NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast - What AI Gets Wrong About Your Money and What a New Study Reveals About Credit Card Debt

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

New research upends assumptions about credit card debt, and we explore what AI gets wrong about money. Could you be making credit card debt worse without realizing it? Should you trust AI with your finances? Hosts Sean Pyles, CFP®, and Elizabeth Ayoola discuss the pros and cons of using AI for financial guidance. But first, senior news writer Anna Helhoski and NerdWallet writer Kurt Woock join them to unpack the findings of a new NerdWallet study that challenges common myths about credit card debt. They discuss why income is a poor predictor of who carries it, what expenses actually drive balances higher, and why Baby Boomers carry multi-card debt at surprisingly high rates. Then, Sean and Elizabeth sit down with Ryan Sterling, wealth advisor with NerdWallet Wealth Partners, to explore how large language models and agentic AI fit into your financial life, where DIY money managers and delegators diverge, what "human value" a financial planner provides that no chatbot can, and how to think about AI-generated answers when your money is on the line. NerdWallet Wealth Partners, LLC is an affiliate of NerdWallet Inc. NerdWallet Wealth Partners is a fiduciary online financial advisor, offering low-cost, comprehensive financial advice and investment management. Learn more at nerdwalletwealthpartners.com/smart  2025 Household Credit Card Debt Study: 49% Say Card Debt is Normal https://www.nerdwallet.com/credit-cards/studies/household-debt-study  Want us to review your budget? Fill out this form — completely anonymously if you want — and we might feature your budget in a future segment! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScK53yAufsc4v5UpghhVfxtk2MoyooHzlSIRBnRxUPl3hKBig/viewform?usp=header To send the Nerds your money questions, call or text the Nerd hotline at 901-730-6373 or email [e-mail]. Like what you hear? Please leave us a review and tell a friend. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've all heard for the last, oh, couple of years or so that AI will replace a lot of us. That is taking the place of all manner of tasks and jobs and creative pursuits. But what about financial advice giving? Should you rely on AI to help with your money decisions? We're exploring that question today with real people. Welcome to NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast, where you send us your money questions and we answer them with the help of our genius nerds. I'm Sean Piles. And I'm Elizabeth Ayola.

later on this episode, we'll be asking whether our robot overlords can do the work of a financial advisor. But, of course, first of our our weekly money news roundup, where we break down the latest in the world of finance so that you can be smarter with your money. Our news colleague, Anna Hal Hoski, is back, and she's going to be talking about the findings of a new nerd wallet study on credit card debt. And who really carries it. Welcome back, Anna. Thanks, Elizabeth and Sean. Yeah, credit card debt is just one of those things. it carries an awful lot of stigma.

And there are stereotypes that persist around who has it. So this new study digs into why these myths persist, and it unpacks what the data is really showing. So I'm joined by the study's author and our colleague, Kurt Wook, to unpack the findings. Kurt, welcome to smart money. Thank you. So as I just mentioned,

the study challenges some common beliefs about who carries credit card debt in the U.S. Can you walk us through some of the biggest myths that you set out to investigate? Sure. and it might help to know that we didn't set out to debunk myths specifically. Happy accident. I know, right?

Since 2015, so about a decade, we've done yearly studies about household debt just to get a sense of how Americans are using mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, and more. We surveyed more than 2,000 people, and we can see if there are any meaningful differences among demographics like age and household income. I'm relatively new to this team, and this is the first time. I was really able to dive into the details. And what really stuck out to me was the lack of meaningful differences in some instances. For example, about 37% of Americans with a household income under $50,000 had credit card debt. It's the same for Americans with household income above $100,000. 37% have credit card debt.

