Well, this month I'm going to tell you about the weird project I've been working on in my off hours that might just answer that question. Then we'll play a quick game to see if you have what it takes to be a financial planner. And yes, we'll talk taxes too, but I'm saving that for the end with your checklists and some required regulatory reading. Think of it as dessert. Fiber-rich, compliance approved dessert.
What's Next for AI?
I'm going to get out my crystal ball and predict the future. I see you putting on your Mask of Skepticism. Wise move friend, my wife did the same thing. But what I haven't told you is I am cheating. I have been out to the frontier land of the AI world and I am back with exciting and weird news to share with you.
In early February, I decided that I was going to dive head first into the world of AI and see if I could learn anything useful about how that rapidly changing world might affect our lives and our long term future. It's important to know that I haven't coded anything since my computer science class in my senior year of high school. I made a game where you could guess which dot would race across a screen the fastest, like an 8-bit horse race.
I decided I would use AI to help me build my own AI agent. This is different from the standard AI that you have used so far. Think of ChatGPT or Google's Gemini in a chat box. You ask it a question and it gives you an answer.
An AI agent is more like an employee. You give it a goal and it takes the necessary steps to complete it. I built my agent using an open source project called OpenClaw (that means the code is free and anyone can use it, modify or contribute to it) and named it Hermes (the Greek messenger god). I gave Hermes its own full Google suite: Gmail, calendar, docs, spreadsheets and the ability to use a browser and search the web. This is the basic toolkit you give any employee these days.
Hermes' job was to become our family manager and help us with the mental burden of all of the things that come with parenting two young children and managing a household. So I started by giving it read-only access to our family calendar and now it knows what kid activities and trips we have coming up, birthday parties, dinner plans and even when we take the trash out. Then I started automatically forwarding all of the school emails to Hermes and he now reads it, tells us when things are coming up, what actions we may need to take and creates a calendar event and adds it to the family calendar.
I'm not done yet. Hermes prepares a weekly report for myself and my wife for the upcoming week. That report contains the top action items that are coming up. There's a meal plan based on what's on sale at the grocery stores we frequent, the produce that's in season at the time and pulls the recipes with links from our 5 favorite cooking blogs to populate into our shopping list. It tells us when we have no plans for a weekend evening and provides suggestions for fun date night ideas like local concerts or performances. It recently highlighted that I'll be solo-parenting for a week soon and advised me to prepare simple meals and remember to have some time for self-care.
This last week, we started forwarding all of our travel confirmations and Hermes created a nice spreadsheet of our trips with individual tabs for itinerary, grocery list, packing list, budget, local attractions and emergency resources. When I have feedback, Hermes takes it and updates itself to remember that I don't actually want to go to 3 different grocery stores in one week, just pick one and make it all work. Done, redo the current meal plan and remember that for all the future ones.
The best part is that all of our primary interactions exist in a group chat with Hermes and if I don't want to text it, I just send a voice message if I'm walking to go pick up the kids from school.
This is what the frontier of AI looks like. But as are many things on the bleeding edge, this thing is fragile and frequently makes mistakes. I've seen more error codes than I can count while trying to build this. Updates are a two step forward, one-step back affair. This is the beta software that's so unpolished that it would be an embarrassment to try and sell something that breaks so often. This is why I won't be using Hermes or any similar agent to do the work that I do for you anytime soon. What I do for you requires a high degree of accuracy, thoughtfulness and the utmost levels of security so that your data and accounts stay safe. Safety first, second and third.
One additional note on my current AI usage. Your personal private data is not being submitted to these AI models like ChatGPT and the like. There are few safeguards on data that is sent out there. I treat these tools as highly experimental and non-private. My primary usage of AI is for notetaking and research on broad subject matters. Kimberly and myself are still the engine that does everything behind the scenes.
Back to Hermes: If I can vibe code this (that's what the kids call building software by describing what you want to AI and letting it do the coding) in my off hours as my first real software project in my adult life, think about what the big tech companies can do. Before the end of the year, you will hear agents or some other more marketable proprietary term for something that can actually start to act like a personal assistant, researcher, blog writer (not me though, I'm still doing it the old fashion way with my own brain), marketing manager, code reviewer, etc… Anything that is repetitive that you can describe to an intern to do without much training is within reach here.
I'm barely scratching the surface of its capabilities. But imagine being able to say, "Hey Siri, take care of my email so I don't have a comma in my number of unread emails anymore. Thanks." I'm not sure what this means for the future of work. That is a whole separate discussion. And I'm not even sure how I feel about all of this. But what I do know is that significant change is coming and it's becoming less theoretical now. Hermes is real and lives in our laundry room.
I'm not sure I have a neat conclusion for you other than the next wave of AI is coming. It's weird, it's wild, it's very capable and things will change rapidly. The chat is out of the box.
Could You Be a Financial Planner?
Let's play a game. I'm going to ask you one question, and all you have to do is give me the right answer. Ready? Here it is: Should wealthy parents be gifting money to their children?
If you said yes, you could be wrong. If you said no, you could also be wrong. The correct answer, the one that earns you the financial planning merit badge (or bobble head for those who have been following along), is "it depends." And those two words are doing a lot of heavy lifting, so let me show you what's underneath them.
When the answer is yes, it can be yes for four reasons at once. Your kids get help now, during the years when it makes the biggest difference, when they're building careers, raising families, managing mortgages. A dollar today is worth more to a 35-year-old than the same dollar inherited at 65.
But don't just hand them cash. If you're gifting appreciated securities and your children are in a lower tax bracket, the capital gains on those shares could be taxed at a very low rate. Potentially zero. You read that right.
That avoidance of your taxable income increasing because you didn't sell, your children will, can help you stay below the thresholds for IRMAA (that's Medicare's surcharge for higher earners). Avoid that surcharge and you've just given yourself a raise of potentially thousands of dollars in a year.
If the source of your gift is from your retirement account, every dollar you move out of your retirement accounts today is a dollar that won't be compounding into a larger Required Minimum Distribution down the road. For those of you staring down RMDs that are bigger than you need, this is a pressure valve.
Four birds. One stone.
That's the kind of move that makes my work deeply satisfying. You know that feeling when everything just clicks? When you find the play that solves four problems at once? For me, it's like being a fighter pilot threading the needle through a Jerry Bruckheimer explosion, coming out the other side, flipping the visor up: "Bogey down. Mission accomplished. I'm coming home, Momma!"
But when the answer is no, it's no for very good reasons too. Your own retirement projections might not be as bulletproof as they look. Your children's tax situation could be more complicated than you think. The gift might trigger consequences you didn't anticipate. The details matter, and that's exactly why "it depends" is the only honest starting point.
If this little game got you thinking about your own family's situation, that's a conversation we'd love to have. This is precisely the kind of puzzle we're built to solve. Reach out anytime.
Taxes: We're Almost There
I won't make this a super long section with tax strategies, just take a look at the links to the PDF checklists below. It's not exhaustive, but it is a list to make sure you're not missing the major common items.
Once you've filed your taxes, please send me a copy. The best way is to upload it to the Vault in Right Capital. This gives me better insight to help you strategize on taxes moving forward. If you're still filing it and need help, let us know.
Regulatory Updates
Every year, the SEC requires registered investment advisors to deliver an updated summary of their Form ADV and Privacy Policy to clients. Think of it as the annual disclosure tune-up. You'll find both documents attached to this email. Nothing has materially changed in how we operate or how we protect your information, but we want you to have the latest versions on file. If anything catches your eye or you have questions, you know where to find us.
Please see these links to download both of those documents: