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.

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kccqzy 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

Financial advice is universally agreed upon, to the same extent that advice about software engineering is also universally agreed upon, you know, like write unit tests, write maintainable code, etc. But the devil is in the details.

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hibikir 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You are comparing to the almighty, not to the kind of financial advisor most people would find while looking at random. Between those with very high AUM fees, those selling bad vehicles that they get kickbacks for and such, people are basically getting robbed already.

It's not that one cannot get very specific, technical advice that helps, but someone without much financial literacy cannot tell someone doing honest work for a reasonable price from easy to find scammers with a marketing budget. The AI isn't going to get everything right, and it's not going to be easy to send good, proding questions to double check things without sufficient financial literacy, but that boring baseline is miles ahead of what most people get, as it's not trying to deceive you professionally, at least for now.

	▲	MBCook 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They are also assuming that the comparison is to a financial advisor and not either nothing or a relative/friend who may or may not give good advice.

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marcosdumay an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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aprilthird2021 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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

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mjr00 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 repeatable build process." All very true, but also so general and basic that it's not helpful.

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blharr 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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grg0 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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anigbrowl 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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sheepolog 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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jandrewrogers an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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singpolyma3 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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lazyasciiart 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	sheepolog 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not at all! I would guess that a sizable minority of "can't save money" people are in that position due to chronic illness or supporting others. I have no idea what it costs to support a family member with a disability; probably varies wildly but I would guess it's about the same annual cost as raising a child? Except that annual cost never goes away.

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grg0 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No offense, but: you need to get out of the house more. It'll answer your question very quickly.

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bdangubic 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

AI is right on the money here (pun intended)

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SpicyLemonZest 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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malfist 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	SpicyLemonZest 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Why do you think it gave vague advice? The paper has a sample of provided advice in Table 1 that seems pretty specific. (I attempted to quote it, but it triggers the HN spam filters, presumably because it's a chunk of LLM generated text substantially larger than my actual comment.)
	▲	SpicyLemonZest 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[flagged]

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toomuchtodo 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Models can be updated when foundations domain knowledge graphs are built on change. As of this comment, target date funds and pensions containing trillions of dollars adhere to the assumptions you mention (asset class allocation, growth rate and return assumptions, safe withdrawal rates ["Trinity study" aka ~4%/year], etc), and so consumers of AI provided guidance assuming these foundations could do much worse (as they already do today due to lack of information, knowledge, will, etc).

You literally just need to stick the Bogleheads forum into your AI assistant of choice for most folks, if they'll listen (which is the hardest part, imho, people want to gamble, not invest, in my experience). Prompt "What is your age?" respond "Optimal target date fund is 20XX fund based on your current age and retirement age, please confirm to set to default for investing." I suppose this will eventually make its way in some form into every banking, fintech, and brokerage mobile app chatbot in some capacity.

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_started

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card

If you want to get fancy, crib off of California's now mandatory high school financial literacy curriculum for grounding.

https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/personalfinance.asp

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

("computah, teach me how to personal finance and invest")

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gloryjulio 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 something from all weather portfolio composition to hedge the risks.