James R. Allen, Jr.
Tools & Techniques of Charitable Planning

James R. Allen, Jr. is the Assistant Vice President for the Wealth Management Group of MetLife Investors. He entered the financial services industry in 1981, after graduating from California State University, Fullerton with a bachelor's degree in business communications. Mr. Allen has a broad range of experience in the financial services industry as an insurance agent, registered securities representative, ``fee only'' financial planner, and as Director of Advanced Marketing for a national life insurance marketing organization.

Mr. Allen holds a Masters Degree in Financial Services from the American College, and has earned the Certified Financial Planner (CFP), Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU) and Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC) designations.

Mr. Allen specializes in qualified plan distributions, charitable planning, and executive benefits. He writes frequently on these topics, and has twice been the recipient of the CLU Journal author award. Jim has been a featured speaker at national and regional broker/dealer and professional organization meetings throughout the country. He is a member of the Society of Financial Service Professionals, the Financial Planning Association, and the Hoag Hospital planned giving roundtable.

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J. Rey Belyeu, MBA, CFP^®, is President of Cornerstone Financial Planning, where he concentrates on providing comprehensive financial consulting for high net worth individuals and small- to medium-size businesses. He has over 25 years in the financial services industry and previously was a First Vice President of Private Banking for SunTrust Bank in Orlando, Florida.

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Peter Blackwell MBA, CEP, CFP^®, has served as the Academic Coordinator and Program Director of the CFP^® Education Program at the University of Central Florida (UCF) since 1997, after serving in the same capacity for four years at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL. He is widely recognized as one of the few educators in the nation with the ability to teach the entire CFP^® curriculum.

Blackwell has authored teaching materials, exam questions and cases, in addition to the supplemental teaching materials used in the UCF Financial Planning Certificate Program. Prior to becoming a full-time educator, he was a full-time CFP^® Practitioner and co-owner of Aegis Financial Advisors, Inc., a Registered Investment Advisor.

Formerly, Blackwell has served as a Presenter for the Disney Institute, Director of the Central Florida ICFP (now known as the Financial Planning Association) and Education liaison to the South Florida SFSP.

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Freelance magazine writer, book author, virtual office consultant and fee-only financial advisor, Joel P. Bruckenstein, CFP®, CMFC, CFS, is Senior Technology Editor at MorningstarAdvisor.com and Publisher of Virtual Office News. He frequently contributes articles to other financial planning publications including Bloomberg Wealth Manager, Inside Information, the Journal of Financial Planning, NAPFA Advisor, Financial Advisor and Horsesmouth.com. Mr. Bruckenstein’s practice management and technology book co-authored by David Drucker, Virtual-Office Tools for a High-Margin Practice: How Client-Centered Financial Advisors Can Cut Paperwork, Overhead, and Wasted Hours (Bloomberg Press, 2002) has garnered universal praise from industry experts.

In addition to his writing duties, Mr. Bruckenstein is a practicing financial planner. He is the President of Global Financial Advisors, Inc., a fee-only financial planning and investment advisory firm located in Miramar, Florida. Mr. Bruckenstein is a Certified Financial Planner™ (CFP) licensee, Chartered Mutual Fund Counselor (CMFC), and Certified Fund Specialist (CFS). He is a former President of the Financial Planning Association (FPA) of the Greater Hudson Valley and former Chair of the FPA Government Relations Tax Subcommittee. He is a member in good standing of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA), the premier organization of “fee-only” financial planners and the Financial Planning Association (FPA).  

Bruckenstein’ s expert opinions have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Business Week, Baltimore Sun, Washington Post, Investment Advisor magazine, Investment News, Gannett Newspapers, New York Daily News, Kiplinger’s Retirement Report, Journal of Financial Planning, and other publications.   

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Darlene K. Chandler
Risk Management for Financial Planners

Darlene K. Chandler is Director of Advanced Markets Administration Support at Farm Bureau Financial Services in West Des Moines, Iowa where she works with annuities and qualified retirement plans in addition to other advanced markets concepts.  Prior to joining Farm Bureau, Ms. Chandler was an editor with the National Underwriter Company contributing to Tax Facts on Insurance & Employee Benefits, the Advanced Sales Reference Service, and the TaxFacts newsletter.  She has written several other books on life insurance and advanced market topics, including The Annuity Handbook.  Additionally, for the past 15 years, Ms. Chandler has served as an associate editor for the Journal of Financial Service Professionals. An honors graduate of Ball State University in Indiana where she majored in English, Ms. Chandler received her law degree from the University of Cincinnati.  She holds the insurance industry designations of Chartered Life Underwriter(CLU) and Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC) and maintains a registered principal license. 

