Personal finances

I’ve spent most of my free time the last couple nights working through my family’s finances to figure out our new healthcare elections. My wife is switching jobs and we needed to figure out whose health plan was better and where Colin would go, and whether we should we should put the entire family on one plan.

Of course, part of this was figuring out our personal plans for next year and also doing a sense check on cash flows for next year. I used to update my family’s balance sheet monthly, and then it went to quarterly, and now it’s more on an as-needed basis usually 2-3 time a year. This exercise helps me check in on our plan and keep things in check.

We are fortunate that I don’t need to run the exercise nearly as often as I used to. It’s a fairly cumbersome exercise all done via Excel. I’ve tried various platforms and tools, and there just isn’t anything that has the flexibility that I need or want. I do suspect that as our net worth grows to a certain point, we’ll be more inclined to focus on the bigger picture and no longer need the flexibility in Excel.

Even for someone like myself who is very knowledgeable in the financial world and works in finance for a living, it’s a tedious task. Figuring out which insurance plan(s) to pick and how to best allocate between the members of our family including HSAs, FSAs, etc. can get a bit complex with thousands of dollars of tax implications.

I’m lucky to work in this world and be able to run the numbers fairly easily, and that still took hours out of my evenings the last couple days. ChatGPT helped, but was clearly still riddled with errors and provided a recommendation that was impossible.

If I’m perhaps in the 1% of people that is qualified to handle these financial matters, and it still took me this long, then it’s evident to me that the 99% out there likely need a ton of help still. This is why financial advisors exist and the industry is booming. There is still a ton of room for improvement in this industry and AI is going to be the catalyst that helps serve the masses.