A similar percentage of people in each of these income levels have maxed out a card before. Same with the percentage of those who have skipped a payment in order to pay for necessities. So why do you think that these myths have persisted for so long? I think it gets back to the reason we do the study in the first place. Money tends to be a private thing. There's a lot we don't know unless we ask. We might talk openly about the price of groceries with friends or with family or coworkers. But most of us probably aren't bringing up the details of our credit card bill. In the absence of information, our brains make a lot of assumptions. So one surprising finding, and you mentioned it was that people with higher incomes often carry credit card debt at almost the

same rate, that 37% as those with lower incomes. So why do you think that's happening? To be clear, this study didn't look into the reasons that drive this, but I'll share my hypothesis. A person with a high income and a person with the lower income have a lot in common. For example, unexpected expenses like a big medical bill or an expensive car repair. He's happened to everyone. And remember, having a higher income is definitely not the same. is having savings to fall back on. Also, we're influenced to spend by peer pressure or by advertising. And that social force can be really strong. And having a higher income doesn't give protection from that. Now, did the data shed any light onto what types of expenses that are the main drivers

of credit card debt? Were there any unexpected contributors? A little more than half of those with the credit card debt said that basic necessities like groceries contributed to that debt. Shopping beyond the basics, like buying electronics or beauty products, that was the next most commonly cited expense. And after that, medical expenses, home and car repair, and travel expense. So how are people differentiating between what's a necessary expense and what's discretionary spending when it comes to their credit card debt? That's hard to say. For example, buying higher-end winter gear might be necessary for someone who works outside in Fargo. But that same gear might be more of a luxury for an office worker who

lives in Tampa. For the purposes of this survey, we ask people to make that distinction on their own when answering. But it is an important question to consider, especially when anyone is thinking about their own personal finances. You don't want to use a credit card to make discretionary buys if you can't pay the bill in full, not just the minimum payment at the end of every month. If you're buying discretionary items with cash and then buying basics when your bank account runs low, I'd say it's still the discretionary spending that's driving credit card use. So I have to admit a little bit of bias here. When I picture someone with credit card debt, I usually am thinking of a younger person. So unless you're someone who comes from wealth,

when you're younger, you haven't built up your savings yet, or you're sometimes maybe spending without fully considering the consequences. And I will also admit that I know I carried some credit card debt from month to month in my 20s. And I remember certain friends who got caught in spending spirals and ended up with pretty high balances that took years to pay off. Did your data reflect that trend as well, or does that reality look a little different? Learning to use a credit card can be a right of passage for a lot of younger people. But age isn't always the best predictor of credit card youth. So our survey showed that about a third of millennials in JemXers, that's people between about

29 and 60, saw their credit card debt increase last year compared to about a quarter of Baby Boomers in Gen Z, the oldest and youngest generations we tracked. All right, Kurt, what are some actionable takeaways for people who want to avoid falling into credit card debt? We ask people who have been in credit card debt in the past how they got out of it. So the top answer was they spent less. Sure. And that might seem like overly obvious.

But the thing is, that was more affected than other totally reasonable strategies like increasing your income or reducing your savings and putting that money toward paying off your debt. And to me, that results like a big neon-like pointing people to the best way to avoid that debt in the first place. And that is make a budget and track your spending. If you want to spend less than you make, you need to know what those numbers are. And we know that people who track their spending are more financially resilient. We also know that people with emergency savings are more likely to withstand a financial shock.

So you have to be sure to include that emergency savings in your budget. Yeah, looking at what you're actually spending and how much money you have, It does sound just like the most obvious thing in the world, but you still end up not looking all the time. You still end up maybe deviating even from a budget if you've already made it. Now, what if you're already carrying the debt? What are some ways to manage that? Just getting started can be tough. And I think this survey is a great reminder that if you have debt, regardless of your income or age, for example, you're not alone.

Other people can and have done it before. So a few different strategies out there. One of them is the snowball method, which means paying off the loan with the smallest balance first. If you're a numbers person, you might be shuddering at this thinking, that's not right, because that's right. You'll end up paying more overall if you're focused on that. But zeroing out an account can be psychologically rewarding. And if Sting motivated is a problem for you, this could be a way to build confidence and

keep going. Alternatively, you can just focus on paying up that highest interest loan first. And that method saves you the most in the long run. You just have to be willing to trust the process. You can also look into a balanced transfer card or a debt consolidation loan. These offer the possibility of a lower interest rate and fewer payments to coordinating. All right, Kurt, thanks for unpacking all that with us today. You're welcome, thanks.

And thank you, Anna. Up next, we're looking at whether AI can replace human financial advisors. And I have a spoiler alert for you guys. It can't. But before we get into that, a reminder to send us your money questions. Maybe you're trying to work through how to pay down debt and would like Sean and I to go through a debt payment strategy live with you. We can help you with that.

