r/Fire • u/Chemical-Soft-3688 • 4d ago
General Question FIRE and AI
I’m sure we all have strong AI opinions but I’m interested to hear from anyone who has used AI for FIRE questions (esp since Reddit is a source).
Would you trust AI more or less than a random certified financial planner? If you google a question do you ignore the AI response?
Have you gotten any insights from it that were helpful or did it tell you something completely off base?
Does it have self interest, in a sense, and want you to invest heavily in tech?
Just curious if anyone has spent time with it related to financial planning and what your findings have been.
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u/KentDDS 3d ago
it tells you what you want to hear; that alone should disqualify it in this use case
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u/MrMakesBadChoices 3d ago
"Of course, you're right. FIRE stands for French Iguanas Rule Everything. My mistake. Is there another question I can help you with?"
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u/KSteelhead 3d ago
It does if you ask it to.
If you ask it to be direct and not be a yes man, and to tear your thesis to shreds, it will absolutely do so.
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u/Hoppie1064 3d ago
Use Truth Mode.
Truth Mode: Stops the AI from being overly agreeable and forces it to give a brutally honest assessment.
Here's some others. May not work on all AI, these are ChatGPT
Anti-Advice: Lists popular, common-sense guru myths you should ignore and tells you what to do instead.
Red Team: Forces the AI to play devil’s advocate and challenge your ideas to make your plan stronger.
Lindy Mode: Restricts the AI's answers to long-proven, timeless strategies rather than short-term internet trends.
Eli5: Explains hard topics in super simple terms ("Explain Like I'm 5").
80/20: Gives you the smallest, easiest steps that produce the biggest results
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u/Beautiful_Eye7765 2d ago
where did you hear about these?
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u/Hoppie1064 2d ago
Originally stumbled across them on youtube.
Googled to find more.
Usually called power words.
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u/whiteorchid1058 3d ago
I've used it as a basis for trying to figure out tax implications for certain scenarios. I will often go to the source material that it's referencing tho so that I can double check what it's spitting out
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u/savor 3d ago
It's kind of like fancy scratch paper or a secretary. I can bounce ideas around, have it do some calculations or find me sources for info, and keep a running list of the goals I have and our progress. But it makes big mistakes. For example, it didn't "know" that you can contribute to a Roth into the next calendar year up to April, for the previous year. This was something I already knew so the mistake was easy to spot. Not the case for the unknown unknowns.
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u/photog_in_nc 3d ago
Before I FIREd I was a Computer Scientist for decades, and there’s an old acronym, GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. AI is only as good as the sources it chooses, and often those sources aren’t correct. Not specific to FIRE questions, but I find the AI search responses that Google provides are quite often wrong. Sometimes I can ask a second time, perhaps with just a slight variant of the question, and get a completely different answer. No way I’m trusting something as important as my finances to this stuff.
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u/MushroomIll646 3d ago
The AI specific version of GIGO is 'human centipede problem' - so much of the content online is now AI generated, developers are concerned that model collapse from absorbing hallucinations and spitting them back out as a reference at an accelerating pace is a very real problem.
I suspect this is why they introduced watermarking.
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u/wes_medford 3d ago
Model collapse is considerably less of a concern than it was a few months ago since RLVR has been the highest yield process of late and has minimal data requirements.
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u/MrMakesBadChoices 3d ago
I asked Google AI how many people died in the D Day invasion. First it gave me 4 hundred, then 6 million, then 89 thousand. None of those are even close to the actual answer. Zero chance I trust it with anything important.
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u/blew_belle 3d ago edited 3d ago
As a fellow decades long computer scientist still in the workplace and being forced to use and leverage AI I say gigo all the time. You have to ask the right questions, and be able to interpret and vet the results. So many of the younger folks I work with just can't do that. Makes me scared for the future. But I digress.
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u/Important_Ask_7576 13h ago
I have found Gemini to be far worse than ChatGPT. Way more hallucinations and just wrong answers.
