Articles About The Nerd's Eye View Blog

Determining whether an advisor is any good is a remarkably difficult task for consumers; in fact, just determining whether an advisor has ever committed a regulatory violation could require contact to as many as 102 different agencies - from 50 state insurance departments and 50 state securities regulators, to FINRA and the SEC. While all the information is technically part of the public record, and to that extent is "transparent," the difficulty to view it in any consolidated manner - much less as an easy resource - renders its value remarkably limited as a consumer protection.

One company trying to tackle this problem is BrightScope, which is drawing all the publicly available information together into a central resource that consumers can use to check out their advisors and determine if there's a clean regulatory record. Recently, BrightScope announced it is also aiming to draw on fee details disclosed by RIAs in their Form ADVs to make this information readily to consumers, and is looking to add more pertinent information as well, to ultimately provide a one-stop resource for consumers to find out key information about an advisor's experience, education, costs, and regulatory record.

While shining such a bold light of transparency on the activities of advisors will no doubt draw some criticism, I believe that this kind of transparency is crucial for consumers to develop better trust with financial advisors, and ultimately can help ensure that consumers always know the truth about who they're working with as "Brightscoping" your advisor becomes a routine form of due diligence check for consumers. At the same time, the reality is that the nature of our industry is complex, and oversimplification of these realities will not help consumers either.

Accordingly, I'm excited to announce that I will be joining the Advisory Board of BrightScope in a consulting capacity, to try to help support their efforts in finding the right balance between fair information about advisors and the transparency that consumers need and deserve.

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As subscribers of my newsletter The Kitces Report know, I like to survey my readers once a year to get their input on what they find least/most useful about the content and how it's delivered to them. As this blog has exploded in traffic and readership over the past year, I've decided it's now time to institute the same process here.

Accordingly, I'm hoping you'll take just a couple minutes to answer the relatively brief reader survey below, and share with me your thoughts about this blog, the content, and some services that I am considering adding to it... if the survey says I should, of course!

The survey is only 10 questions, and should take no more than a minute or two. Thanks in advance for your time, feedback, and ongoing readership!

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As 2012 comes to a close, I'm thankful to all of you, my readers, who have visited Nerd's Eye View more and more over the year, and shared this blog with your colleagues. The growth has helped to renew my energy and enthusiasm to continue writing regularly here in the coming year, as well as reinvest into the site; in the coming weeks, you'll see a significant re-design rolling out. And yes, due to popular demand, it will include a larger default font size!

With life and work as busy as it is, though, I know that most people don't have the time to keep up with everything that's written here, and it's an unfortunate "curse" of blogging that articles, once written, often vanish to the archives, never to be seen again outside of an occasional Google search or two. Accordingly, I've compiled for you this list of the 12 most popular articles that ran this year on Nerd's Eye View. So whether you're new to the blog, or simply haven't had the time to keep up with everything, I hope that some of these will (still) be useful or of interest to you!

Thanks for a great 2012, and looking forward to an even better 2013!
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As I come up to speed on the world of blogging, it is my goal to make it easier for all of you to read the content on this website. Accordingly, I have configured this blog's content to publish via FeedBurner, so that you can conveniently using any number of blog reader programs to keep up with new content.

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After being absent from this blog for nearly a year, I'm happy to report that the Nerd is back! That's right, Nerd's Eye View is coming back to life with a new focus, and a fresh commitment that it will have content!
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With this entry, a new blog is born in the world. Like most of the 100 million or more others who have created blogs in recent years, I've created this one because I have something to share, and I hope that I will find an audience who finds value in what I have to say.

The focus of this blog will be on all things financial planning. As a self-admitted financial planning nerd, I will share in this space my own commentary on financial planning developments that I believe are relevant to the world, and on development in the world that I believe are relevant to financial planning.

It is my intention, though, to not let this be a purely one-sided discussion. Please share your comments on my posts. Feel free to write me at [email protected]. Tell me about your challenges and your successes, what you're seeing and hearing and reading, and what you're experiencing.

I'm going to share with you whatever insights I can on financial planning issues; I hope you'll consider responding in kind.