Or maybe you have questions about how to increase your income. Whatever your question is, send it to us on the nerd hotline at 901-730-63. That's 901-730 Nerd. We love email. Send them to us at podcast at nerdwallet.com. You can also leave us to comment on Spotify. We read them. Or YouTube for that matter, because we have a whole YouTube channel just for smart money,

which you should subscribe to, by the way. All right, more in a moment. Stay with us. We're back in answering your money questions to help you make smarter financial decisions. This episode, we're talking about AI, its role in answering your financial questions, whether it can replace financial advisors, and how it fits into comprehensive money management. Joining us in this conversation is Ryan Sterling, wealth advisor with NerdWallet Wealth Partners. He has been on the pod before. And our lawyers want us to say that NerdWallet Wealth Partners LLC is an affiliate. of NerdWallet, Inc. Welcome, Ryan. Hey, thanks for having me. It's good to be back.

You know, there are a lot of AI tools available to consumers right now. You can hit up an AI large language model LLMs like Clod or chat GPT or DeepSeek and get pretty quick answers to financial questions like how do I pay off dead or what's the best new travel credit card. And these are topics that writers at NerdWallet have historically spent a lot of time researching and carefully crafting articles about. But now, AI can serve up this information a lot faster than it would take to actually read a full article. And despite this, I'm not really afraid of AI taking my job, at least not yet.

So how do you view AI tools like LLMs in the context of researching financial information amid other resources? I think they're a great tool. And I think they enable good financial decisions. From a practitioner's point of view, it's tremendously helpful for us. And, you know, we're seeing in terms of, you know, the client benefit in lower fees. You know, the reason that we've been able to drop our fees over the last couple of years and, you know, I will say be less expensive than a lot of competitors is because we've been more tech forward and we're able to serve just the same amount of clients, if not more, because of the technology

that we're using, which allows us to then lower our fees. So I think it's a great enabler for financial advisors. I do think, again, it's going to benefit the clients in the form of lower fees, or at least it should in the future. But I think the reason I'm not worried about it replacing financial advisor jobs is people are still going to be emotional. Even though it can help drive us to good decisions, we need help kind of getting over the home. So I always say like, AI is going to be really good from zero to 80. But then from 80% to 95%, let's say, that's a whole different ballgame.

I think a great example that I give is I see a personal trainer two days a week. Now, I could go to use AI tools and I could find what is the best workout for me, like what's the best diet for my body type, like what macro should I be counting, so on and so forth. I don't need a trainer for that. Like I can go to AI and I can get all that information. So why do I pay a trainer two days a week versus just doing it through AI? Reason being is because the trainer gets me to show up. And he gets me to do just a little bit more.

And I can tell you when I work out by myself, I don't nearly, I mean, it's not even remotely close in terms of how much I push myself. He gets me it again to just do that one or two extra reps per sets. And that makes a big difference. And I say, you know, a part of success with anything in life is number one showing up. And then number two is the gains from marginal improvements over time. And that's really where the difference is made. It's not in the zero to 80 percent. It's really from the 80 to 90 percent from the 90 to 95

and then for some people to the 95 to 100. So that's how I see it. I think there's a lot of room for error or missed opportunity, especially in the financial space in that final 20 percent. If people are solely relying on these tools because they may not know what they're missing, the advice that an advisor could give them. And yes, it's great to maybe be more informed. I'm sure you probably have a more informed client base because they are doing their research now. But again, AI tools can do everything for you. There's still a lot of value in talking to people. There's no question.

