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Truly Evaluate Your Business Year

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Evaluating Your Year Goes Beyond Production At the end of the calendar year, many advisors find themselves thinking about how well they did during the year and what they can do better in the next. However, advisors and agents often evaluate their year from one single metric: production. It’s the only thing that matters, right? While production can be an …

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4 Ways Giving Back Pays Dividends for Brokers

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What are your business goals for 2015? I hope at least one involves giving back to your community. Deepening your involvement in a community-based charitable organization or not-for-profit can help satisfy your employees’ desire to make a difference while also supporting a good cause and firmly establishing your business and its identity. I’ve seen it with the top brokers we …

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Health insurance confusion likely for many filing taxes

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By Pamela Yip, February 22, 2015 Taxpayers are just starting to learn the complex connection between the Affordable Care Act and taxes. For the first time, taxpayers will have to state whether they had health insurance through an employer, a health insurance exchange or a private insurance policy. If they didn’t, they could face a tax penalty. “I don’t think …

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Self-Marketing: The Salesperson’s Other Job

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Even highly experienced and successful salespeople can have a blind spot. They can be so intent on what they want to accomplish that it’s easy to ignore how others view them. And it isn’t always complimentary. “Oh, don’t take Sally seriously. Just remember that she’s in sales.” In fact, salespeople find themselves on the bottom rung of the public’s trust …

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5 Musts for a Successful Financial Web Site

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It’s an amazing feeling when someone contacts your business through the company Web site and is completely sold during the telephone follow-up. Unfortunately, countless professionals end up losing business because their Web site is poorly designed and does not utilize an efficient process for generating and capturing leads. I have made a living selling life insurance through my own Web …

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Enrollment Period for Health Insurance Ends; Now the Tax Penalties Start

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By Margot Sanger-Katz, February 17, 2015 The Affordable Care Act’s second open enrollment period ended on Sunday. Well, almost. Some computer problems over the weekend have led the administration to give a one-week extension to people who tried and failed to sign up. But its tax penalty season has just begun. For people who didn’t sign up for coverage last …

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Millions in health coverage gap seek to avoid tax penalty

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By Emily Schmall, February 14, 2015 Stephanie Daugherty earns too much from her part-time job at a doctor’s office to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to comfortably afford one of the health plans for sale through the federally-run insurance exchange that Texas and many states use. So the 26-year-old nursing student and mother paid a $180 tax penalty — …

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Connecting the Dots

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My teenage children went on their first scavenger hunt in December.  As they foraged around town collecting various trinkets, they were trying to make sense of all the cryptic messages within each new instruction before the other competing teams.   When all the trinkets were collected, they were finally able to piece together the final clue that led them to the …

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Burn Your Boat!

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I believe that the great NFL Hall of Fame coach, Vince Lombardi, had it right when he said, “The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.” Do you agree with Coach Lombardi, or are you the type of person who has difficulty staying focused and keeping …

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Changes to Military Retirement Benefits in the Works

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By Bridget Naso, January 28th, 2015 For the first time in a quarter century, the military is likely changing retirement benefits, and new recommendations are going to Congress. Congress tasked the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission to take a look at military benefits two years ago because they felt the government couldn’t sustain the costs. Since then, the group …

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