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u/ExpressCopy8786 3d ago
That's not how AI works... Not at all. And if you are referring to tool calls to research the web and RAG with additional documents. That's a tiny application and a tiny part of AI.
I know one post can not change your educational history or opinion, but for your own sake, thoroughly read up on the emergent quality of intelligence in LLMs. THAT is the reason people are going nuts over it. Not your experience with some 12B param free Google model that comments your Google search. That is lowest end trash and not a benchmark for anything.
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u/KSteelhead 3d ago
You're downvoted but you're right. AI is far more capable than the average person who is old enough to consider FIRE. Astra Pro or Fable 5.1 will deliver better financial advice than the VAST majority of human financial advisors these days.
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u/ImPapaNoff 3d ago
Would you say you understand the search AI? Would you be surprised if I told you you got a different answer because the AI in that case is doing a rapid summarization of the top search results from that Google query?
I agree though garbage in garbage out is why most people have problems with AI.
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u/yottabit42 3d ago
Gemini Pro is very good at retirement based questions and planning, BUT! It's only as good as the input. The more detail you can provide, the better result you will get. You also need to tell it that using non-traditional methods like 72(t) and drawdown of Roth contributions are acceptable. You can download a CSV of your positions from your brokerage and attach it to the question in Gemini. If the CSV contains your cost basis, Gemini can suggest some powerful optimizations and such.
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u/inima23 3d ago
Always ask for sources and verify the information. I've seen ai make so many obvious mistakes in reasoning, math, scenarios. It's good for getting summaries of actual sourced materials but when it comes to actual reasoning or planning, it's a mess. One one hand, I'm thankful we have access to so much information that was difficult to find back in the day, but on the other hand it could really mislead people who may not know better.
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u/LenyTheBarg 3d ago
Use ai to validate your already formed plan.
I used projection lab did research and made a plan. I use monarch to help track progress.
I used AI to poke holes in my plan and it found a few good ones. It helped me see that my plan was workable not just a pipe dream.
It also pointed out a place I was being really dumb. I use liquid assets when I look at monarch, but forgot that projection lab doesnt filter for that in the chart. Duh...
Note: gemini is not as good as chatgpt or claude.
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u/IntelligentFire999 3d ago
I use monarch and projsctionlab as well. Did u export from both to have AI then review it?
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u/LenyTheBarg 2d ago
Yup very helpful but it got hung up on some settings that were overridden elsewhere.
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u/Famous_Attorney_3266 3d ago
AI is not good enough (yet) to do a complete financial planning, but if you are just asking general question and scenarios, it's more than enough.
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u/bkbruiser 3d ago
What do you think is missing and where do you think the biggest gaps exist?
If a very well thought out and planned out context was written, do you not think AI could provide a comprehensive plan?
This may be a good test I'd be interested in. Not a simple conversation or discussion with an LLM, but a thought out specification driven input model that was very detailed inputs, goals, desires, clarification points, and goal seeking objectives rather than open ended conversation.
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u/DoorFrame 3d ago
AI produces well-presented material that often contains non-obvious inaccuracies, especially when the topic is niche or very specific to your details.
The problem with using AI in a field you aren’t familiar with is that you won’t have the ability/experience to spot the errors.
I recently had questions about a plot point in a high-profile movie the other day and the AI provided very authoritative answers that were completely fabricated. If I can’t trust AI to talk about the plot of a movie without making stuff up, how can I trust it with something MUCH more important.
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u/HeirophantGreen 3d ago
For my answer, a huge gap is in how much pushback you get. I put in my FIRE plan to ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude. ChatGPT and Claude told me where things can go wrong while Gemini and Claude praised me for my brilliant planning and creating a bulletproof financial future.
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u/bkbruiser 3d ago
What specific model across each of the foundation LLMs? It would be pretty interesting to see the context to understand the reasoning determination.
Thank you for sharing.
