Hillary Clinton

It has certainly had the industry in a tizzy the last two years as its different versions have come in and out of comment period. The final rule, though over 2,500 pages long looks much less stark than the ones which were published as proposals.

So let's say I'm a financial adviser and you come by my office one day. You say you have some money to invest but haven't ever done it before.

I start asking you some questions.

Turns out you are 27 years old, married with no kids. Your parents just retired and sold their family home to move to a smaller place. They got lots more than they expected and surprised you with $ 10,000 check for your birthday with a note explaining that this is a one time gift since they were surprised by their house profits. You have a pretty good job paying $ 60,000 and your husband has a pretty good job paying $ 40,000. No kids yet but you'd like to in the future. You're lucky that you just paid off your student loans a year or two ago and have no credit card debt. You both have 401 (k's) at work, so here you are.

We talk about the difference between qualified and non-qualified money and you decide to keep it non-qualified but don't know what to invest it in?

I start giving you options.

1. We can leave the money in a money market account which is making .02 % interest which means in 30 years you will have made 1 % interest.

We can buy a 2 year cd for 1.2 %

3. We can buy a bond, either taxable, but since you guys make $ 100 k with few deductions, a municipal bond is probably better. For a muni bond we can make 3.8 % tax free a year for 25 years or 2.4 % for 8 years.

4 We can buy a mutual fund, or group of mutual funds, medium risk growth and income funds, higher risk growth funds, or wildly risky aggressive funds like tech funds or oil funds or emerging markets funds, or more likely a mixture of all of them.

5. We can buy a couple of stocks. Let's buy , just pick two companies, $ 5,000 of any of 1000 companies.

So the old rule was that the investments I recommended must be suitable to your age, wealth, income, family situation, risk tolerance and debt level.

The new rule is the investment I recommend must be in your best interest. So which of the investments 1-5 is the one that's in your best interest?

The one that costs the least? That would be the cd or the money market. The one that made the most over the last 20 years? That would be some tech stocks or some others we never heard of. Is it the one which causes the least taxes? That would be the muni bond. The one that makes the broker the least commission? That would be the money market.

The companies are trying to figure out how they will comply with the rule. Most of them are moving people toward managed money accounts which charges you a set annual fee, say 1.5 % a year regardless of which investments you choose. The biggest thing that change will do will make the broker richer and increase your costs dramatically. In this case though, too bad but $ 10,000 is below the minimum for that type of account.