For years, tax-optimizing investing strategies were confined to hedge funds and ultrawealthy families with access to specialized financial planning. Now, they’re being pitched to the masses on YouTube and TikTok.
However, in a world dominated by TikTok influencers, Reddit forums, and algorithmic recommendations, family and friends are among the most important sources of financial advice for retails investors. The important question is whether this kind of advice actually helps investors make better decisions.
AI is powerful enough to analyze your finances in seconds and find things you’d probably miss. It can also end up with enough information to know every aspect of your financial life. So, how do you get the benefits without giving away more than you’re comfortable with?
And following financial advice from AI means respondents move towards life cycle theory: broader participation in diversified equity funds, age-declining equity shares, and larger savings buffers. Recommendations vary systematically by gender, prior AI experience, and financial literacy.
Retirement is not a single, static event where you simply flip a switch and stop working. It is an evolution. Dana Anspach breaks retirement down into an incredible framework called the Four Seasons of Retirement.
Interest rates may stay higher for longer. When the Fed raises rates, borrowing becomes more expensive, and consumers face higher costs for mortgages, car loans, and credit card debt.
Not all debt is created equal. Good debt pays you to hold it. Most debt, however, doesn’t work that way. Here are the five biggest ways debt erodes your ability to build wealth.
Inflation, which was held down for the last two months by falling fuel prices is set to rise again in next month’s data. Here’s an explanation for how the whole economy is working right now.
Medical innovation has transformed our lives, but hardly anyone realizes it. You can tell people that global life expectancy has doubled in a century and watch it fail to register. Few people know how much medicine has progressed in their lifetimes. Fewer know how much faster it could be progressing.
A massive egg recall affecting nearly 1.6m dozen eggs has been elevated to the US Food and Drug Administration’s highest-risk warning as officials investigate a salmonella outbreak that has sickened nearly 100 people.
Trump Accounts went live on July 4, 2026. Also known as the “Baby Bonus”, these are new tax-deferred savings accounts for kids under 18, created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. High-earning parents have three major questions to consider.
Prove It, Doctor
Somewhere in a windowless office, a credentialing specialist named Diane is deciding whether I exist.
She already holds my NPI, ten digits assigned for life, outlasting most marriages. She has the DEA registration I renew every three years for a fee that would cover a decent camera lens, plus the Medicare PTAN, the CAQH attestation that expires every four months (my medical school might rescind the diploma, you never know), and a parchment written in a dead language. Diane wants one more item before she signs: a certified copy of my birth certificate, raised seal, county clerk, from a state I left decades ago.
The hospital keepsake with my inky little feet stamped on it does not qualify. I asked twice.
The gray box at 4:47 in the morning
The EMR times out because I paused long enough to let a patient finish a sentence, and signing back in wants a password plus a six-digit code from a token I last saw in a coat pocket.
A box appears. Verify that you are a licensed physician.
Panel one: select all images containing a prior authorization. Panel two: type the characters in this blurred DEA number, and no, that is a 7, not a 1. Then the security question no bot could ever crack, the one asking for the name of the malignant fellow who made me cry in a stairwell in March of my intern year.
A server somewhere logs that the cursor moved with the tremor of a mammal nineteen hours into a shift, and waves me through. Verified.
Call it CADAVER: Continuous Attestation of Documented Aptitude and Verified Existence Requirement. It establishes two facts at once, that I hold a license and that I have not yet died, and the algorithm holds no strong preference between the findings so long as the form arrives by fax. Which it must.
We were the original proof-of-humanity project
Silicon Valley thinks it invented this problem. Sam Altman has people queueing on sidewalks to stare into a silver orb so a machine will certify them as human, and the tech press calls it dystopian.
Physicians have been getting scanned for decades. Fingerprints at a Live Scan storefront wedged next to a nail salon. A notarized statement of good moral character, which is real language on real state applications, as though the notary would know. An explanation, in writing, of the 34-day gap in my employment history in 2011, when I moved apartments.
None of that establishes competence. What it establishes is a paper trail on a person who can be sued, sanctioned, reported to the NPDB, and stripped of the ability to earn a living by a committee that meets on Tuesdays.
Which is where the value hides. A language model can chew through a question bank and draft a note that reads better than mine, yet it cannot hold privileges or sign a death certificate, because liability demands a body with a license number attached.
The credential expires before I do
Every hoop Diane makes me jump through wraps another course of barbed wire around something no bot can counterfeit. That moat has a shelf life, and mine falls short of my life expectancy by a margin I would rather not calculate on a Sunday.
Nobody issues you a count of remaining clinical years. You invent one, then argue with it in the shower. The wrist goes, or the nights stop being survivable, or private equity buys the group and installs a spreadsheet where the conscience used to sit.
So the arithmetic runs against a clock. Money earned by the license carries an expiration date, which makes the only reasonable move shoving it into assets that keep working the year my badge quits: index funds indifferent to whether I slept, tax-deferred space I actually fill rather than admire from across the room. I price shifts by what they cost my one life per hour instead of what they generate per RVU, and I have grown pleasantly rude about declining committee work that pays in gratitude.
Diane will keep asking me to prove I am alive and credentialed. The plan is to reach the year I no longer need to answer, and then answer anyway, from somewhere with better light.
Thanks for stopping by!
Jorge Sanchez, MD
