As a Medicare insurance broker, I am in the process of getting ready to offer the next year’s products. Insurance companies are also getting ready to advertise next year’s plans, and clients are beginning to wonder if this is the year they should make a major change. Every year, marketing during the Medicare Annual Election Period [AEP] has gotten intense, and there is no evidence to show it’s slowing down. As trusted advisors, you can expect clients to go to you for advice as their opportunity to change plans approaches. Fortunately, you do not need to know the intricacies of the two main types of competing products to be able to advise on financial impacts of them. Here’s the basics of what all financial advisors need to know.

The National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors (NAIFA) is pleased to announce that Weigner Insurance & Financial Services in Pottstown, PA, has become a NAIFA 100% Agency. Under the membership program, Weigner Insurance has enrolled all of its advisors as NAIFA members and enrolled them in NAIFA’s grassroots advocacy programs.

HOW LONG CAN MY CLIENT PAY $10,000/MONTH FOR HIS WIFE’S NURSING HOME CARE?

Harlan Accola, National Reverse Mortgage Director of Fairway will be joined by David McKnight the President of Power of Zero for the webinar How to Advise Your Clients to Get to the Zero Tax Bracket, Wednesday, August 4th at 2 pm eastern.  

For Carina Hatfield, LUTCF, CLCS, LACP, Owner of Weigner Insurance and Financial Services in Pottstown, PA, providing business owners and other members of her community with financial security and insurance solutions runs in the family. As a third-generation financial professional, she follows in the footsteps of her father and grandfather. The Weigner Insurance team includes Hatfield's sister, Trish May, a loyal NAIFA member since 2013, and new Sales Associate Sally Shaw of New York. Weigner Insurance recently signed on as the newest NAIFA 100% Agency

Ameritas held its Pathways conference this week in Denver, Colorado. Randy Clark, Senior Director of Membership Outreach & Engagement, and Beth Helberg, Director of Partner Marketing, attended from NAIFA staff to support the event. Thanks to Ameritas, we were able to organize a group photo of some of our many NAIFA members who are part of Ameritas. NAIFA members were ecstatic to have the opportunity to unite together for the first time in over a year to show their pride in belonging to their beloved professional association.

EveryIncome is front-office marketing, prospecting, and education tool designed to help advisors promote themselves and their practices while encouraging the use of financial products through financial literacy, wellness, and education.

We all know it’s important to plan for retirement. But not all of us know how to do it — and many of us who do, don’t always have access to secure retirement planning.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of “Client Relationship Management Systems” CRMs in the marketplace. I am selectively going to talk about some of the more popular or industry CRMs, yet not purposely excluding any specific vendor or CRM product. You can identify CRMs in 1 of 3 categories: Generic, Industry Specific, or Home Grown. The CRM companies that are Generic like the big names: SalesForce, Microsoft, and Oracle for example are powerful products. These Fortune 500 companies have figuratively unlimited resources to setup their software to fit your practice. Typically this can be a little more on the expensive side, but makes sense with a larger agency that has many advisors. I would be wary about a generic CRM solution from a small vendor because even though you can license it at a lower cost, you may find them to be problematic for a many reasons like incompatibility for integrating data and limited functionality. There are some new popular generic CRMs from middle size companies like like Zoho and HubSpot that are really easy to use and setup with a lot of functionality. It is easy to gravitate to Industry specific CRMs because they are practically ready to use right out of the box. See information on some industry specific CRMs below.

Last week, E4 Insurance Services hosted NAIFA’s Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Suzanne Carawan on the weekly BREW to discuss what's new with NAIFA.

Dan Peterson, President of E4 Insurance welcomed Suzanne and attendees and shared “The important part of financial advisors measuring up is the support of your industry. We have partnered up with NAIFA to support advocacy and by sponsoring advisor's membership dues with NAIFA.  We are proud to have Suzanne on today and thank you for allowing us to partner with NAIFA.”