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

The corporate players in the space can jump through the security hoops and integrate with Plaid, but if I wanted to automatically pull my own data into the single-user budgeting tool I host entirely on my own network I need to pass the same security checks as a full-on fintech startup.

Currently I enter transactions manually, but manually reviewing multiple credit card and bank statements is a chore and I don't keep up with it as much as I should. To make things worse, since I ideally want a live view of my budget and not a post-statement-issuance monthly review, I'm constantly checking over transactions I've already entered when their ordering changes in my credit card company's app.

The closest thing to a potential solution involves extracting my Monarch Money session key from my browser and pulling data from their GraphQL endpoints with the help of an unofficial Python SDK. That doesn't solve the "relying on a subscription service" problem, but it would at least let me get my data into the custom budgeting tool I built that actually meets my needs.

maybe they can grow larger brains and an extra hand so they can hold 3 calculators at once?

Backdoor Roth IRAs involve making a traditional IRA contribution and not taking the deduction at tax filing time (because you can't), but then rolling over (not recharacterizing, that's something else) the traditional IRA contribution into a Roth IRA. It's completely tax free, assuming you have a $0 traditional IRA balance once the rollover is complete. The usual way to accomplish this is to roll all traditional deductible IRA balances into a traditional 401k first.

What you're kind of thinking of, but also not quite right, is called a 'mega backdoor Roth', which involves contributing to a 401k via a non-deductible contribution (which is not part of 24.5k/yr limit), then immediately rolling it over into a Roth 401k. It has to be allowed by the plan, but some plans even offer to do the rollovers for you automatically.

The Mega Backdoor basically lets you get an extra ~40k/yr of Roth contributions, if you can afford it.

True.

But does that make any economic sense? If you're so rich that it doesn't matter, sure why not.

But for most people leasing is a terrible economic decision. If money matters, never lease. If your wealth is past the point where money matters, go for it.

> As someone who drives a ten-year-old car that probably has several good years left

I'd say several decades at least. My new car is 13 years old, which I consider barely broken in.

Second oldest is 22 years old, doing great. My other cars are much older, in their third and fourth decades.

Barring a crash, older cars can go on for a very long time. Newer cars built these days have a very limited lifetime ahead of them, as the electronics will be unrepairable in short order.

That is very true and a trap that is important to be aware of. Anyone who started investing after ~2010 has only ever experience a bull market, so expect severe pain at some point. It doesn't go up forever.

I'm old enough that my investing history inclused the dot.com implosion that wiped out nearly all of everything, and also the financial crisis of 2008. It remains true that investing in the winning companies is by far the best return by orders of magnitude.