Income Tax Disconnect

I was not planning to post on my blog while traveling today. However, over the past several days I have watched an interesting set of income tax discussions which seem to show a real disconnect between a large portion of our population and financial advisors. So, here is my first Blackberry authored post. Please pardon any errors.

Last week a statistic hit my Twitter timeline that 47% of Americans pay no income tax (see here: http://tinyurl.com/y8u53tb) accompanied by various opinions by financial advisors about this fact. Oddly, around the same time a Forbes article about how to plan for upcoming tax hikes was being discussed by financial advisors on Twitter (see here: http://bit.ly/aU6zaA). This struck me as an unfortunate disconnect and a clear example of how a huge portion of the population is simply ignored by so many financial advisors. Nearly half the population has little tax planning to be concerned with, yet financial advisors tweet and retweet these tax planning tips in a spirited manner.

To be fair, many clients of financial advisors do expect a high degree of tax planning because these clients do fall into the group of highly taxed individuals. Therefore this article made sense to share. But that is my point. Who is providing financial advice to the rest of our population? Where do most Americans turn to for good, objective, low conflict financial advice? What can be done to better serve people who do not pay income taxes (or pay income taxes at a low rate?)

The arguments for why this population is not well served are many, very reasonable and the subject of a future post. Somehow, it strikes me, "the rest" could use the help of good financial advisors.