The Advice Gap Is a Class Problem. And I’m Done Pretending Otherwise.

I posted something on LinkedIn this week that I suspect will ruffle a few feathers. I called out the financial planning industry for something most of us inside it know is true but rarely say out loud: that we have built a system that serves people who already have money, and quietly prices out everyone else.

I’m curious what the comments will look like. Watch this space.

But LinkedIn is an industry conversation. This is a different one. This one is for you.

What nobody tells you about financial advice

Here’s the thing the industry doesn’t want to admit: the people who would benefit most from a good financial adviser are the people least likely to ever sit down with one.

Not because they don’t care about their future. Not because they’re irresponsible or disengaged. But because somewhere along the way, financial advice became coded as something for people with investment portfolios and holiday houses. Something you graduate into, once you’ve already made it.

That coding is wrong. And it costs people, not just money, but something harder to quantify.

It costs them dignity.

The ability to retire without panic. To not lie awake at 63 wondering if you’ll outlive your savings. To not feel like a comfortable retirement is something that happens to other kinds of people, in other kinds of suburbs, with other kinds of incomes.

The system is genuinely complicated. You’re not imagining it.

If you’ve ever tried to understand your superannuation and felt like you were reading a different language, that’s not a reflection of your intelligence. It’s a reflection of the system.

Concessional contributions. Non-concessional contributions. The transfer balance cap. The total super balance threshold and how it affects what you can put in. The bring-forward rule. The work test. The downsizer contribution. Co-contributions. The low income super tax offset.

And underneath all of that: the Age Pension, with its own assets test, its own income test, its own rules about what counts as an asset and what doesn’t, and the way it interacts with every decision you make about your super.

This is the system every working Australian is expected to navigate. Usually alone.

For someone on a modest income, getting this wrong doesn’t just mean a suboptimal outcome. It can mean tens of thousands of dollars less in retirement. It can mean the difference between having enough and not having enough. Between independence and anxiety.

A single piece of well-timed advice, a contribution strategy in your early 50s, a Centrelink optimisation before you retire, knowing how to structure your assets before you apply for the pension, can be worth more to someone with a $150,000 super balance than a comprehensive investment strategy is to someone with $1.5 million.

The benefit of advice genuinely scales inversely with income. The person with less has more to gain.

So why doesn’t the industry serve them?

Honestly? Because the fee model rewards assets under management. The more money a client has, the more revenue a practice generates. It’s not malicious. It’s just incentives doing what incentives do.

The result is a profession that has drifted, over decades, toward the wealthy end of the population. Minimum portfolio thresholds. Advice fees that start at $3,500 and climb quickly. A compliance environment so heavy that advisers spend as much time on paperwork as they do with clients, making lower-value engagements commercially unviable before they even begin.

And so the gap widens.

What I think needs to change

I called on two groups publicly this week. I’ll say the same here.

The government needs to stop treating advice reform as an industry problem and start treating it as a social equity problem. Fund community-based advice. Fix the tax deductibility rules. Make it possible for an adviser to answer one specific question for a client without it triggering a $5,000 compliance exercise. And mandate that super funds, which have a relationship with every single working Australian, provide genuine personal advice to members who need it, not calculators, not webinars, actual advice.

The insurance industry needs to do better too. People in lower-income brackets are often significantly underinsured or paying for cover they can’t claim on, not because they chose badly, but because they never had anyone in their corner to help them choose well.

These are solvable problems. The will is what’s missing.

The business case nobody talks about

Here’s something I’ve learned from running a practice that deliberately keeps its entry point low: serving people who don’t have a lot of money is actually a genuinely good business model, if you think in decades rather than quarters.

People who feel seen don’t leave. They refer their friends and family. They come back at every major life event. And they grow, slowly, steadily, because good advice compounded over time does exactly what it promises to do.

The client who walks in at 32, earning $55,000, trying to figure out whether they should consolidate their super accounts, is, with consistent support, a very different person financially at 52. That relationship has value, human value and commercial value, that a short-term revenue model completely misses.

The industry has confused revenue per client with business value. They are not the same thing.

A final word

I don’t write this as someone outside the industry looking in. I’m in it. I’ve built a practice inside it that tries to do things differently, and I know how hard it is to push against structures that weren’t designed with equity in mind.

But I also know that the median Australian has never spoken to a financial adviser. Doesn’t understand their super. And will retire with less than they need, not because they didn’t work hard enough, but because nobody was in their corner when it mattered.

That’s not inevitable. It’s a choice we keep making by default.

And I think it’s time we made a different one.

Have thoughts on this? I’d love to hear them, whether you’re a client, someone thinking about getting advice for the first time, or someone who’s always assumed it wasn’t for people like them. It is. Or at least, it should be.