This already happened 10-20 years ago when personal finance got big on the Internet, it’s just taking a long time to play out.

It was never about ROI anyway, just preservation of capital and peace of mind - makes a lot of sense in the analog/less automated financial world of yore when non-professionals were writing checks or wiring money to people over the phone, and checking stock prices in the paper.

There will also never be a way to pay $10/mo for Gecko+ and trade your way to a lambo with it, because whatever advantage an amateur investor might have is purely from their niche knowledge/information/heterodox beliefs, though I give it about 6-18 months until we’re hearing all about it because it’s a timeless siren song.

This is spot on and has been my experience. The tax-efficiency and lot-selection work it can provide is easily more valuable than a human advisor charging $2,000 for boilerplate. However, I know my P&L best and it has to ride shotgun while I am making the final decisions and I should know the overall strategy — should i be 80/20, have this much tech concentration, will 8% hold, tax implications in my state etc.

99% of it would just be a search of Bogleheads wiki.

Financial planning is mostly a solved problem. For whatever goal and situation a person is looking for, there's already an optimal path that has been long proven.

The only times you need very custom advice is at very high levels of networth or ownership, as in "you want to sell stock but you have to physically find the buyers and negotiate deals because you can't just sell on the open market without disrupting the price"

Lol. You don't even need AI for that 99% boiler plate. Save 6-12 months of expenses in cash, DCA the rest into total market stock index funds. But people still pay expensive advisors to get worse results.

What’s the one piece of advice everyone sells but you think should be free?