And I will say people should demand more from their advisors. So I think it's going to force financial advisors to get better. And I think about, you know, going back to the evolution of this industry, you know, if you go back to the 80s, if you were to work with a financial advisor, they were really a broker. They were buying and selling stocks for you. So you were either calling them and say, hey, can you buy me five shares of IBM? Or they were calling you saying, hey, you know, I think you should be buying Microsoft. can I write you an order for X number of shares? That industry started changing and going away in the 90s when you started getting online trading in that two things happened. Number one is you

didn't need a stock broker to buy and sell shares for you anymore. You could do it online. But number two is the commissions, the spreads came down dramatically to now they're basically zero. The way things evolved from a stock broker to a wealth advisor is, okay, instead of buying and selling stocks for you now, what we're going to do is we're going to curate an allocation of mutual funds, for example. We're going to charge, you know, one and a half, two percent, and you're going to be charged the expense ratios and the loads inside the mutual funds, and we're going to call it a day. And that was really, and I don't mean to throw shade, but that was really kind of the extent of the relationship people had with a quote unquote financial advisor in the early 2000s when they went

from the broker to the advisory model. Now, though, you don't need a financial advisor to build a mutual fun portfolio for you. You can go to chat GPT, Gemini, whatever, and you can type in, build me the best model portfolio and tell me the ETFs. So we do that for clients, and it's a really important role that we play for clients in that capacity. But people need a lot more. They need comprehensive financial planning. They need coaching. They need individualized attention. So I think the consumers out there should work with a financial advisor, but you should also demand more for your advisors. You know, building an asset allocation and calling a day, that doesn't really caught it. Well, Ryan, the shiny new thing in the world of AI right now are so-called

agentic AI tools that can actually execute tax for you. We have yet to see AI tools, though, that can set up direct deposits into your high-ield savings account or shop for a mortgage for you. But where do you see the use case of these tools in managing our individual finances and also, like, in your work as a financial planner? Yeah, look, I mean, I think being able to use some of these tools to take away some of the rote jobs that none of us like to do, whether it's having a biweekly transfer from your high-yield savings account to your checking count or vice versa, having AI replace that, that's great. That saves you time. That saves you mental capacity, so on and so forth. You know, I think for us, in terms of the day-to-day admin, those tasks are

going to be instrumental in freeing up our advisor's time, where they don't have to be, again, doing as much of the admin, they can free up their space to really serve their clients in the best way possible. So I think, again, they're going to replace the jobs that none of us really want to do, and they're going to allow us to use our time in a higher valued way. So a lot of AI tools, whether it's a chatbot or an agent, they maybe seem best positioned to me to help those who are more DIY money managers. These are people who like doing financial tasks themselves and utilizing tools at their disposal. and I would say that's in contrast to maybe people who are more delegators,

those who want to hire a financial advisor. Do you see a potential future state where DIY folks are moving away from financial advisors and relying mostly on AI tools while the delegators tend to keep working more closely with advisors? Yeah, I mean, we've already seen that. So that is not a new thing. And by the way, I talk to DIYers all the time. There are people in my family, friends of mine, et cetera, and they do a really good job with it. And just like using my fitness example, like I know people that would say I would never hire a personal trainer because I'm disciplined.

I go to the gym four days a week. Like I know how to push myself. I get a spotter and I do that extra marginal. And like that's great. But that's not going to be for everybody. So again, I don't push back at the DIYers. If you want to do it like all day long. When I think about some of these, whether they're blogs today or whether some of these DIYers are using some of these LLMs now,

to help build their financial plans. A AI financial plan is going to give you the absolute best definition textbook version of what you should be doing. And that's great. There's nothing wrong with that. However, that doesn't mean it's the right thing for you. So here's a controversial take.

I'm a big fan of maxing out of 401K, especially contributing up to the employer match. There are instances where it doesn't make sense to max out your 401K. I see this all the time. there are people that fall into this trap where they have all their money in their house and their 401k and a disruption happens and they have zero liquidity outside of it. You have millionaires right now that cannot handle a one to two months disruption in their

life because they have no liquidity. So if you're someone, for example, and I have a couple of these back patterns where it's someone in their 30s who's like, hey, you know what? Life is short. A big life event happened that has made me want to go, like take the work. old, you know, by storm, I want to take a two-year sabbatical and I want to plan on doing this in the next three years. And that's something that like you don't get that experience back. That person, maybe you don't max out your 401K. Maybe you do need to save a little bit extra

liquidity. AI is not going to tell you to do that. AI is going to give you the textbook definition. And I think about I used to work in the high net, in the high net worth space and we did a lot with estate planning. And we would bring in these, you know, the room full of attorneys, room full of resources and we would build out these very complex estate plans to make sure that someone with $100 million, their family never pays a dime in estate taxes. Okay, great. I'll never forget this. I was talking to one client who was kind of a blue collar guy who sold a business, generated a liquid net worth of north of $100 million, like a great success story. And remember we're in this room all these attorneys, all these resources, basically telling them what to do. And he goes,

