The Hidden Risk in AI Financial Plans
More and more people are showing up to calls with a financial plan built by AI. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, it does not matter which. And I love it. If AI gets you to think about your financial future for the first time, that is a win. But here is the problem. Every single plan I have looked at has had mistakes in it. Not obvious ones. The kind that look perfectly reasonable on screen. The kind you would never catch unless you knew what to look for. And in finance, small mistakes do not stay small over time.
Let me show you what I mean. A couple used AI to build their full financial plan. It told them they would need €1.3 million to retire, and they could get there in 15 years. Sounds great. But when we ran the numbers based on their actual spending, the real figure was €3.6 million. If they had followed that plan and retired in 15 years, they would have run out of money, and much sooner than they expected. The worst part is the plan looked good. Well structured. Clear. Confident. Logical. And completely wrong.
A Salesforce employee came to me with an AI-generated plan that recommended going straight into pension contributions. Makes sense on the surface. But it missed the ESPP. Salesforce offers a 15% discount on company stock through their Employee Share Purchase Plan. That is a guaranteed return in six months. In my last full year at Salesforce, that discount alone put around €11,000 in my pocket after tax. The smart move is to max your ESPP first, sell the shares, then move that money into your pension. Now you are getting a guaranteed return twice: the ESPP discount, then tax relief on the pension contribution. The AI skipped the first step entirely and left thousands on the table.
And then there is the one that worries me most. AI telling people to hold off on lump-sum pension investments because of “current market volatility”. This sounds sensible. But if you are investing for the next 25 or 30 years, current volatility is irrelevant. The market is always volatile. There is never a calm moment where everything looks safe. If you wait for one, you will wait forever. What AI is actually telling you to do is time the market, and market timing is a game most professional fund managers cannot win. When AI tells you to wait, it is not protecting you. It is costing you years of compounding.
I want to be clear. I am not anti-AI. I use it every day, and I think everyone should use it to build an initial financial plan: to get your thoughts in order, test your assumptions, put structure around the mess in your head. But do not stop there. Because a 1% difference in your plan today does not feel like much, but over 20 or 30 years it compounds into hundreds of thousands of euros, in the wrong direction. AI gives you a plan that looks right. An expert helps you build one that is right.
One example of how big the gap can get. A client of mine did not fully understand her own pension. Default contributions, default fund, default everything. On that path she would have ended up with a respectable €700,000 at retirement. Then we optimised the setup she already had. Nothing dramatic. Her new projection: €2.5 million. More than three times what she had before. Same salary, same employer, different decisions. She also claimed back over €7,600 in tax from the previous year’s pension contributions, cash she did not know she was entitled to.
So here is what I would sit with. You might already have a financial plan. Maybe AI helped you build it. Maybe it looks solid. But can you honestly tell if it is right? Can you spot the ESPP being missed, the retirement number off by millions, the market-timing advice that costs years of compounding, the asset allocation that makes no sense? If you are not sure, talk to someone who can check it with you. That is the difference between a plan that looks right and one that actually works.
If you would like me to check yours, here is a short video on what I actually do: https://go.bamillionaire.com/watch-now, or book a call: https://go.bamillionaire.com/apply
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