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Robert J. Doyle Jr. is an independent consultant, speaker, and writer who is associated with Surgent & Associates, the country’s leading purveyor of continuing professional education seminars and self-study materials for CPAs in the areas of taxation and financial planning. He has served as the subject matter expert and speaker for courses on “Everything You Need to Know About IRAs, Roth IRAs, SIMPLEs, and SEPs,” “MBA in a Day,” “Comprehensive Tools and Techniques of Investment Planning,” “What Every CPA Should Know About Retirement Plan Distributions,” “Advanced Strategies and Tactics of Wealth Accumulation and Retirement Planning,” “A Technical Guide to Using the Wall Street Journal,” “What Every CPA Should Know About Insurance Products and Planning,” Surgent’s Financial Planning Applications from A to Z,” and “Determining How Much Money You Need to Retire and Tax Ideas and Money Management in Retirement.”

Before associating with Surgent, Robert J. Doyle Jr. was Senior Vice President of Mandeville Financial Services, Inc. (MFS), a diversified insurance, employee benefits, and executive compensation consulting firm and life insurance agency. MFS was part of the Mandeville Group, which included operations in property and liability insurance, real estate sales, management, maintenance, and appraisals, and personal and commercial motor vehicle sales and leasing.

Mr. Doyle has served as Adjunct Professor of Taxation in the graduate tax program of Widener University Graduate School of Management where he has taught courses in taxation of investments and taxation for financial planning. Mr. Doyle also spent 15 years as Associate Professor of Finance and Insurance at The American College where he was responsible for designing and writing courses in retirement and wealth accumulation planning for the College’s CLU and ChFC professional designation programs. He did his graduate study as a Huebner Fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He holds the MA and MBA degrees from the Wharton School, a BA from Macalester College, is a CLU and aChartered Financial Consultant (ChFC).

Mr. Doyle is the author of a dozen books and monographs including Can You Afford to Retire?® (Probus Publishing Company) and co-author of The Tools and Techniques of Life Insurance Planning (The National Underwriter Company). He has published numerous articles in the academic, professional, trade, and lay press on insurance, investments, taxation, business valuation, executive compensation, qualified and nonqualified plans, wealth accumulation, and retirement planning, and is a frequent speaker to business organizations, professional associations, and civic groups. He has been a main platform speaker at both the National Forum of the American Society of CLU & ChFC and the Fifth Annual National Conference on Financial Planning sponsored by Commerce Clearing House and The American College. He has appeared as a financial planning expert on radio and television talk shows around the country and videotaped a series of financial planning segments sponsored by The American Society of CLU & ChFC that have aired on various financial news broadcasts.

Mr. Doyle is also the author of several financial and tax planning software programs including Brentmark’s IRS Factors Calculator®, a tool to compute the value of annuities, life estates, remainders, and terms of years for gift and estate tax purposes. He has served as a design consultant and financial planning expert in the development of several commercial software packages including NumberCruncher, Money® Magazine’s WealthBuilder®, and The Vanguard Group’s Retire®.

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David J. Drucker, MBA, CFP®, is the co-author of Virtual-Office Tools for a High-Margin Practice: How Client-Centered Financial Advisors Can Cut Paperwork, Overhead, and Wasted Hours (Bloomberg Press, 2002), and editor of the monthly newsletter Virtual Office News.  Drucker writes on practice management issues for other professional advisors as a contributor to Bloomberg Wealth Manager, Financial Planning, Research and Financial Advisor magazines, and as a monthly columnist for the MorningstarAdvisor.com website and the NAPFA Advisor. Drucker is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, serving on its finance committee, and a member of the AICPA’s Personal Financial Planning Section Editorial Advisory Board. He also serves on the Rydex Funds’ Skip Viragh Award Advisory Board.

In addition to his writing, Drucker is a fee-only financial advisor who started his own advisory firm in the Washington, D.C. area in 1981 after working as a financial analyst in government and private industry for over ten years. Drucker still manages the financial affairs of a limited number of high-net worth clients as President of Sunset Financial Management, Inc., an Albuquerque, New Mexico state-registered advisory firm.

A principal in the firm of Practice Merger Consultants, Ltd. (www.practicemergers.com), Drucker helps other advisors prepare their practices for merger and/or acquisition, including helping them identify and negotiate with potential, well-matched merger/acquisition candidates, assisting them in structuring merger/acquisition contract terms, and showing them how to use strategic technology to improve the profitability of their merged entity.

