By Pawan Jain, University of Michigan Flint 

Finding good financial advice can be stressful – and expensive. That’s one reason why chatbots have become an increasingly popular and free alternative.

But using artificial intelligence to answer your pressing money questions also carries hidden dangers. I’m a finance professor who has been closely watching the spread of AI into personal finance, and I recently warned that AI is riskiest when it sounds most confident. I advised readers to bring in a human professional for high-stakes financial decisions.

One response came back that caught my attention: What if you can’t afford an adviser?

For many households, that’s the reality. A traditional adviser can cost hundreds of dollars an hour, which makes little sense when your savings are modest. For those people, AI isn’t a second opinion but the only financial adviser they’ll ever have. So the useful question isn’t whether they should use it; it’s how to get something actually helpful out of it without being misled.

My answer: For people who can’t afford ongoing advice, AI is genuinely useful for budgeting, paying down debt and low-cost investing.

The skill lies in using AI well. Here are some simple guidelines to get accurate and actionable answers when you engage with a chatbot:

AI is good for everyday money questions

The gap between AI and a human adviser is narrowest for commonsense guidance. Build a small emergency fund. Pay down high interest debt. Contribute enough to your workplace retirement plan to capture the full employer match, which is free money. Invest in low-cost, diversified index funds. Don’t panic-sell when markets fall.

None of this is controversial. It’s consensus advice, and it’s precisely where AI is reliable and its confidence is earned.

Here are a few examples of specific questions that a chatbot handles well:

• My daughter is 6, and I would like to have around US$60,000 saved by the time she starts college. How much do I need to set aside each month to get there, and what rate of return does that assume?
• I’m carrying credit card debt at 22% interest, a car loan at 7%, a student loan at 5%, and I’ve allotted $300 a month to put toward them. Which takes priority?
• My employer matches 50 cents on the dollar up to 6% of my paycheck for my retirement fund, and I earn $58,000 annually. How much do I need to contribute to capture the full match, and what’s that worth for a year?
• My retirement plan has a fund charging 0.85% a year and an index option charging 0.05%. If I put away $40,000 over 25 years, what does that gap cost me?
• I’m the only earner in my household, my income varies month to month, and my expenses run about $3,200 per month. How large should my emergency fund be, and where should I invest it?
• My retirement plan offers a 2055 target date fund and an S&P 500 index fund. What’s the difference, and what factors should I consider while choosing one of the two?

Notice what these questions have in common. Each is a general question with a well-established answer, and every fact specific to you is one you supply rather than one the tool has to guess. Give it the facts and ask it to do the reasoning, and its responses are genuinely strong.

For these questions that are 90% of your financial life, AI is a useful free guide, and for someone who had no professional guidance at all, that’s a real gain. The danger lives in the other 10%, and the key is telling the two apart. A typical chatbot will answer anything you type – including questions it should not – in fluent prose that can be confidently wrong.

So slow down whenever a decision is large, irreversible, tax-related or being sold to you. Examples include negotiating a windfall or inheritance; making early withdrawals from or conversions between retirement accounts; claiming Social Security; taking on major debt; and weighing any pitch for a product like an annuity or whole life insurance.

Inherited retirement accounts alone carry withdrawal and tax rules that a chatbot can state with total confidence and still get wrong for your specific case, at a cost of thousands of dollars.

Financial advisers are pricey, and chatbots can be a good free substitute if you have basic questions.
Badhan Ganesh on Unsplash, CC BY

Five habits that make AI safer

Once the list of questions is set, here are some precautions to take once you engage with a chatbot.

Make it ask you questions first. Open with, “Before you advise me, ask me the questions a good financial planner would ask.” Generic answers come from under-specified questions, and you learn which details will actually produce a more useful outcome.

Ask it to argue against itself. After any recommendation, reply: “Give me the strongest case against this, and the situations where it would be wrong for me.” If it can’t engage in response, that’s a sign the bot is entering a more dangerous mode. This one precaution does more than any other to signal for you to be careful.

Make it show its assumptions. If the bot projects that your savings will grow to an impressive number, ask what assumption it made and what would change it. You’ll learn that it assumes steady returns every year, no missed contributions and no fees. That means the projection is just information, not a promise.

Verify the facts. Contribution limits, tax brackets and deadlines all change, and this is exactly where AI can be subtly out of date. Check the IRS or the Social Security Administration directly. If one number drives your decision, don’t take it on a chatbot’s word.

Never share identifying details. Don’t offer account information, Social Security numbers or logins. Describe your situation in general terms. Good advice doesn’t require handing over data that can be used against you.

Robo-advisers are a low-cost middle ground

If your main need is simply to invest, robo-advisers sit between a free chatbot and an expensive human. These automated platforms build and rebalance a diversified portfolio of low-cost funds based on your goals and risk tolerance, typically for an annual fee of 0.25% to 0.50% of assets under management, often with little or no minimum balance.

In a 2022 study of a large robo-advisory platform, my co-authors and I found that typical users skew young and male, and are often small investors – exactly the people that traditional advice has priced out. We also found that new account sign-ups rise during periods of high market volatility. People reach for these tools when markets turn turbulent, which is when automated discipline helps most and a panicked move costs most.

The catch: Robo-advisers run on preset models and the inputs you give them. They won’t handle a divorce, an inheritance or a complicated tax year. If your life changes and you don’t update your inputs, the strategy won’t adjust on its own.

What a human adds that AI does not

Let’s say you can afford a professional. What advantage does human advice offer over a bot?

It’s not just about the material results. In a new study, I found that the value of human advice shows up as lower financial anxiety rather than higher returns. It wasn’t about simply having an adviser. Rather, the comprehensiveness of the planning put clients at ease: detailed attention across estate, investment, retirement, risk management and tax questions, as well as advice about the psychology of money.

That benefit, I found, was concentrated almost entirely among households with lower financial literacy, where the effect was roughly six times larger than among the most financially sophisticated, for whom it was negligible.

Two further findings are practical. My research found that clients of Certified Financial Board-certified advisers reported more comprehensive service across all six planning areas, so the credential is a reasonable proxy for what actually helps. And AI use showed no sign of substituting for human advisers, and it did not predict lower financial anxiety.

Reassurance is the one function current AI does not supply.

A professional doesn’t have to mean expensive

Hiring a human for help doesn’t require splurging on an adviser on retainer. You can save here with fee-only planners, who charge a flat hourly rate to answer one focused question for a few hundred dollars, through professional and certification organizations such as the CFP Board, the Garrett Planning Network, the XY Planning Network, or the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors.

In addition, many workplace retirement plans and credit unions offer free coaching. For handling debt, nonprofit credit counseling is available through the National Foundation of Credit Counseling. And if your annual income is $69,000 or less, the IRS’ free Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program provides tax help at no cost.

So the choice isn’t between AI or a pricey adviser. It’s AI for the everyday questions, a robo-adviser for hands-off investing if you want one, and a single affordable hour of human time at the red-flag moments, ideally with someone who does comprehensive planning rather than a single transaction. That last point isn’t just a preference – it’s what the evidence says actually reduces the worry.

About the Author:

Pawan Jain, Associate Professor of Finance, University of Michigan Flint

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.