Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mitsloan.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 443 posts

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

#201

Post by JKCalhoun »

eks391 wrote: post #138
MBCook wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3% is amazingly good. It’s not hard to beat that, but a savings account at a common bank can easily be below 0.05%. I looked up BoA. 0.04%.

3% is becoming more common as of the last few years, at least in the US. I know several banks off the top of my head that offer 3.5% or higher (and more if you are a new customer) for their savings accounts. I would persuade people who use banks that haven't moved on from near-zero APY to move on themselves.

FWIW, savings rates have been coming down.

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

#204

Post by jandrewrogers »

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.

Federal Reserve studies indicate that 10-15% of the US population can’t save money due to fundamental financial realities. That is, the necessary expenses of an ordinary lifestyle consumes all of their income. That is tens of millions of people.

There is another ~30% that expand their lifestyle to consume all available income. Not saving is a choice for this part of the population.

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

#205

Post by navigate8310 »

Mikejames wrote: post #13

i copied the page into claude and added i want to create a Financial advisor agent.md / i can use for a system prompt in a claude project or as a a agent in a wider financial research workflow by looking at this paper and access to the internet identify ways to address the points that are identified where ai is good and bad at and improve on those areas and ultimately provide a comprehensive financial advisor agent i…

How did it go?

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

#206

Post by kumarvvr »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #98

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 car…

The last bit of the last bit of what you said is what Warren Buffett has been saying for decades.

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

#208

Post by marcosdumay »

kccqzy wrote: post #70
jamestimmins wrote: post #19

AI 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.

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.

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

#209

Post by what »

lostaccount wrote: post #112
bradfa wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with bank accounts for your kids? Sorry, this one doesn’t seem to fit with your other examples.

Not OP, but I think they are referring to the fact that you can get tax advantaged accounts instead of a standard savings account. Not to mention the interest rate on those accounts is basically a rounding error.

A child can not get a tax advantaged account. You need earned income to contribute to those.
Post reply on HN