why am I doing this? We're like, well, so you don't pay estate taxes? And he goes, what if I don't care? It's like, well, if you don't do this, though, the government's going to take half your money when you pass away. He goes, I love my kids. They've already gotten a good amount of money. They're going to inherit a lot of money. He's like, quite frankly, I don't want to spend my life in my retirement with attorneys and having to draft these documents. And like, long story short, like, I gained a lot of respect for this person because there's like the textbook of this is what you should do because you don't want to pay estate taxes, of course.

And he was like, well, maybe I don't care. And that's not wrong. Right. So I do think, I use that example because I think there's so many nuances that we see with our clients with like, oh my God, I should be doing this. I feel so much anxiety. And it's like, actually, no. For you, maybe it doesn't make sense. And there's a good reason for that. And a lot of these chatbots, these LLMs, rely on pattern recognition and what's been done before. And what you're speaking to gets to the fact that there are so many unknowns and different paths that people might want to take in their own life that might not have been done before and might not be the obvious course. action. Like you said with 401Ks, the advice is to just max it out, but there are other priorities in life, such as living for today. So that is where an AI tool is much less helpful. And that's where, again, the tools will allow us to get, you know, 80% of the way there.

And then the magic happens in that last 10 to 20%. And that's where the nuance comes in. Now, Ryan, you mentioned earlier, you know, clients potentially asking their financial advisors for more and demanding more of them since they can get a lot of generic advice from these AI tools or just even online. So I can see with that in mind, specialization becoming more important amongst financial advisors. So let's say maybe you're an expert in helping people who have complicated, like you were saying, estate matters, or in crafting tax efficient strategies in retirement. AI tools might be less equipped to assist with that. So what are your thoughts there? Yeah, I think you're spot on. We have all types of clients. But I'd say like our core client is

kind of that millennial, upwardly mobile tech professional. So we have a lot of clients in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, et cetera. And there's two interesting things. Number one is their compensation isn't just a salary. There's oftentimes RSC is restricted stock units, incentive stock options, non-qualified stock options. New York City is a completely different beast from a financial planning standpoint than Wisconsin,

where I grew up originally. And it's funny because we have so many clients who, again, are from the Midwest or from the south or wherever and live in San Francisco and New York. And they're making really good money. And they go back to Michigan or Wisconsin or whatever, and their parents say, how come you don't own a home? This is like insane to me. You make so much money. Why not? And our clients come back to us and say, well, does it make sense? I feel

anxiety. Like, I should be buying something. Shouldn't I? It's like, well, let's put it through the plan. Let's talk about what your goals are. Let's talk about what makes sense for you. So again, like it goes back to that nuance piece of it where, you know, again, the clients that we work with, like, look, that's me. I've been an upwardly mobile millennial living in New York City from the Midwest. I know what those clients are going through when they go back to those family reunions. So I think having a niche, knowing who your client is, in particular, because you know the nuance of what that client is going through. A big part of working with a financial advisor is really having a trusted partner who can maybe understand your background or have some kind of specialty to help you articulate your goals and see opportunities that you maybe weren't aware of. And this is something that I'm seeing described a lot as the human value of a certain profession.

and that's just what you can't get from working with an AI tool. So can you define a little bit more clearly how you understand this human value? And what might you say to people who think, oh, if I just keep chatting with this chatbot, they'll get close enough. When you think about the goal of a financial advisor, you think about the goal of wealth, right? Like, why do we acquire wealth? We acquire wealth because at some point in time,

we don't want to be reliant on an income, a bonus, a paycheck anymore. It really boils down to we all want to have more control over our time. The goal for a lot of our clients is not to die with the most money possible. It's not to die with the most efficient tax structure. The goal is to be able to maximize life experience. And I think that's where an advisor can say, hey, here are all the things that you can be doing. And let's just put out 20 things. Maybe 20 out of 20 is the right thing to do.

