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."

Artificial intelligence

"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."

Retirement planning doesn’t mean locking up your money for a rainy day and forgetting about it. Planning your future means reacting to events today. Decoding Retirement gives you the tools to navigate the years ahead, and take action now!

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 https://www.cerveza-artesanal.com/videos/series/decoding-retirement.

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Editor's note: This post was written by Zach Faulds.