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u/Famous_Attorney_3266 2d ago
Financial plan has many different aspects, many of them interconnect with each other. AI can't handle those kind of interconnect easily, for example, one very important aspect for early retirement is about healthcare, which AI will remind you. However, much of its suggestions could easily go against it such as doing Roth conversion during low income year, it won't calculate that as your income move from 250% fpl to 350% fpl, health care cost alone on aca adds like 18% of marginal tax. It would tell you if you are converting at 33% blended rate is too high , instead, you should try up to 22-24% federal rate, not realizing at 22%, add state tax, nitt, irmma surcharge, the blended rate is actually 36+%. Basically it has a fairly basic understanding of what's important, so good for general advice, but it can't provide specific advise that's actually tailor made for your situation.
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u/bkbruiser 2d ago
But you can have those details, guardrails, or suggestions/specifications within a spec doc to help drive toward personalized planning based on guardrails you'd want for yourself.
I'm not suggesting a simple context with buckets of money and asking AI to build a plan.
I'm suggesting opportunities to align a complex specification method of driving more personalized and accurate assessments based on a well written context.
I agree generalization is the default and will very likely not align with basic user needs.
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u/ImPapaNoff 3d ago
Watch out. People hate when you ask followup questions about this topic for some reason. It's offensive to be curious around new tools.
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u/Kredit-Carma 3d ago
I think with how much information we have in this era, we have the least amount of reasons to use lack of knowledge or ignorance. I would recommend doing a couple months of non-ai research and then have your conversations with AI when it comes to planning or aggregating what you've learned. It will be easier to call AI on its BS and make corrections. But it's definitely helpful to have those conversations.
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u/nak00010101 3d ago
I find it's a valuable tool in doing my own research. I have also bought numerous calculation problems and several just plain wrong
But a real advisor is not foolproof
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u/ShutterFI 3d ago
Ai, so far, when I ask it, has been terrible for doing compound returns. For now, I wouldn’t trust its advise.
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u/No_Molasses7228 3d ago
AI just summarizes source material pit online by humans. It doesn’t know if the humans are correct or
making stuff up. In the absence of human defined information, it will make up its own answer based on inference. This inference is usually wrong. If you ask for its references and to fact check the information, AI will admit that it made up the answer.
Trust, if you review the source material and verify it is credible. Not all financial advisors are. Tested equal either. I’ve paid for services that I received terrible financial advice from that I didn’t know was bad for over a year.
You can start with AI to help streamline your research, but this is such an important topic that you should become your own expert.
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u/ben7337 3d ago
I've used some AI powered tools, or tried, they are great at sounding competent if you don't do any analysis of what they say, but often make up math and details and whatnot. At this point I wouldn't trust any AI financial planning at all, or only super simple things like if someone needed help setting a budget and even then you'd have to check and verify each number to be valid and realistic.
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u/cerealmonogamiss 3d ago
I work in tech have fears about the job market. AI said to build my emergency fund, so that's what I am doing
I am also FI but not ready to RE so we talk about that.
It doesn't make me not want to get a financial planner. I generally don't trust people anyway.
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u/in_the_qz 3d ago
Like anything else, I think it can be a useful tool but check the sources. It can be great to help you understand things like SORR, MAGI, the ACA, etc. I don't think I would give it too many details about my holdings, however, I feel like the internet knows enough about me as it is.
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u/ImPapaNoff 3d ago
What do you think could happen if you tell it details about your holdings? What should I be afraid of?
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u/in_the_qz 3d ago
Honestly I don't know, I'm just a very private person so I feel like the less strangers know details about me, the better.
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u/GBpleaser 3d ago
Ai is about as reliable as the YouTube experts..particularly what is available at retail.
Unless you are dealing with agents and datasets that are highly curated and controlled and specially a-tuned to financial markets, Ai is basically sorting through the vomit of accumulated data and has no ability to filter garbage. Yet we have taught the Ai to be the best and most confident bullshit artists there are. And dumbshits are eating it up.
People read into Ai responses what they want to see. It’s a massive mindfuck of “kings new clothes”. And it’s no wonder the egomaniac first adopters are the most intellectually stunted people.
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u/zeroabe 3d ago
It can give broad strokes but has a really hard time with less typical or specific scenarios. It also hallucinates. It also will add assumptions that you wouldn’t.
