Setting the Standard: LifeYield Wins 2019 Solutions Provider of the Year

We are proud to announce we received the top prize from the prestigious Money Management Institute (MMI)/Barron’s Industry Awards as “Solutions Provider of the Year” for LifeYield Income Advantage^®!

The winning solution

Income Advantage is the first and only solution that enables advisors and their clients to leverage sophisticated technology to create intelligent withdrawals from all their accumulated assets. Income Advantage looks across all household accounts and products—including taxable and tax-advantaged accounts as well as annuities—when a client seeks to make a withdrawal. The tool provides instructions on what to sell to generate tax-smart retirement income while minimizing asset allocation drift, improving asset location and creating opportunities to realize losses.

Independent research by Morningstar says investors can enjoy 52 basis points in improvement per year through tax-smart asset location; and, after-tax income can be improved by an additional 54 basis points per year. Ernst & Young found household-level management can result in up to a 33% boost in after-tax returns and income improvement over an investor’s lifetime.

Income Advantage makes these numbers real by providing advisors with specific instructions on how to make tax-smart withdrawals from multiple account registrations and income sources to benefit investors.

The challenge

Calculating withdrawal strategies by hand is time consuming and fraught with inaccuracies, especially when trying to provide more comprehensive and tax-smart recommendations than simple rules of thumb. One study of advisors found it can take up to three hours to attempt to calculate the optimal sequence of withdrawal from multiple accounts from a single household using a spreadsheet.

How we solved it

Income Advantage enables advisors to strategically identify from which accounts and in what sequence to draw assets across an investor’s entire portfolio in order to minimize taxes, maximize income and maintain a portfolio’s optimal tax efficiency. Additionally, it automatically considers investor objectives such as minimizing asset allocation drift, tax-loss harvesting and setting capital gain limits.

In just a few seconds, Income Advantage delivers an even higher level of accuracy and sophistication where advisors can tailor specific variables to every client. This includes age, tax status and adherence to a target asset allocation to provide truly personalized withdrawal recommendations.

For more info on the winners of the MMI/Barron’s Industry Awards winners, click here.