Incentives and mandates: small-business owners, wealth planners weigh Obama's proposals.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: Barack Obama

From the investor's standpoint, the Obama administration's tweaks, plans and proposals for changes to wealth management/financial planning/savings might seem a tad tepid.

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From the entrepreneur's point of view, the potential voluntary measures also appear non-dramatic. The administration's proposed mandates, however, seem designed to make small businesspeople mad, as in angry, and also mad, as in crazed.

Over here, we have a background of a still-troubled financial sector, crumbled 401 (k)s and IRAs, rising unemployment, the looming disintegration of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and an on-the-books federal deficit the size of the Orion Nebula.

Over there, we have a foreground of a few likely additions to the financial planning repertoire: giving businesses the option of making 401 (k) contributions an opt-out process rather than an opt-in, permitting workers to toss leftover vacation and sick time into the pension pot; and, most lukewarm of all, you can have your tax refund come back to you as a government savings bond.

Plus a couple of more serious options under congressional consideration, which we'll get to in a moment.

"It's all kind of ho-hum," says Wayne Farlow, founder of Westminster-based Financial Abundance LLC and a ColoradoBiz columnist. "Frankly I don't find it all to be very exciting, but it's out there."

Savings bonds? "It's for people who are really scared or people who have a really hard time saving. Nothing to write home about," Farlow says.

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The vacation- and sick-time idea, so far also an option for businesses, obviously would sound brilliant to an employee, and just as clearly could seem exorbitantly expensive to some employers.

"If it's such a good idea and would really help the employee, then a group of businesses could just form an alliance to enact that voluntarily in their own businesses and theoretically they could attract the best employees," says Jeff Nabers, CEO of the Denver-based Nabers Group. "In reality, it's probably a mediocre idea at best, and that's why it hasn't happened."

Back to automatic opt-in, which has been studied and discussed for a long time, and which has bipartisan support in Washington.

The idea seems sensible, and actually had been proposed by the Bush Administration, Under it, employees would have 90 days to tell their bosses they don't want to participate in the company 401(k) plan. If they don't, they could still withdraw from the...