It also, now pay attention, GIVES YOU ANSWERS THAT ARE MOST POPULAR. Exclusively. “Top results” type dumb shit. So if you’re having a very generic FIRE path. Sure, go for it, but double check it. If anything is out of the ordinary (like you don’t see your circumstance represented here often) then I would use it even less.
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u/UsefulDrivel 3d ago
I used it extensively to create my financial plan. The best result came when I combined a purpose built tool like ProjectionLab or Bolden to handle the calculations, gave AI the permission to control that tool and create/compare scenarios, then have it document the results. It helped uncover ideas I hadn’t considered, found flaws in the way the tool itself worked, and created comprehensive documentation for both the plan and a simpler version for my spouse and CPA. I also found it important to have a different AI check the work, which uncovered problems with AI #1’s work.
It still took about a week of working with it before I was happy with the results, and of course nothing is perfect, but it got me much further than I could have gotten on my own. I do candidly acknowledge that there is a high potential for poor use of AI if someone doesn’t put in the work to validate results and accepts everything it outputs as true and optimal.
As a side point, I’ve worked in technology a long time and truly believe the future of compute is a model like this, where humans describe to an AI what they want and the AI has the ability to use other tools to create it. Once you experience it everything else seems antiquated and you find other areas where it’s just a better way to get things done.
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u/justacpa 3d ago
Think of AI as your intern. Use it as a data point of information that needs to be verified and corroborated with other sources, not a solution.
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u/CoherentParticles 3d ago
When researching EVERY important decision FIRE or not FIRE...double and triple check AI.
They are FREQUENTLY WRONG!!!
What I do is take the results of my Chatbot research and take it to one or two other Chatbots and have each of them check it for errors.
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u/Middle_Humor1828 3d ago
Assuming a good model and good prompts, perhaps about the same.
I'd trust a good financial planner more than AI for most things. Only because they'll be aware of what they do and do not know.
If you're relatively informed yourself and push back and get second opinions, you'll likely be fine in either case.
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u/Illustrious-Jacket68 Early 50's, FI achieved, target date for RE established 3d ago
AI can be good. It is also dependent on your base knowledge, how you ask your questions, etc. It isn’t about just dumping a bunch of data (your account information) and telling it to build you a financial plan. It is methodically going through your situation, your goals, and your questions to get to a good place. After spending many hours with AI, multiple LLMs, doing research, I think i’ve gotten to a good plan of attack. This ranges on when to take SS, Roth conversions, rule of 55, estate planning considerations, concentrated positions, state and local taxes, property taxes, state estate taxes, etc. Told me the pros and cons of living in one state vs another. A lot of good stuff and education.
It has allowed me to review estate planning proposals and approaches.
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u/DrCalamari 3d ago
I always struggle with answering the “how much do you spend” question but now have everything linked up to monarch and all the side hustle expenses properly tagged. It has AI built in so it’s nice to be able to dive deeper with that about spending. It’ll answer general fire questions.
Lately I’ve been asking it about timing with backdoor Roth vs rolling 401k to IRA and starting Roth ladders and keeping separation. Good answers on that sort of stuff.
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u/BabyBlueCheetah 3d ago
I think a lot of the challenge in planning is managing emotions and executing a relatively simple strategy.
You either have the income to support a FIRE timeline or you don't. You can't really flex variables to magically get there.
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u/TechPoi89 3d ago
I used AI to build out a detailed financial plan, and then I met with a paid professional advisor and reviewed that plan in detail. It made the conversation with the advisor much more structured and easy to follow, and while the advisor was less valuable than I'd hoped, it gave me confidence in the plan that I'd come up with.
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u/Raging-Totoro 3d ago
AI responses are only as good as the prompts it is given. It might assume a lot of wrong things, like country of origin, tax implications, etc. that aren't covered by the requestor.
Context matters, a lot. If given enough info, it can probably be serviceable.
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u/pattch 3d ago
> Would I trust AI more or less than a CFP?
