulations. In this case, the Financial Accounting Standards Board or FASB had instituted new rules on the measurement of current and expected credit losses, i.e. CECL, that would require massive reorganization of financial reporting for the largest financial services organizations in the world. This thought leadership piece concerned the results of a survey among C-suite executives about their state of preparedness in the final countdown to the CECL implementation.

Securitizing Structured Settlement Payment Streams: A Primer

Fall 2012. This article was written with Stefano Sola and Phil Donahue, executives at JGWPT Holdings. We were engaged by JGWPT to assist them
in publishing the article below for The Journal Of Structured Finance.

Is The Media Biased?

This story is from our February 2024 update newsletter that offers communications insights, and hopefully, some amusing diversion.

David R. Evanson, LLC