Personal Financial Planning Committee

COMMITTEE ACTION PLAN

About the Personal Financial Planning Committee

The Personal Financial Planning (PFP) Committee provides the leadership role in casting the CPA as the premier and "trusted" provider of PFP to both the public and NYCPA members through community communications and educational programming.

What we do:

Strategic Objectives

• Enhance the CPA's ability to provide effective financial planning services by providing guidance:
  • in leveraging existing CPA knowledge skills and abilities in relation to individual and business owning clients
  • to increase competency in the PFP discipline.
  • in building and managing ethical and economically successful financial planning practices
• Provide leadership within the PFP profession with regards to competency, ethics and innovation; and actively support the American Institute of CPA's Personal Financial Specialist (PFS) specialty designation.
• Continuously improve the quality and delivery of the financial planning information and services to the public.
• Help the media understand the unique traits that a CPA brings to the field of personal financial planning.
• Provide support to the Society in legislative and regulatory matters pertaining to personal financial planning and related practice, as well as the promotion of the PFS designation.

Tactics:

• Provide networking opportunities for members to share knowledge and insights of general practices related to financial planning. This involves individuals with many years of PFP experience as well as those CPAs that are new to PFP or have limited PFP experience.
• Provide cutting-edge seminars/workshops to increase CPA practitioners' technical capabilities.
• Provide resources to assist with continuing education and licensing requirements.
• Work with the accounting groups (e.g. AICPA and other State Societies) and non- accounting groups (e.g. other PFP organizations, bankers and lawyers) to understand developments in the personal financial planning environment.
• Prepare a regular PFP column for The CPA Journal
• Identify newsworthy issues to the NYCPA's public relations staff and serve as a resource to them for PFP related matters.

Committee meetings are held approximately nine times during the year. At these meetings, members exchange ideas about current personal financial planning (PFP) issues that they are facing. Some of these issues have been of a technical nature and some have been concerned with licensing and ethical matters. Members, volunteering as liaisons, are in contact with their colleagues in the other State Society and at the AICPA and exchange information with these organizations.

Members of the committee have been asked to speak at various chapter activities. Members are also called upon by the Press to provide comments about related PFP topics. Each committee meeting is available by telephone and includes web site access enabling offsite participant to fully interact with the meeting.

Most committee meeting conclude with an hour of CPE. The CPE will include topics related to all areas of financial planning.

Who should join:

CPAs who provide PFP services to their clients should consider joining this committee because they can keep up with current developments in the field and learn how their colleagues treat certain matters. Also, CPAs who are considering developing a PFP practice and/or an investment advisory practice should consider joining this committee so that they can meet others whom have experienced these issues before.

Being a member of the PFP committee provides a professional with a forum to exchange ideas and learn more about this topic. It is an impressive credential to mention to a client. There is an opportunity for exposure to the public through written articles, speaking at conferences and press interviews.