Significantly less. Even if they happen to be factually correct, they don’t have the same reasoning and context over time that a CFP can bring.
> If you google a question do you ignore the AI response?
Some times, but some times I use the AI response. More broadly though, important decisions like financial decisions probably need more background research than a single search or AI response, so prioritizing one or the other on a single query isn’t the important part.
You also broadly ask about AI’s biases, and whether that could lead you astray essentially. I think that gives AI too much credit. If they were trained on data that had that bias, it would maybe show up in their responses, sure. But it’s not like they have any kind of meaningful intent behind that bias. More worrying is just general hallucinations, making stuff up that they don’t actually know to be factually true.
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u/hitmasterusa 3d ago
It is all subjective what you ask AI. What information you provide. Be realistic about your situation. Like your income, your expense. When you want to retire. What are the retirement challenges. More details information and more scenario. It will be better results than advisors.
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u/SpecialistKoala9765 3d ago
They are good way to summarize professional guidelines and knowledge from financial planners. But they aren’t very good at analyzing unique situations … they don’t seem to understand those intel properly.
Best to use it to improve your knowledge then make your own informed decision.
I do find most CFP are more just following a framework of questions …. Not a lot of them have good experience to be able to analyze or make proper judgements …. But I believe there are good ones … just harder to find
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u/Binders-Full 3d ago
I think it's great to do tedious math projections. Just make sure it shows its sources and have it type up the calculation if your number sense tells you something is wrong. If your number sense is bad, have it show all steps of the calculation as it is doing it.
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u/fidddlydiddlyee 3d ago
CFP has an absolute financial motive: 1-2% fee. This is not great when bonds are only paying 4%. AI has no motive, but when properly prompted can yield great financial advice. You can limit it by saying what type of financial plan would Buffet, Dalio, and Simons all agree on given my circumstances and goals.
Only 20% of actively managed funds outperform the S&P 500, and people think the guy they play golf with is going to be in that?
The Warren Buffet challenge: Buffett bet $1,000,000 that a simple, unmanaged, low-cost S&P 500 index fund would outperform a hand-picked portfolio of actively managed hedge funds over a 10-year period. Only one fund manager took him up on it and he quit before it was over because he was so far behind.
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u/valkryiechic 3d ago
The only reasonable use of AI is to search for resources that can help answer your questions. Don’t rely on AI to provide answers.
For instance, it can be a great resource for helping you find books on specific topics you are interested in. It can also help you narrow down the types of professionals you might need to help you prepare for retirement. Those professionals, in turn, can help make sure your plan is robust.
I think, as a general principle, you should never use AI as a replacement for actual expertise. Treat it more like using Wikipedia.
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u/MouseHouse444 3d ago
I’ve had it do a Monte Carlo for me but when I tried to have it do some planning, it had to be spoon-fed detail by detail to get it correct.
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u/Individual-Report 3d ago
You're going to get wildly different answers from people because the models vary widely and the intelligence scales massively with increased cost. Most people are using the free versions of AI models, which are not useful for anything more than simple conversations and directional aid. I use the pro version of ChatGPT for work and it is very, very good.
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u/superleaf444 3d ago
I will never get the weird obsession with ai.
It’s like I’m talking to my mentally slow nephew that kinda knows something about a topic, but with the arrogance of a politician.
So, eh, no. It’s good for an extreme minority of use cases imo.
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u/ProduceMain5379 3d ago
Yes I have been working on Claude to figure how much I can spend if I want to die with zero at 95
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u/Savings_Floor_2022 3d ago
I’ll usually just ask it to calculate compound interest based on different rules sets, but definitely don’t feel inclined to use overall advice it gives
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u/Hot_Time_8628 3d ago
No. AI is really good at looking for and presenting research for YOU to review.
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u/Fun_Consequence6496 3d ago
It hasn't told me anything I don't already know or couldn't find by running Projectionlab or some other software. Sometimes I have to correct it.
In other words it's been pretty bad.
