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This is a field guide for avoiding the pitfalls that cause families to overpay, waste time, or lose money due to estate transitions. If you are dealing with a family member’s house full of possessions when age, personal or medical reasons dictate that it is time to sell a primary or vacation home, then these tips will help you simplify the pr...

From the intense wildfire activity in 2017, lessons were learned on the value of smart landscaping. Applying those lessons and other tips, you can enhance your home's resiliency and keep your family safe.

Each decade of life brings unique challenges and opportunities, financial and otherwise. Focusing on each stage from the 40s to the 70s, we highlight the planning issues that may be ripe for your consideration, including revisiting your estate plan, downsizing your home, and constructing your general retirement plan.

When it comes to protecting digital assets, the users can end up being the biggest flaw in your cybersecurity armor. Mistakes like creating easy-to-guess passwords, not encrypting important data, or sending passwords over email can make a hacker’s job easy. To help strengthen your cybersecurity armor and stay ahead of the hackers, here are so...

As the office of the controller becomes ever more strategic—creating higher levels of financial visibility to help drive growth and profitability—the financial organization’s relationship to the controller role must evolve as well. Specifically, today’s CFO needs to work closely with the controller to ensure that, one, the o...

Both New York State and New York City have recently passed a series of laws that significantly increased the protections against sexual harassment in the workplace. These laws outline additional and specific requirements—including the adoption of anti-sexual harassment policies and training—that employers must comply with over the next ...

When surveying the top causes of home damage that might lead to an insurance claim, water damage is the second highest frequency claim category (after wind and hail). With concerted and targeted educational efforts, water loss prevention measures can become more common place and damage can be prevented.

Before executing a commercial property lease or sales contract, the parties may prepare a letter of intent or an agreement in principle. The letter of intent or a similar document (the “LOIs”) generally signals that the parties have agreed on the outline of a deal, but not on all of its provisions or details. While LOIs can serve differ...

It’s tempting to imagine the computer systems as airtight vaults, impenetrable and immune to cyberattacks. But this would be a risky move. In reality, IT infrastructure is more like a porous sponge with gaping holes where data can leak when things don’t go according to plan: a staff member might lose a laptop, a system might experience ...

Wealth attracts attention and an increase in personal risk, including the risk of being kidnapped. Why then is there resistance to security among wealthy individuals and families, whether they come from security-savvy hedge fund managers or young parents of families with extensive financial holdings intent upon raising their children “like ot...

Terrorism can take many shapes and involve a vast range of political or ideological agendas. But there are common threads linking all acts of terror: they involve the use of threat of violence, they are random—potentially occurring in any country, against any target, at any time—and their ultimate goal is to generate fear. As terror tac...

Strong cybersecurity for protecting sensitive client data is a critical capability for any Registered Investment Advisor firm. In 2013, Hardy Reed—one of the first firms to earn the Center for Fiduciary Excellence certification—considered cloud services as an option for its IT needs. They wanted to look at alternate options to replacing...

Cybercriminals targets the financial industry 300 times more frequently than any other industry, resulting in mega breaches and millions of records stolen through hacktivism, malware, social engineering, phishing, and other applications. The harsh consequences of remaining vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches are costly, and the number one threat t...

An unprecedented cyber theft transpired earlier this year, one as daring as it is revelatory. When unknown thieves siphoned $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank, by using the SWIFT system to trick the U.S. Federal Reserve into turning over the money, the criminals showed that hackers can exploit virtually every aspect of the global financia...

During the past year, financial institutions of all kinds have experienced repercussions from cybersecurity gaps. The alarming truth is that many broker-dealers have failed to stay up to date with cybersecurity controls and must swiftly get in compliance with all computer-related rules that the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) enforc...