For most financial advisors, 2023 was a year of rebound and reinvestment, as markets bounced back from the turbulence of 2022, and expanded profit margins allowed advisory firms room to reinvest back into the services and value they’re providing clients to make sure their retention stays strong in the future. Here at Kitces.com, we’ve similarly been in the midst of a reinvestment process in 2023, setting the foundation so that we can give even more back to the Financial Advicer community, as we continue to expand our “Team of Nerds” beyond just myself with more writers and more speakers, and develop and refine our Q-N-R standards to ensure that everything you get from Kitces.com is Quality, Nerdy, and Relevant… a standard for all Kitces content, even if it’s not created by Michael.
And in the coming year, we’re going to make sure that even more of that Kitces content is eligible for not only the full range of CE credit for CFP, CPA, and the other various professional designations, but also the ever-expanding IAR CE obligation. Which, thanks to the new rollouts in both California and Florida in 2024, will mean nearly half of all financial advisors who are IARs will need to fulfill the new IAR CE requirement in 2024… as once an advicer has half a dozen clients in any of the 17 states or the District of Columbia, they have to comply with the new IAR CE rules. And a lot of advicers have more than 5 clients in Florida!
In practice, this means that we’ll be bringing back our popular IAR Ethics CE Day in 2024 (save the date for August 29th!), expanding IAR CE credits to apply to our monthly live webinars (in addition to our written blog content and recorded webinars), increasing the cadence of our webinars from monthly to offering 2 every month (on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of each month… with the recording still available for those who can’t attend live), and continuing to cross-apply our Kitces content for all the other types of CE you may need as well (so you can check all the boxes at once!). Though we are implementing a small $20/year increase (from $169 to $189 per year) in the price of the Members Section to help manage the cost of rising staff salaries in the midst of inflation over the past 2 years, and to further reinvest into our Platform team to make site improvements so our content is faster to load and easier to navigate.
In the meantime, we remain committed to delivering the ongoing cadence of content that you’ve become accustomed to from Kitces. In 2024 we’ll again feature our Marketing Summit (save the date for April 25th!) and our Financial Planning Value Summit, we’ll be rolling out 2 new Advicer Research studies (on Marketing and on Productivity, as we wrap up the 2023 study on Wellbeing in the coming weeks), and we’ll be building a new Kitces Course on Optimizing Roth Conversions (to complement our course on Optimizing Social Security) to be released in mid-2024.
If you (or anyone you know) wants to join our Team of Nerds, stay tuned for more openings in 2024 as well, as we anticipate hiring a new Associate Financial Planning Nerd, an Operations Associate, a new Director of Product and Platform, and a Director of Advisor Research. We’ll be listing these as they become available on our Kitces Career Opportunities page, or you can sign up for our separate Career Opportunities mailing list (via that Opportunities page) to be notified when new positions open up!
Ultimately, though, the focus remains the same as it always has been – on our mission to “Make Financial Advicers Better, and More Successful” – through our 4 strategic pillars of creating Navigational resources, insightful Education, original Research, and skills Development for financial advisors (and yes, our organizational strategy really does spell out N-E-R-D 😊). I hope you’ll continue to come along with us on the journey in 2024!