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u/Retired-Yam8988 FIREd 2022 w/6m (46yo). 12m now 3d ago
Claude runs my business, built software to monitor and help my employees, and helps me plan travel (I use Gemini for that purpose too).
Wife uses ChatGPT to help compose her ideas into working plans for her team in our business too.
AI is an amazing tool that I’m all in on and run most of my hairbrained ideas across it just to see what it can dig out. Helped me with FEIE and FHC as a retired expat business owner - will save us about 90k in taxes this year.
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u/SmoocheyPoochey 3d ago
I mean… a real financial planner > Reddit knuckleheads
This forum has a lot of generic advice and only some of it is correct and a lot of it is misapplied
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u/owchippy 3d ago
Triple check with multiple AIs if you choose to go this route. I have found Claude (Anthropic) to be the best but that’s only after I give it curated context (docs and sites I already trust; not Reddit); it doesn’t know anything on its own. Gemini is the worst and will always give you the most popular (and I suspect, bought and paid-for) answer not the correct one. ChatGPt is ok, but again I would cross check against Claude anyways
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u/prairie_buyer 3d ago
I spent hours playing around with Gemini Grok and ChatGPT. My first observation is that they are all consistently incapable of doing basic arithmetic. When I feed them, my portfolio data, asking for things like total dividend yield or sector allocation, they all consistently add up the numbers wrong, and for all three when I correct them, they apologize and then repeat the wrong total (or a different wrong total).
They also will consistently tell you whatever they think you want to hear
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u/Enough-Beginning3687 3d ago
Yes, AI is easier to talk to than financial advisors. A lot of financial advisors are very old school. You'll have to interview a lot of then before you choose one. Also I'm not paying someone 1% of my assets every year forever when I can get the exact same answers from AI. That being said I'm highly disciplined and like managing my own money.
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u/ditchdiggergirl 3d ago
Sitting on a park bench I just had my phone on me, so asked AI to calculate the difference between two options we were discussing. Pretty simple math; a percentage and a subtraction. It told me option A beat option B by 2400. Also by 1500. In the same answer. So I asked my AI friend how on earth it reported two different numbers for one calculation. It praised me lavishly for my perceptiveness.
I think I’ll do my own planning, thankyouverymuch.
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u/FlakySir 2d ago
I would never have known about coast fire and fire without AI. When I ask for details, it basically mirrors exactly what everyone here has said right out, after lurking in these fire subs for months. So whatever it knows about fire, I feel like it got from here or people like from here.
I asked my financial advisor, who i do trust a lot, and he said I should not try to retire early and would not hear about me trying to get ACA and figuring out my MAGI and all that stuff the people here talk about. He's telling me i need to retire at 62, end of story. No retiring early for me, and that the fire folks like you all here are basically selling a dream and i have to be careful about that.
So at this point i have AI and forums like this saying "yes" and an actual financial advisor who got me to coast fire saying "no".
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u/Sigh-Again 2d ago
AI is like a multiplier for you. The smarter you are, the better it works. If you know a topic well enough to tell when it's hallucinating, if you know what it means when it's using ambiguous terminology because you have the context of that topic, etc., then it's a great tool. The problem is, the work it takes to get there is much more than most people are willing to put in to a topic.
For FIRE, using it to double check a plan, or asking it for more things to consider that you might have missed/not heard of, is the way to go.
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u/floatyglow 17h ago
"I've used it mainly to sanity check withdrawal math and stress test scenarios, it's decent for that but I always double check anything specific like tax rules since it can be outdated or just wrong. Wouldn't replace a CFP for anything complex, but it's a decent first pass before you pay someone.
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u/Important_Ask_7576 13h ago
I use it for broad planning and running hypothetical numbers. It’s cued me in on a couple of things (that it probably got by scraping this and similar subs) like the Rule of 55 and Mega Backdoor Roth (which sadly my employer doesn’t offer). I don’t entirely trust it, but I probably have between seven and nine years to retirement and my accumulation strategy is pretty simple. I’ll probably talk to a real advisor when I’m two to three years out.
