There is a growing trend on social media, including Instagram, TikTok and other platforms, where influencers are increasingly providing personal finance advice. The general public is also trusting AI more and more to answer their personal finance questions.
Mitlin Financial founder and wealth advisor Lawrence Sprung joined Robert 'Bob' Powell on Decoding Retirement to discuss misinformation in the digital age and whether or not it has become a problem for the general public.
'Finfluencer' (decoded)
A "finfluencer" is a combination of the words "finance" and "influencer." It describes individuals who leverage social media platforms—like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube—to share advice and information about personal finance, investing, budgeting, and other financial topics.
"When you're scrolling and looking at some of these folks that are giving the advice, you have to be very careful about who you're taking the advice from," Sprung explained. "We've seen in recent years, people giving out and espousing this advice, as you say, and people following it, and two weeks later, their TikTok handle is gone, evaporated because the information they gave was wrong or hurtful to those followers."
Let's turn our attention to the world of social media. Uh there are many, I guess they're described as what, finfluencers? Is that the term about?
I I yes. Yeah. Yeah.
So there's a lot of them out there on TikTok and Instagram and other places that are sort of espousing something or other about money. How do you help people evaluate who to trust and who not to trust in that world?
Yeah, it's it's a very difficult thing and I think when you're when you're scrolling and looking at some of these folks that are giving the advice, you have to be very careful about who you're taking the advice from. We've seen in recent years people giving out and espousing this advice as you say, and people following it. And two weeks later, their Tik Tok handle is gone, evaporated, because the information they gave was wrong or hurtful to those followers. So, you have to be careful and look for those individuals or those companies that have credentials. They have, you know, a following behind them, not just a social media following, a following of success in this profession. Uh we get calls all the time. Hey, I saw this on TikTok, should I do it? And you know what? There there are certain things on there that generally speaking, they're not bad. They're just not right for everyone. And then there are other things that say, you know, we've seen headlines like, you shouldn't put money in a 401K, put it into a whole life insurance policy. I don't think that works for most people and uh you have to be careful.
Yeah. So, a similar topic is uh related to AI and I've been uh recently asking AI, Perplexity, Chat GPT, Gemini, personal finance questions and then asking a subject matter expert to critique those answers. And invariably, it gets some stuff right, some stuff wrong, and then there are some serious material omissions. Um I would never trust AI at the moment with any personal finance question.
Not now. I mean I I've done the same. I've run questions by them to get topics for blog articles and things like that and I've noticed really a lot, you know, several inaccuracies there. So, I think you have to be very careful there as well. And you know, use it as maybe an idea generator, but have a expert or somebody that is a professional double check to make sure that what the AI is telling you can be done or the way to do it is actually something that would work for you or smart for you to do.
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"I've been recently asking Perplexity AI, ChatGPT, Gemini (GOOG, GOOGL) personal finance questions, and then asking the subject matter expert to critique those answers," Powell said. "And invariably it gets some stuff right, some stuff wrong, and then there's some serious material omissions. I would never trust AI at the moment with any personal finance question."
"I've done the same, I've run questions by them to get topics for blog articles and things like that, and I've noticed really several inaccuracies there," Sprung explained. "So I think you have to be very careful there as well."
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Yahoo Finance's Decoding Retirement is hosted by Robert Powell, and produced by Zach Faulds and Alexander Frangeskides.
Find more episodes of Decoding Retirement at http://goldberglawma.com/?id=videos/series/decoding-retirement.
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Editor's note: This post was written by Zach Faulds.
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