But maybe it's 14 out of 20. Maybe it's 10 out of 20. And what we do in our plan is to say, hey, let's say you don't go the full distance of all the things that the LLM is recommending for you. Let's say we don't do 20 out of 20. Let's say we get 14 out of 20. But you know what? You're fine.

You have a very little risk of running out of money. But you maximize some of these life experiences. So I'll just give one quick example. We have a client of ours who's 62 years old, recently retired, has a pension, but also to make the choice like, do I take Social Security? Now, the right decision is to take it at 70. If he waits till 70, he's going to maximize his Social Security benefit. He's like, you know what?

I feel really good right now. My wife feels really good. We're healthy. We're active. Having that extra money today is going to change our life in a dramatic way. So we modeled it out to say, hey, look, let's look into your 90s. Taking Social Security at 70 is the right decision. That will maximize their wealth.

It's the textbook right decision. It's a textbook right decision. However, taking it at 62, they're still making it. They're still fine. They have very little risk of running out of money, but it maximizes that period from 62 to 70. They don't get this back. We don't know what health issues are waiting for them at 71. So they want to maximize life today. And that's not wrong. It's a values-based right decision, right? But I think the problem, though, is people get these, they see these blogs, they see these podcasts, they see, you know, what their friends are doing. And now they get these LLM saying, you are an idiot if you're not doing this. And they come to us almost like looking for permission to say, I know this is dumb, but I really want to do this. And we're here to say it's actually not dumb. It actually makes an enormous amount of sense. Let's just put it through the plan, though, to make sure that. you're not going to find yourself financially compromised at 85. And to the extent that we can check the box and sign up on that, you're going to be fine. Like, all day long, take more money at 62, 63. Live your life. You don't get this time back.

What's been remarkable is seeing how much some people are trusting these tools almost to a fault. And what you're describing is almost reminding people that they have free will and that they can make their own decisions as people. And they don't need to be relying on what a computer that has been cleverly designed, to speak like a person so you are emotionally invested in the conversation is spitting out for you. It's interesting. I had one prospective client once who said, I really like you. You're the favorite in terms of the people I've met so far. However, I'm having a hard time hiring you because you can do this job from anywhere and you choose to be in New York City. You choose to be in one of the highest tax jurisdictions in the world. Like, how can I trust you if you, if you choose to be in New York City? You choose to be in one of the highest tax jurisdictions

in the world. Like, how can I trust you if you, if you choose to be in New York City. You choose to be in New York City. You choose to be in the if you are living in such a high tax jurisdiction. And I said, do you want to know why I live in New York City? And he goes, yeah, because I like it. Yeah, because I like it. And you know what? I know I'm paying more taxes than I need to. I couldn't move somewhere else.

I don't want to. But then you're not in New York. No, because everything is not about saving money, right? Some of it is about quality of life and making choices that make you happy is part of quality of life. He hired us, by the way. But he was very embarrassed about the question. He read all the blogs. He's so by the book.

He's like, if there's 20 things I should be doing, I'm hitting 20 out of 20. I'm a super high achiever. And it was one of those things like he couldn't understand why I'm not doing 20 out of 20. And it's like because it controls your life. It's funny. I mean, we keep mentioning this book, this textbook of what you should be doing. And I think it almost comes down to are you relying on what the book of like everything that's on the internet that's being condensed into an LLM is telling you to do?

Or are you actually going to have your own book? with blank pages that you can write yourself. That's exactly right. And I think that you need to overlay it with some intention and understand like what does your best life look like and then have the money decisions fit that, not the other way around. And the LLMs can't do that.

Right. That's the magic 20-ish percent of working with an advisor is understanding your goals. I mean, that's basically the first step of the financial planning process is understanding like where you are and what you wanted to be doing with your money. Can you talk about how you, you approach that when you're talking with a client and, you know, really where the value is there that people might not be aware of? Yeah, I mean, I think first and foremost, it's within the financial

plan. Some people come to us with very clearly defined goals. Some people say, I don't really have any goals, but I know I need to be doing something. So regardless if you have 10 goals or if you have zero goals, what we always start with is we say financial independence is mandatory. So again, maybe someone's goals I want to reach financial independence at 42 years old. Okay, fine. someone says, I'd never really thought about it. Okay, what we always do is we target for financial independence in our modeling at 55. So we say, okay, this is the longest we want to wait before you are in control. It doesn't mean you have to retire at 55.

