Proposed Department Of Labor Rules: How They'll Impact Advisors and Investors
A fiduciary standard requires the professional to only provide advice that is in the best interest of the investor, regardless of how the person giving the advice may be compensated. While you would think financial advisors would already be adhering to such a rule, the reality before this rule was that securities brokers and representatives of products for which a sales commission was paid to the financial advisor only had to use a "suitability" standard for their advice -- in other words, the sale could be justified based upon a less stringent evaluation of the investor's needs or desires.
This new DOL rule requires no real change to your relationship with Stout Bowman, as we are Registered Investment Advisors, not brokers, and have adhered to the fiduciary standard from Day One. Therefore, if you hear on the news about any turmoil in the financial service industry as a result of this new DOL ruling, rest assured that they didn't need that rule to force us to put your best interest first: we've been doing that all along.
Stout Bowman regularly posts important and interesting information on our blog. Current topics include credit/debit/loans, estate planning, insurance, investing, Medicare, retirement, Social Security and taxes, as well as general information that we think you might find of interest. 
We have been publishing an email newsletter for our clients and friends since 2016. Links to all of the newsletters can be found on our newsletter page, with the most recent listed first. We try to keep our emails short, so there are typically only three articles in each one, most of which link to other articles in the financial and mainstream press. 
We also have a page on our site for the latest news about our company, notice of any upcoming events, and a market commentary to discuss what our advisors and other financial industry experts conclude about the previous investment performance and what we might expect the markets and the economy will do in the coming months. 
Many news organizations offer what is called a Rich Site Summary (RSS) feed, a listing of the latest changes to their site's content. We have subscribed to several of these news feeds and present a list of their latest ten articles on a page on this website to save our clients the hassle of going to multiple websites just to see what is available. Currently, we subscribe to 
At Stout Bowman every investment client is first a financial planning client; it's important to go through that process before we make any professional investment recommendations. Therefore, we strive to make financial planning understandable and comfortable every step of the way. One way to do that is to provide our clients access to financial education resources. To that end, we have subscribed to educational websites to receive their news feeds and present a list of their latest ten articles on a page on this website. Currently, we offer