Tags: Congress | Dodd-Frank | financial planning | FINRA | SIFMA

FINRA is spending a lot more this year to explain its agenda to Congress, but that's nothing compared to what a few of the industry organizations regularly pay out to lobbyists.

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The Lobbying Disclosure Act database is a great way to figure out just how much money trade groups and other entities are throwing around on Capitol Hill.

For example, as widely reported, FINRA spent 42% more money on lobbyists last quarter than it did a year ago -- a cool $50,000 of it to pay Michael Oxley to plead its side of the financial reform story.

But even at a quarterly spend of $300,000, FINRA's first-quarter spend wasn't a record. That honor goes to the third quarter of 2009, when the debate over what would become Dodd-Frank was just getting going.

By comparison, SIFMA reliably spends $1.2 to $1.3 million every three months. Again, this has been ramping up over the last year or so, but is still 12% less than what the broker-heavy organization was spending last summer.

While the FPA spends a lot less, it generally coughs up $108,000 a quarter on lobbyists. NAPFA and the CFP Board do not, but it's conceivable that the FPA dollars do double duty for the Financial Planning Coalition that represents all three planning groups.

But all these lobbying budgets pale in the face of groups like the Financial Services Roundtable, which represents the biggest firms and has taken to allocating around $7.5 million a year to making friends in Washington.

That's more than JP Morgan or Wells Fargo -- and more than Morgan Stanley and Bank of America put together.

The College of Financial Planning is looking for explanations for a 12.7% dip in financial planners' earnings last year -- and they can't blame the recession.

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It turns out that planners' income peaked in 2009, as the markets were recovering and the recession was on the wane. This is a bombshell.

As it is, the average planner made $190,922 last year, which is even 2% under the $195,394 the College of Financial Planning says was the average back in 2008, when the markets were at their worst.

While the College says "researchers suggest that the lingering effects of the economic recession are likely to blame," there's not much detail, and in fact the word "recession" doesn't appear in the report itself.

Maybe the public's interest in getting a financial plan is a trailing indicator that peaks during and immediately after a recession, then bottoms out as the economy recovers.

And maybe the fee-only planning model is showing signs of strain as financial plans themselves become commodities or even loss leaders handed out free with a commission-backed purchase.

As the College says, 36% to 37% of advisors do not charge for single-topic or even comprehensive financial plans. Those who do charge for plans can charge as little as $100 per focus area.

These are real "race to the bottom" prices. It's the burden on more value-added planners to differentiate themselves from the commoditized one-plan-fits-all types, but that requires new ways to think about the business beyond the old "planning is best" mentality.

Interestingly enough, the College also found that fee-based or hybrid models are on the rise. A full 60% of advisors now say "fees and commissions" are their business, while fee-only planners now represent only 17% of the market.

Tags: CFP Board | fiduciaries | financial planning

The SEC may be signaling a cooling-down period over whether to impose a unified fiduciary standard on RIAs and brokers, but the financial planning groups are still beating the drum.

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The Financial Planning Commission -- NAPFA, the FPA and the CFP Board -- reached out to Congress to argue for "prompt action" on the standard. 

It's an interesting campaign, although it lays things on a tiny bit thick: Bernie Madoff, crimes against the elderly, and the recent decline in investor confidence are all invoked as the types of problem that the financial standard of care will theoretically cure. 

For all that, this kind of slowed-down, street-level discussion -- rooted in real people and their concerns -- is probably a better tack to take than all the pondering of business models put together.

Whether June or July -- when plans to unveil and enforce the new standard are currently set to begin -- would be too late for these suddenly deadline-driven groups remains to be seen.

Representatives of the National Association of Independent Broker-Dealers (NAIBD) are actively lobbying with the SIPC to lower their fees back to pre-Madoff levels.

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Otherwise, hardships could emerge for pay-for-service firms in particular, the group explains.

The goal is to return SIPC fees back to where they were before Bernie Madoff's crimes became known -- roughly 95% down from here for some firms.