Earlier quoted context omitted.
What an exciting life you got there! Enjoy your sad and lonely retirement
I guess dying destitute because you saved nothing is more romantic?
The romance of Dickens gets less appealing with wisdom.
AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions
301–310 of 443 posts
Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
An advisor gives you emotional support and helps you not fuck it up.
The problem with giving financial advice to people is that many struggle to pay their rent. Telling them to invest in index funds from an ivory tower is laughably misguided of the realistic situation they live in. After they pay their rent and feed themselves, they may have a little left over which they will simply spend on basic pleasures, or simply rack up debt to get by. The financial advice ignores the fact that…
>The problem with giving financial advice to people is that many struggle to pay their rent.
If you're struggling to pay rent... Your quality of life is too high and you need to reduce it.
Straight up.
This isn't a wealth inequality issue, it's a "you're overspending" issue.
Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the common fallacy of “AI is terrible in my own field of which I have deep knowledge, but AI is totally fine in this other field of which I only have cursory knowledge.” Even ignoring all other aspects of financial advice and only focus on saving for retirement, there are so many topics involved like asset allocation glide paths, tax advantaged accounts, safe withdrawal rate, sequence of return risk, etc etc.…
LLMs are mediocre for every topic that people talk about all the time. When it's software development, it just happens that your mediocre code is incredibly bad. When it's financial advice or diet, it just happens that you mediocre advice is either the correct "do the hard thing, there is no magic" one or some crazy shit that will ruin your life.
One of the most hilarious things coming out of this community, easily disproved, is how high it thinks the code quality of the average developer is.
If AI writes code at the 51st percentile it's raising the bar.
Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, that's the 'what', but not the 'how'. > Prompt: but I don't have enough money to save, I can barely make ends meet. > AI: I see the problem now---If you don't have enough money to save, and reducing your expenses is not an option, then the answer is clear: make more money.
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.
Because at a certain point, "spend below your means, save as much as you can" is the financial advice most people are unable to follow, yet determines 90% of the outcome.
Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ad…
Sometimes I wonder if some folks have even used AI. Maybe this is your chance: AI will easily take you down a rabbit hole of financial advice beyond your ability to understand it, including up to date research. Far beyond what 99% of people would find useful or interesting.
Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s the one piece of advice everyone sells but you think should be free?
If you’re a layman investor just dump all of your shit in index funds. Even if you’re smart and sophisticated, you’re still competing against the massive amount of fraudulent insider trading happening right now with zero enforcement and are trading at a disadvantage as a result
I think you're missing the point why younger people do that. Real wages have been deteriorating over the years. It's much more difficult to afford a house today than it was 50 years ago. People are perfectly aware that investing into index funds is the "correct" approach, however it does not solve anything for them. They're desperate and for them _to gamble_ seems like the only way to become decently rich allowing to escape the rats race, otherwise there is not much to live for, just slaving their days away. That's exactly what led to the recent situation of en masse margin calls in Korea.
Here in Europe I too have been working for years and I just don't feel like I'm earning actual money. Most of my income is eaten away by taxes and very basic living expenses. ETFs won't compound for me much if there is not a lot invested into them in the first place. This is exactly what led me to despite high electricity costs to buy 2x open source bitcoin lottery miners (NerdQaxe++) and just hope for the best.
Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions
#307AI seems to struggle most when it has to make decisions with lots of trade-offs, especially where the context or implications of various decisions are nested, which is presumably why it struggles to write full software systems that are well-designed. By comparison, financial advice is pretty simple, and there is a universally agreed-upon approach that most people should follow to maximize long-term financial health.
> By comparison, financial advice is pretty simple, and there is a universally agreed-upon approach that most people should follow to maximize long-term financial health. What will AI do when those rules, which it's trained on their repetition so much, don't apply anymore? ~8% annual stock gains for the next 40 years may not hold and an 80/20 stock/bond ratio may not be as wise in upcoming decades
Sound financial advice is not "go all in on SP500".
Albeit that's more sensible than what the overwhelming majority of retail investors do.
Sound financial advice takes into account the financial situation, time spans, goals, risk adversity, etc.
Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions
#308AI seems to struggle most when it has to make decisions with lots of trade-offs, especially where the context or implications of various decisions are nested, which is presumably why it struggles to write full software systems that are well-designed. By comparison, financial advice is pretty simple, and there is a universally agreed-upon approach that most people should follow to maximize long-term financial health.
There is a universally agreed-upon approach, but is it actually correct? Usually, investing in the thing that people have invested in for the last 20 years is a good way to buy at the top.
Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions
#309Earlier 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…
And similar to the low quality of developers... If you are even thinking about writing clean and testable code, having clearly defined API boundaries, and keeping a repeatable build process, you are probably already significantly above average. If you are even trying to save, invest diversified, and manage risk as you age... you're probably doing better than like 80% of your peers financially
Uncle Bob is a worse programmer than Casey Muratori, and he does nothing but think about clean code.
Re: AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
> By comparison, financial advice is pretty simple, and there is a universally agreed-upon approach that most people should follow to maximize long-term financial health. What will AI do when those rules, which it's trained on their repetition so much, don't apply anymore? ~8% annual stock gains for the next 40 years may not hold and an 80/20 stock/bond ratio may not be as wise in upcoming decades
Investing and trading is a dynamic game. If everyone has the edge of certain portfolio to out perform the average, then no one has the edge. Similarly AI is not going to solve that. Because everyone would end up with similar AI edge until no one has the edge. People should start with simple universal rules: Stay invested. Buy low cost diversified etf fund. Favor long term investment instead of trading. Learn somethin…
When everyone is crowding into one investment that investment tends to get irrationally over-saturated. With the current makeup of the S&P500 we can predict it will dramatically crash in real value in the next five years.