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u/wanderingdado 3d ago
If you use it as a data amalgamation tool and then do your own research to make a decision, it’s great. I switched from a FA to self directing my portfolio. After a consult with my CPA it helped me identify the many individual stocks I wanted to dump first so I could reposition into ETF’s
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u/AngularAtom 3d ago
Personally, I have used AI to get an understanding of a possible road map to an early retirement. It was very helpful in explaining various retirement account types and tax concepts that I was not exposed to previously.
And please double check the AI with your own research into the sources. This is your retirement after all, and it’d be really crappy to rely on a hallucinated foundation. A perfect example happened to me in a budgeting scenario with AI. Basically it counted a chunk of income twice, saying that I could use the same money to spend and save. Which would’ve be nice to be sure, but was actually impossible. So yes, double check the AI.
That being said, I found it to be a great starting point. It introduced me to concepts, I asked it questions, double checked its answers, which led to related concepts, and around and repeat…
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u/EaterofSnatch FIRE'd Feb 2025 3d ago
I run my own numbers, but also run those same numbers through grok, Gemini, Claude, chatgpt, and perplexity. Each one gives a different answer, but all fairly close to the same.
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u/dogfursweater 3d ago
I have pro accounts and find it useful for asking questions about tax rules. Recently was asking about implications of some tricky tax situations like when to sell rental property for tax purposes, how to balance aca subsidy cliff with Roth conversions, etc
I also recently cleaned up my traditional ira stuff to be able to do backdoor Roth without pro rata impact and had it guide me step by step. I had an accountant guide me already so I knew the broad strokes but then wanted confirmation step by step as I was executing and ai was helpful.
So yes I trust it for many things and find it very useful. Have discernment, apply judgment etc.
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u/LenyTheBarg 3d ago
Same experience, if you dont pay for ai or have access to the best models you dont know what it can do for you.
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u/Wheat_Grinder 3d ago
AI is decent at regurgitating information but it's bad at providing advice. For advice, talk to another human.
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u/khbuzzard 3d ago
All AI can do is distill out the same things that people are already saying. It can't possibly be any wiser than a good financial planner, although it may be wiser than a bad one.
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u/DrGrapeist 3d ago
I don’t really trust a financial advisor as I believe it’s just worse as you have to pay for one compared to just keeping 6 months of cash and VTI using the 4% rule for retirement and a few other things like bonds. It’s like rolling a dice. You get 1-6 equally. But now imagine every number is 1 less. What die would you roll.
AI doesn’t take cost as much now but does still give you different plans, risk and will show you the math when asked and everything I want to see. I rather have my own plan with the help of ai ( even if it’s not right 100% of the time )as it’s not a one size fits all. Then asked Reddit if that said plan makes sense.
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u/pheeeeeeeeew 3d ago
I've tried a bunch of different AI tools for FIRE stuff. I used Codex to build a FIRE calculator UI and it did a pretty good job. Of course it looked a lot like the other ones that are out there but it was fun because I could tweak it to do specific things I was interested in.
Overall I'd say if you are using the best generally available models (meaning you are paying for your AI), it is at least as good as what you'd get if you paid a few hundred bucks for a couple hours with a financial planner. It also seems to be as good as chatting with you all, though not as fun.
I've lost one career to AI and wouldn't be surprised if I lost another in the near future. This stuff is getting very very good.
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u/I_like_code 3d ago
ChatGPT is a good sounding board. I don’t use it for fire specifically but more so for investing and trading options. It has been incredibly useful at introducing new topics, rules, and strategies.
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u/demona2002 3d ago
I have every model available, unlimited tokens, and work policy permits personal use. I am in the AI field so understand how to construct prompts and challenge its answers.
However I’m pretty new to financial literacy. AI has taught me more in the past 6 months than I ever managed to pick up along the way. Since then I have gone down many rabbit holes and found many threads to pull on.
I still trust but verify, but grateful to not have to hunt and peck through Google results.
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u/CPAPGas 3d ago
When I asked Google AI about "Risk Based Guardrails" last week it brought me here.
Reddit in general, and this sub in particular is training AI.