It just means that if something happens, you could stop working at the age of 55. So we always start with our modeling with, hey, let's look at financial independence at 55. Now let's back into what do we need to be putting in motion today? And that's then when you can start thinking about the order of operations between, okay, what should you be doing between maxing out your 401K, maybe the mega backdoor Roth, maybe doing a traditional IRA or Roth IRA, you know, building up a taxable account. It's first starting like, what's the destination? Where are we going?

And then let's back into, okay, what are the right vehicles to use and what are the right strategies to use in order to get there? But one thing that's really important to note, though, is you need to include a certain amount of wiggle room because life happens. So I can tell you that, again, our plan or model, it's not reality. It's an abstraction of reality. This is what could happen. It's not what's going to happen. So that's where, again, within the plan or within the short term, we have to include a certain amount of flexibility in a wiggle room, knowing that life reveals itself.

and it might not reveal itself in the way that we think it's going to today, in both good ways and bad ways. Something I feel like we have briefly touched on, but maybe not enough, is that sometimes these tools are inaccurate. When you have someone who, for example, has no financial knowledge using this as their, you know, beginning and end of financial advice, they may not be able to poke any holes because they have nothing to refer from. There's garbage in, garbage out, but also some of these models, and I'm not going to throw shade in anyone in particular. but, you know, I've seen blogs and podcasts where people have said, oh, here's a calculator to use to show like this is what your savings rate is, this is how much you'll have. And when I kind of dig into it, it's like, okay, you're just assuming a straight-lying 12% annualized rate of return.

12%. Yeah. I was like, I hope you're right. That'd be great. I hope you're right. But history doesn't tell us that that's likely to happen. That leaves very little room for error. So that's where if you're, 30 years old and you're like, oh, great, let me put in this tool. Okay, here's my savings rates and I'll be great by 55. And the annualized return for the next 20 years turns out to be 6%. You are way off course. For our modeling, we use forward looking capital markets assumptions based on market conditions today, et cetera. So right now, like the stock market forward looking returns, according to their models, is like 6.5%. So it's not conservative for the sake of being

conservative, it's looking to say, hey, where are we right now with respect to stock multiples? Where are we in the market cycle? So on and so forth. And saying, hey, you know, if we've annualized over the last three years at 18, 19 percent, that's unlikely to be sustainable going forward. So what we see is we see a very detailed look of what truly could the worst of the worst case scenarios look like? What could the best of the best case scenarios look like?

And let's plan for maybe not the worst of the worst of the worst case, but let's look on the downside to get comfortable and be able to touch and feel okay with the downside scenarios. If you don't know what goes into the model, if you don't know how the model is calculating these assumptions and the variability around these assumptions, you could be setting yourself up on the wrong course. And just being a little off can have pretty dramatic consequences. I was going to ask if you can see a future state where the role of the advisor is really leaning very heavily into the soft skills, helping people see through crises and resolve these unknowns about what should I be doing with my finances to get the life that I want, and maybe having

less technical skill, like maybe relying less on Monte Carlo simulations or other tools that are your disposal. It seems like you think that that's not going to be the case, that the technical knowledge of CFPs and other advisors is going to be just as important, perhaps not more so than it is now. Yeah. I mean, I think they're both going to be very important. Again, you could have an LLM, run a financial plan for a client, give you the script to relay it back to the client and have it be pretty accurate. But this is a trust business. And if the client starts sniffing around that you don't know what you're talking about, or if they're clients asking very nuanced questions about it, the only way that you're going to know how to answer the nuance is if you have a deep

understanding of these things, it's going to be very hard for you to be able to work with your clients in an effective way. I've been in this business for 22 years. I'm a chartered financial analyst, and I will say on the investing front, it's like, the more I know, the more I don't know. And then the more I don't know, the more I want to know, and then the better that I get. But I also have learned that the more technical I've gotten over my career, the better equipped I am at explaining things to someone that knows nothing. Yeah. And it's fascinating because I can always see someone who is a newbie because they talk in very technical language and they're throwing everything at you and you know like, okay, they read one book and they think they're an expert on

