Anonymous wrote:AI is a joke when it comes to financial planning. If you don't know your shit and you don't want to invest time in learning about the different aspects of investing, seek out a fee only financial planner.

Disagree. AI is an incredible tool for asset planning. I play around with multiple different assumptions to understand how I'll fare in various scenarios. I do all the other work, too, but AI is so much more efficient than creating my own spreadsheets. Definitely don't need a financial planner, though I still find a tax adviser helpful.

Don’t gate keep. Teach us your prompt!

Anonymous wrote: 8% withdrawal rate? Awesome advice if your plan is to live fast and die young!

+1. This is terrible advice.

Anonymous wrote:AI is a joke when it comes to financial planning. If you don't know your shit and you don't want to invest time in learning about the different aspects of investing, seek out a fee only financial planner.

You know what a joke is? Financial planners, I get calls from them all the time and later look them up, they literally are gym bros that have history or some other odd major that got their financial planner cert after being unmployed for a year our of college and now want to manage my money

8% withdrawal rate? Awesome advice if your plan is to live fast and die young!

Here’s the secret: buy 50% VT + 40% VXUS + 10% BND when you’re 21 in an Ira and dollar cost average. Then when you retire withdraw like 4-8% a year based on your budget. Done.

AI is a joke when it comes to financial planning. If you don't know your shit and you don't want to invest time in learning about the different aspects of investing, seek out a fee only financial planner.

No, I commend you, OP. I think AI should be one part of your planning strategy. Not the only part, of course.

I do this for complex medical issues that I, or my relatives, have had. And then I double-check with my husband, who is an internist, or other doctors who are treating us. ChatGPT has complemented human medical advice very nicely, and my husband was quite impressed.

The only thing I would caution you on is that Chat GPT and other AI models can only give you information they find that's available to them. This means that they will present you with the solutions that are most likely to have been repeated millions of times on the internet. If you want a different strategy than the one most commonly used, for reasons of your own, then AI will not steer you in that direction. It will steer you down the common path. Sometimes that's not what you want.

For example, I am 100% in high tech stocks. Barring Act of God, I am not planning on changing my strategy for retirement, since my aim is to hand down my high-growth, high-risk stock portfolio to my kids. I don't want to redistribute to "safer" investments as I age, not at all. So the common advice wouldn't work for me.

AI cannot do the thinking for you. It's not actually intelligent, it only regurgitates what it has identified as relevant from its database. It can only present you with commonly used options. As long as you remember this, you're all good.

Anonymous wrote:Are these AUM advisors, or flat fee?

We left our AUM firm because they literally talked big and just put us in things that they could churn. Cost us a fortune in taxes and fees. But the day we left our rep sat there at the lunch brought into their offices for us and after I specifically told them I could not put a large chuck of money into their fund because it was set aside for X reason, toward the end of lunch the guy said, You really need to invest that money with us. As if he hadn't heard a thing I said OR totally disregarded what I wanted. Didn't matter. We were done.

It was toward the end of December and I am almost certain he was trying to make HIS end of the year numbers. We set everything up with our old firm (not an AUM firm) and on Jan 1 they sent firm notification and everything was transferred out on the 2nd. (Easier to do it this way for tax purposes.)

Anyway, as you already know, you can run all your details through bogleheads.org. See if the assorted and knowledgeable opinions match ChatGPT.

Ok, I'll try that. I was using Boldin, but it's not interactive in the way conversational way. It models but it doesn't explain in the same way.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If I were you, I would solicit comments from people on here, reddit, and/or bogleheads and if you felt comfortable after posting and discussing, cancel the appointment.

That's kinda what I'm doing. Many of you seem really knowledgeable.

I think the difference between here and bogleheads.org is that they have a standard form that you can use to fill out all your details. No names, etc., but then you have extremely knowledgeable people whose credentials are frequently listed. I've never done it, but I use our advisor less and less due to all I have learned at bogleheads (among other places.)

Anonymous wrote:If I were you, I would solicit comments from people on here, reddit, and/or bogleheads and if you felt comfortable after posting and discussing, cancel the appointment.

That's kinda what I'm doing. Many of you seem really knowledgeable.

Are these AUM advisors, or flat fee?

We left our AUM firm because they literally talked big and just put us in things that they could churn. Cost us a fortune in taxes and fees. But the day we left our rep sat there at the lunch brought into their offices for us and after I specifically told them I could not put a large chuck of money into their fund because it was set aside for X reason, toward the end of lunch the guy said, You really need to invest that money with us. As if he hadn't heard a thing I said OR totally disregarded what I wanted. Didn't matter. We were done.

It was toward the end of December and I am almost certain he was trying to make HIS end of the year numbers. We set everything up with our old firm (not an AUM firm) and on Jan 1 they sent firm notification and everything was transferred out on the 2nd. (Easier to do it this way for tax purposes.)

Anyway, as you already know, you can run all your details through bogleheads.org. See if the assorted and knowledgeable opinions match ChatGPT.

I recently did the same and what it produced (after tweaking and challenging some assumptions) seemed just as good as feedback I have received from financial planners.

If I were you, I would solicit comments from people on here, reddit, and/or bogleheads and if you felt comfortable after posting and discussing, cancel the appointment.

But I just chatgbt'd our retirement withdrawal strategy.

I gave it a ton of information that won't actually identify us. I continued to adjust with more information, probably several dozen times over the last few days. As we went along, I was fact checking using Boggleheads and other resources.

It looks to me like the results -- annual action plans and summaries, ending asset estimation, year-by-year asset balances maximum sustainable spending calculation, brokerage tax control checklist and worksheet, effective tax rate estimates -- is on track. I caught what I thought were errors, but there were always reasons. I've adjusted it for varying returns and I've asked it to check itself for errors. It cited reasons for its calculations and recommendations.

If this thing is close to right, I am cancelling our appointment with a financial planner. I've been so frustrated with them in the past. They tend to talk to my husband rather than me, even though he knows nothing about our finances. They want to speed through parts that I want broken down and explained. And had I asked them to continue to tweak our plan over and over, they would have been exasperated or it would have cost a fortune.

I would certainly feel better if a human double checked all this, but it really just doesn't seem that hard. And I think our planner would say that they need to start over with the same numbers and assumptions -- so they'd end up charging us the same as if I hadn't done this work.

Go ahead. Let me have it. Or not?