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Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

Stock/bond ratios are way too advanced for what's qualifying as good advice here:

> AI consistently advised people to save during their working years, draw down savings in retirement, invest heavily in diversified stock funds, and reduce stock exposure after age 45.

This is analogous to saying to an aspiring software developer, "You should write clean and testable code, have clearly defined API boundaries, and a repeatable build process." All very true, but also so general and basic that it's not helpful.

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It's not helpful to the kind of person whose recreational weekend reading includes MIT Sloan analyses. Most Americans don't have what I suspect you'd consider a basic level of financial literacy (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/your-money/americans-fina...), and do need to be informed about things like the compounding effect of savings or the benefit of diversification.

Its also not helpful to the person who doesn't. How much to save, when to save, how to diversify, what rate of exposure to equities is too much, how much to with draw in retirement? And thats just questions on the answer it gave. But what about if I have a loan bearing interest? What about if I'm self employed? What if my appetite for risk is less, greater? What if I want to retire early?

It gave vague unspecified advice that isn't actionable and didn't provide any weight to tradeoffs.

Why do you think it gave vague advice? The paper has a sample of provided advice in Table 1 that seems pretty specific. (I attempted to quote it, but it triggers the HN spam filters, presumably because it's a chunk of LLM generated text substantially larger than my actual comment.)

Sometimes I wonder if some folks have even used AI. Maybe this is your chance: AI will easily take you down a rabbit hole of financial advice beyond your ability to understand it, including up to date research. Far beyond what 99% of people would find useful or interesting.

And similar to the low quality of developers...

If you are even thinking about writing clean and testable code, having clearly defined API boundaries, and keeping a repeatable build process, you are probably already significantly above average.

If you are even trying to save, invest diversified, and manage risk as you age... you're probably doing better than like 80% of your peers financially

Uncle Bob is a worse programmer than Casey Muratori, and he does nothing but think about clean code.

Right, that's the 'what', but not the 'how'.

> Prompt: but I don't have enough money to save, I can barely make ends meet.

> AI: I see the problem now---If you don't have enough money to save, and reducing your expenses is not an option, then the answer is clear: make more money.

AI is right on the money here (pun intended)

I don't know why you're being downvoted here. A huge amount of 'financial advice' boils down to 'stop being poor,' which is to say it's about what to do with your economic surplus rather than what to do if you don't have one and aren't long on avocado toast.

I didn't downvote them, but I am genuinely curious to hear from people who "can't save money", and try to understand why that's the case. My assumption is that a large percent of them are spending way more than they need to, but that could easily be an incorrect stereotype.

It's actually almost certainly true just on the basis of basic numbers. Many people who are really actually quite poor (making say under $35k CAD annually for a family of 5) manage to make ends meet and even save a little. So if you make more than this but can't save any it's because you're spending on things they are not and which are therefore nonessential.

Now maybe restaurant food, name brand groceries, driving two SUVs, vacations, etc etc whatever it is for a given person are seen as essential. That's how lifestyle works after all and we often can't imagine our lives without it. So I'm not saying it's a "simple" matter of just spend less because it's often not very simple feeling. But from a numbers PoV it is possible for most people who otherwise see themselves as struggling in theory.

Are you excluding all the people with disabilities or chronic illnesses or supporting children or parents or other dependents with disabilities?

Not at all! I would guess that a sizable minority of "can't save money" people are in that position due to chronic illness or supporting others.

I have no idea what it costs to support a family member with a disability; probably varies wildly but I would guess it's about the same annual cost as raising a child? Except that annual cost never goes away.

No offense, but: you need to get out of the house more. It'll answer your question very quickly.

Federal Reserve studies indicate that 10-15% of the US population can’t save money due to fundamental financial realities. That is, the necessary expenses of an ordinary lifestyle consumes all of their income. That is tens of millions of people.

There is another ~30% that expand their lifestyle to consume all available income. Not saving is a choice for this part of the population.

Thanks; can you share a link to these stats?

Because at a certain point, "spend below your means, save as much as you can" is the financial advice most people are unable to follow, yet determines 90% of the outcome.

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