this now. And in reality, though, they don't really know how to explain what's going on underneath the hood. So I would say again, to be able to effectively work with your clients going forward, I do think you're going to have to have the technical skills. You're going to have to know what's under the hood, but then you're also going to need the soft skills to be able to articulate it in a way that the clients understand it and the clients trust. How do you think your work is going to change based on the tools that we are currently seeing in the path that looks like they're on? What do you think might be the biggest shift in how you are using these tools and working

with clients and providing your human value that you just outlined? I think one of the biggest changes is the coaching piece of it all. So again, we always say our offering is planning, coaching, and investing. and I don't really hear a lot of other firms talking about the coaching piece of it. So I think coaching is going to become a much bigger part of the relationship that financial advisors have with their clients. Because again, these tools are going to be able to, again, build the best model portfolio for somebody.

They're going to be able to do the planning with a good deal of accuracy that's just going to need a little bit of kind of refinement and fine tuning. But that's that coaching piece and that here's what everything's telling us. But then how do you take that and then how do you apply it to an individual who has emotions, who has biases, who has certain fears, who has maybe some delusional optimism, and then be able to coach them to decisions that make the most sense for them. I think there's still going to be important, the planning and the investing piece. I think we're going to be able to get there much faster.

So I think, again, the special sauce is going to come in the coaching and in the nuance. nerd wallet, we provide a lot of different types of content, right? We provide articles, because I know we focused a lot on using a financial advisor, but we provide articles, videos, and all of that type of information that people can consume. So how do you think people can decide whether it makes sense to use an AI bot, for example, or go to an article? And I don't know about you, Ryan. Or a podcast for that matter. Thank you. Or our podcast. And I don't know about you, Ryan, but now we go on Google and you have an AI summary before you can even start digging into articles and reading for yourself. I'll give a plug to you guys and I mean this with all sincerity. I think podcasts are

probably the best way to consume content today because of the nuance of it all. There is something about hearing people articulate certain topics, whether it's really complex and technical or more along the lines of lifestyle design. I think podcasts are best equipped to really be a able to tug on both the technical as well as the emotional part of wealth or really anything for that matter. You're not going to get that in an LLM. You're just not. There's a lot of value in seeing how other people have written their own book instead of just relying on the textbook. And I think that's something that Elizabeth and I provide on this show too, as we talk about how we have very different backgrounds and lives, but that we are still making our finances, what we want

them to be based on our own values and our own priorities. And again, you're not going to get that just by talking with a chatbot. That's right. That's right. It's about your values. It's about your life. It's about how money plays a role in your life, not, again, being controlled by money, by taxes, by Roth IRAs, by whatever these tools are,

which are all great. Again, like, I'm not sure I did any of them. There's a place for them. However, lifestyle design and intention is going to play a much bigger role. One of the main takeaways is the human element and how important that is in finances, whether that comes from a financial advisor or podcast where we share our personal stories, articles where they're also sharing personal stories and experiences. I think the human element plays a humongous part in managing your finances, and that's something that AI

doesn't have. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on and talking about all this with us today. Yeah, I know. I really enjoyed this, and I hope to be back again. Ryan is a wealth advisor with nerd wallet wealth partners. So if you're considering working with a financial planner like Ryan, then we want you to visit nerd walletwealthpartners.com slash smart. We're going to include link to that site in today's episode description. And that's all we have for this episode. Remember a listener that we're here to answer your money questions. So hit us up on the nerd hotline. You can call us or text us at 901 7306373. It's 901 730 nerd. Nerdd. You can also email your questions to podcast at nerdwalla.com or leave us a comment on Spotify or YouTube. Join us next time where we help a listener rehab their budget and figure out how best to use an additional $1,000 a month. Follow smart money on your

favorite podcast app that is Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and IHeartRadio to automatically download new episodes. Here's our brief disclaimer. We are not your financial or investment advisors. This nerdy info is provided for general educational and entertainment purposes and may not apply to your specific circumstances. This episode is produced by Tess Figland, Hillary Georgie, help with editing, Nick Carysami and Eve Progman, Halmar Audio, and video production. And a huge thank you to Nerdwallis editors for all their help. And with that said, until next time, turn to the nerd. Yes.