I gave up on offering people financial advice a long time ago. I also gave up on listening to financial advice from others a long time ago too. What do these two things have in common?
The common denominator between the two things is financial intimacy.
In order to truly help someone with financial advice, you need a high level of financial intimacy. What does that mean?
You need to know someone’s incomes, debts, goals, behaviors, risk tolerances, assets, liabilities, tax bracket, age, timeline, and current and future states of things like health, retirement, kids, etc.
In order to receive accurate and helpful financial advice from someone they would need to know the same list of information otherwise the advice will have little value.
I think this is why most personal finance advice boils down to simple cliches like, “spend less than you earn” or “invest 10% of your income in S&P 500.” While that advice is technically correct, it doesn’t really offer that much help to anyone struggling financially or someone that has done very well and is now struggling with a large investment portfolio.
Over the past few weeks I’ve watched a ton of financial youtube videos, read a ton of financial news, and ingested other data from various sources only to find most of the advice is wrong, irrelevant or doesn’t pertain to my personal situation.
The only thing that has worked consistently is working with AI to guide me through some financial, insurance, investing, taxing and legal issues.
Why?
It’s largely because AI will respond to your unique custom situation as opposed to “general” advice from “experts” which will be generic advice and unfamiliar with your specific issues.
For example, if you’re dealing with tax issues, the city, county, state and country you live in will each have some level of impact on your taxation. There will also be impact to your investments if you live in a state with a state income tax versus one that does not.
Further, if you have assets in multiple countries then your tax situation will be even more complex.
To get the right advice your choices are to hire experts in each city, county, state, country to help guide you which can turn into an expensive proposition or you could just use AI which may offer you 80% of what you need and sometimes 100% of the advice you need.
Yes, AI does make mistakes but that will get better over time and the best thing to do with AI is to use more than one service anyway to corroborate the advice you’ve been given.
AI is still a toddler at three years old and it’s growing and learning. I do fear what it will become when it hits it’s teenage years and beyond but for now it’s the best tool we all have to get help with our financial issues.
Share The Wealth
Do you have something better than AI for personal finance advice right now?