Drucker is a member of the Financial Planning Association (FPA) and the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA), and has served in a variety of NAPFA regional board member and conference planning roles during his many years of membership. He was named by the readers of Financial Planning magazine to its 2003 list of “Movers, Shakers & Decision-Makers,” and by Worth magazine as one of the “Best Financial Advisors” in the United States every year from the beginning of the Worth survey in 1994 through its 2001 listings, when Drucker cut back his financial planning activities. In May 1996, he was given the NAPFA Distinguished Service Award for his contributions to the fee-only financial planning community. He is the original author of INTEGRATE financial planning software used by him and other financial advisors nationwide, now developed and distributed by PlanWare, Inc.

Also a virtual office consultant, Drucker shows other financial advisors how to replace traditional, inefficient office systems with virtual office systems (outsourcing, paperless office technology, and other virtual tools) to improve profitability, and increase owner’s compensation and leisure time.

Drucker’s community service activities include his weekly volunteer work with the Animal Humane Association of New Mexico’s (AHANM) Junior Humane program for children ages eight through 18, for which he received distinguished service awards in 2001 and 2002. In 2003, he was recognized by Helping Everyone Reach Out in Community Service (H.E.R.O.I.C.S.) for his volunteer efforts with AHANM. Drucker is also a volunteer worker with “Project Second Chance,” a joint program of the Animal Humane Association and the New Mexico Youth Diagnostic and Development Center in which youth offenders are made responsible for the care of shelter dogs to promote the rehabilitation and growth of both species.

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John H. Fenton, Jr.
Tools & Techniques of Income Tax Planning

John H. Fenton, Jr., J.D., M.S.B.A., is a Staff Writer for the Professional Publishing Group of The National Underwriter Company.  He is a graduate of the Duke University School of Law, has a bachelor's degree from Harvard University, and has a master's degree in Taxation from the University of Cincinnati College of Business.  He is a past chair of the Elder Law Committee of the Cincinnati Bar Association, and has taught graduate estate and gift taxation courses at the University of Cincinnati College of Business.

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Randy Gardner

Tools & Techniques of Income Tax Planning

Mr. Randy Gardner, LLM, MBA, CPA, CFP®, is a Professor of Taxation and Co-Director of the Certificate In Financial Planning Program at the University of Missouri - Kansas City. Teams he has coached have finished in the top ten of the Arthur Andersen Tax Challenge for the past four years.  Coauthor of the book, 101 Tax Saving Ideas, Mr. Gardner is a highly rated discussion leader. In 1997, he was recognized as Educator of the Year by the Missouri Society of CPAs.

In addition to teaching, Mr. Gardner works as a tax and estate planning consultant for several accounting firms and over 200 individual clients. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree, cum laude, from Harvard University; his Juris Doctorate and Master of Business Administration degrees from the University of Kansas; and a Master of Law in Taxation from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A member of the AICPA and the Missouri Society of CPAs, Mr. Gardner serves on the Board of Directors of Consumer Credit Counseling Service, Inc. and lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife and four children.

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John E. Grable

The Case Approach to Financial Planning / The Process of Financial Planning

Professor John E. Grable, CFP®, RFC holds the Vera Mowery McAninch Professor of Human Development and Family Studies professorship at Kansas State University. He received his undergraduate degree in economics and business from the University of Nevada, an MBA from Clarkson University, and a Ph.D. from Virginia Tech. He is the Certified Financial Plannerä Board of Standards Inc. and International Association of Registered Financial Consultants registered undergraduate and graduate program director at Kansas State University. Teams of undergraduate financial planning students mentored by Dr. Grable won the National Collegiate Financial Planning Championship in 2000, 2003, 2005, and 2006. Dr. Grable also serves as the Director of The Institute of Personal Financial Planning at K-State.

Prior to entering the academic profession he worked as a pension/benefits administrator and later as a Registered Investment Advisor in an asset management firm. Dr. Grable served as the founding editor for the Journal of Personal Finance, a rigorous peer-reviewed research journal. His research interests include financial risk-tolerance assessment, financial planning help-seeking behavior, and financial wellness assessment. He has been the recipient of several research and publication awards and grants, and is active in promoting the link between research and financial planning practice where he has published more than 60 refereed papers. Dr. Grable has served on the Board of Directors of the International Association of Registered Financial Consultants (IARFC), as Treasurer and President-elect for the American Council on Consumer Interests (ACCI), and on the Research Advisory Council of the Take Charge America Institute (TCAI) for Consumer Education and Research at the University of Arizona. In 2004 he won the prestigious Cato Award for Distinguished Journalism in the Field of Financial Services, and in 2006 he was honored with the IARFC Founders Award. In 2007 Dr. Grable was awarded the Dawley-Scholer Award for Faculty Excellence in Student Development at K-State.

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