Client Calculator Use, Now and Later
| Have used | Likely to use | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retirement planning calculator | 35% | 42% | +7% |
| Asset allocation tools | 18% | 31% | +13% |
| College funding estimators | 18% | 24% | +6% |
| IRA calculators | 20% | 33% | +13% |
| Mortgage analysis tools | 35% | 28% | -7% |
| Tax calculators | 32% | 38% | +6% |
| None | 39% | 35% | -4% |
Identifying the Clients
To participate, respondents had to have a full-service broker, a personal financial planner or both. In particular, 68% work with a broker and 43% have a planner, which means 11% have both.
In addition, the survey required respondents to have Internet access at one or more locations. At 90%, the majority has access at home, while 68% has access at work and 5% has access someplace else.
Almost 9 out of 10 participants are male. Regarding age distribution, 21% are under 40, 28% are 40 to 49, 30% are 50 to 59 and 21% are 60 or older. About 38% of the group has household income less than $100,000, 46% earns more than $100,000 and 16% refused to answer the question.
Respondents' portfolio sizes range from less than $50,000 to more than $1 million, but 28% would not reveal the amount and 2% didn't know. For the purposes of comparison, people are grouped by their portfolio sizes into those with less than $100,000 (34%) and those with more than $100,000 (36%).— J.S.
Playing Favorites
Clients definitely train their computer mice to frequent a few financial information Web sites. When asked to name their favorite URLs, several received repeated mentions. Yahoo! Finance is by far the most popular, and others rate highly as well. In alphabetical order, they include sites from:
Bloomberg, CNNfn, Fidelity Investments, Morningstar, MSN MoneyCentral, The Motley Fool, The Wall Street Journal and Quicken.
Methodology: A 16-question telephone survey of 200 investors was conducted in April by Beta Research, Syosset, N.Y. Names and telephone numbers were purchased from the Investors Masterfile maintained by Act One Lists, Marblehead, Mass.
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