If the Obama administration and House Representative Rob Andrews of New Jersey have their way, the independent contractor rep may become a thing of the past.

Harry Markopolos, the famously ignored Madoff whistleblower whose well-informed and detailed warnings about Bernard Madoff were disregarded for years by regulators, testified before House Financial Services Committee today that the SEC is “...

These days everyone is suffering. The media has been all over the story of the credit bust, the drop in housing values, the stock market's dive since Labor Day, and how these events have wiped out the American Dream. Financial advisors and other...

For some time, prominent commentators have requested that the Internal Revenue Service publish official guidance to deal with this increasingly common scenario:1 A deceased spouse's IRA is payable to a trust in which the surviving spouse is the...

During the course of an estate's administration, a personal representative performs four basic functions: (1) marshals assets; (2) determines and raises cash needs; (3) pays reasonable funeral expenses, debts, administration expenses and taxes...

Perhaps the first time most people would've heard of a green burial was in the last episode, aired during summer 2005, of the blockbuster HBO series, Six Feet Under. The featured family ran a conventional funeral business and, at the end of five...

Yes, it's true that the commercial real estate industry is suffering from increasing vacancies, decreasing rents and declining property values. Call it a trifecta of bad news. Yet, for bottom-feeders er, contrarians this might be a good time to...

Bernard Madoff’s astonishing fraud has accelerated calls for regulatory overhaul that had already begun with the credit crisis. then again, the regulatory system was antiquated. The real problem for retail financial advisors: Your clients no...

The aim of the LIG [Leadership, Innovation and Growth] program at GE was to embed growth in the DNA of our company, GE CEO Jeff Immelt says in an interview in the January 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review. You will have to read the article...