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AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions

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Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions

#91

Post by malfist »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #64
mjr00 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock/bond ratios are way too advanced for what's qualifying as good advice here: > AI consistently advised people to save during their working years, draw down savings in retirement, invest heavily in diversified stock funds, and reduce stock exposure after age 45. This is analogous to saying to an aspiring software developer, "You should write clean and testable code, have clearly defined API boundaries, and a repe…

It's not helpful to the kind of person whose recreational weekend reading includes MIT Sloan analyses. Most Americans don't have what I suspect you'd consider a basic level of financial literacy ( https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/your-money/americans-fina... ), and do need to be informed about things like the compounding effect of savings or the benefit of diversification.

Its also not helpful to the person who doesn't. How much to save, when to save, how to diversify, what rate of exposure to equities is too much, how much to with draw in retirement? And thats just questions on the answer it gave. But what about if I have a loan bearing interest? What about if I'm self employed? What if my appetite for risk is less, greater? What if I want to retire early?

It gave vague unspecified advice that isn't actionable and didn't provide any weight to tradeoffs.

Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions

#92

Post by singpolyma3 »

sheepolog wrote: post #77
anigbrowl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you're being downvoted here. A huge amount of 'financial advice' boils down to 'stop being poor,' which is to say it's about what to do with your economic surplus rather than what to do if you don't have one and aren't long on avocado toast.

I didn't downvote them, but I am genuinely curious to hear from people who "can't save money", and try to understand why that's the case. My assumption is that a large percent of them are spending way more than they need to, but that could easily be an incorrect stereotype.

It's actually almost certainly true just on the basis of basic numbers. Many people who are really actually quite poor (making say under $35k CAD annually for a family of 5) manage to make ends meet and even save a little. So if you make more than this but can't save any it's because you're spending on things they are not and which are therefore nonessential.

Now maybe restaurant food, name brand groceries, driving two SUVs, vacations, etc etc whatever it is for a given person are seen as essential. That's how lifestyle works after all and we often can't imagine our lives without it. So I'm not saying it's a "simple" matter of just spend less because it's often not very simple feeling. But from a numbers PoV it is possible for most people who otherwise see themselves as struggling in theory.

Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions

#93

Post by zuzululu »

note this is financial advice not a crystal ball which some of you are perceiving this as. there's just no way to prompt your way into trading or any type of imperfect information situations where there is no nash equilibrium

we might get there eventually but not with LLMs no matter how much RL or "skin in the game" you throw at it.

Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions

#94

Post by lazyasciiart »

sheepolog wrote: post #77
anigbrowl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you're being downvoted here. A huge amount of 'financial advice' boils down to 'stop being poor,' which is to say it's about what to do with your economic surplus rather than what to do if you don't have one and aren't long on avocado toast.

I didn't downvote them, but I am genuinely curious to hear from people who "can't save money", and try to understand why that's the case. My assumption is that a large percent of them are spending way more than they need to, but that could easily be an incorrect stereotype.

Are you excluding all the people with disabilities or chronic illnesses or supporting children or parents or other dependents with disabilities?

Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions

#95

Post by singpolyma3 »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #65
networkOne wrote: post #25

Yes, financial planners will be one of the first industries to totally revamp itself because of AI. $2,000 for some SoA which is 99% boiler-plate? No thanks. I spent years in this industry, and the advice from these 'experts' is demonstrably poor.

Lol. You don't even need AI for that 99% boiler plate. Save 6-12 months of expenses in cash, DCA the rest into total market stock index funds. But people still pay expensive advisors to get worse results.

I mean, never DCA anything that's terrible advice. But still better than what most people do.

Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions

#96

Post by willio58 »

I've been building a smart personal finance app with AI integration and I've heard great feedback from my first users. I had a friend ask me a financial advice question the other day and I directed him to use the chat interface in the app, it gave him a better answer than I could and gave it to him with context of all of his financials. This stuff is the future of personal finance.

Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions

#97

Post by eqmvii »

willio58 wrote: post #96

I've been building a smart personal finance app with AI integration and I've heard great feedback from my first users. I had a friend ask me a financial advice question the other day and I directed him to use the chat interface in the app, it gave him a better answer than I could and gave it to him with context of all of his financials. This stuff is the future of personal finance.

There's a huge market right now for "AI product, without much different than Gemini/Claude/GPT do out of the box, but from somebody you actually trust"

Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions

#98

Post by AussieWog93 »

People in this thread are massively underestimating the level of financial illiteracy in the general population.

We've had multiple people try to convince us to set up bank accounts for our kids, so that they could accumulate interest over 18 years.

More that tried to convince me to gamble on random pump and dump shitcoins.

More still that talked about "investing" in random collectables like Funko Pops or Pokemon cards - they're not a bubble, Logan Paul told me so!

You could replace the AI with a piece of paper that says "set aside 10% of your income and invest it in an ETF" and it would outperform the financial "advice" that people receive on a daily basis.

Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions

#99

Post by yodsanklai »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #65
networkOne wrote: post #25

Yes, financial planners will be one of the first industries to totally revamp itself because of AI. $2,000 for some SoA which is 99% boiler-plate? No thanks. I spent years in this industry, and the advice from these 'experts' is demonstrably poor.

Lol. You don't even need AI for that 99% boiler plate. Save 6-12 months of expenses in cash, DCA the rest into total market stock index funds. But people still pay expensive advisors to get worse results.

It's more complicated than that. You probably don't want all your equity in stock, unless you're young and you're confident you can keep your strategy when the AI bubble crashes. And what do you do with the part that isn't in stock? bonds? what are they? which ones to buy? Even the 6-12 months of expenses in cash doesn't apply to all people.

That being said, I agree with the bad and expensive advisors, but I think financial planning is hard, and you really need to educate yourself.

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