Note: all opinions stated here are my own 🙂
Intro
A few months ago I saw some chatter on financial planning twitter about this new AI-tool that generates a “free financial plan” for people in as little as 10 minutes without having to talk to a single human.
Most planners are aware that this tool generates crap, but someone was trying to make a point about whether or not tools like this take away from actual financial planning because the people likely to use this tool don’t “know any better”.
I can see where he’s coming from, but I decided to look into this tool myself just to see what it really is, what it’s capable of generating and learn more about the company behind a tool like this.
About FreeFinancialPlanning.com and the Company Behind it, Anasova, INC.
FreeFinancialPlan.com is a service provided by Anasova, Inc., a lead generating software company for financial advisors. Their “Free Financial Plan” software is powered by AI.
According to the fine print on their website, anything generated on the FreeFinancialPlan.com site is for educational purposes only and is not meant to be considered personalized advice in any way.
There terms of use is here: https://www.anasova.com/termsofuse
As per usual with most things that are given away for “free”, the exchange for getting access to this free tool is that the company then sells the information you provided to advertisers.
The main company Anasova is a lead generating software company for financial advisers so this isn’t really all that surprising to me.
I do find it funny that in their Terms of Use, they specifically state: You do not consider it to be a Financial Plan, but just a “plan”, like “I plan to have dinner tomorrow”.
In fact they made several statements about how nothing that is generated in this tool is at all a plan. They state that their “plans” contain zero personalized advice and that math errors and factual errors are to be expected.
All this to say, this “Free Financial Plan” seems like it is just a tool created by a software company to sell the information you provide to a 3rd party financial advisors/firms so that those firms can then prospect you for their services.
Note: Since completing the plan in January 2024, I have only been contacted twice by individuals trying to prospect their services and haven’t really received any other spam that I’ve noticed.
The Process
After confirming the company was in fact “legit” and not a total scam, I decided to take one for the team and give it a shot (after all that’s the point of the whole blog post lol).
After clicking “Get Started” on the main page, you will be prompted to either continue immediately or ask for more information.
The more information section briefly describes how this tool will create a “Financial Plan” for you that will outline your goals, then be used to help match you with companies that can best give you financial advice and then after that you can choose to engage with the matches or not.
After clicking yes, you are then asked a series of questions.
Here are all the questions as well as the selection of answers:
- Question 1 – are you married? Yes, No, or No, but let’s treat it like Yes.
- Question 2 – are you retired? No, Yes with more than $200k, or Yes with under $200k.
- Question 3 – children? Yes, No
- Question 4 – what do you think about debt? I’m comfortable with strategic debt, I would prefer to be debt-free
- Question 5 – You and your partner’s First Name (they state they do not need your personal info, just want you want to be called for the rest of the survey)
- Question 6 – You and your partner’s age
- Question 7 and 8 – Your credit score and then your partner’s credit score
- Question 9 – what is your annual household income? Above or below $250,000
- Question 10 – what is your total household income? This one you are given the option to actually pick your household income.
- Question 11 – how much does your household save annually? $0, between $0 and $50k, above $50k
- Question 12 – same as above, but this time you state your actual savings.
- Question 13 – how much does your household owe on credit cards? $0, between $0 and $1,000, above $1,000.
- Question 14 – excluding home and cash, how much does your household have in investments? $0, between $1,000 – $100,000, between $100k-$500k, above $500k.
- Question 15 – same question, but this time you pick
- Question 16 – Asks you to list out the value of your other assets including cash, cars, homes, and personal property.
- Question 17 – asks you to list out your debts including car loan balances, mortgages, student loans, and other debts.
- Question 18 – what state do you live in
- Question 19 – what would you like to cover today? Improve my near-term financial wellness (reduce my financial stress), Plan for my long-term success (retirement). You can select both.
- Question 20 – rate your financial stress from 0 – 10.
- Question 21 – It looks like your household would like about $X,XXX per month after taxes to live on without needing to work. How much would you actually like? (I believe the estimated amount comes from your household income number provided in question 10).
- Question 22 – how much inheritance do you anticipate you will receive?
- Question 23 – Annual social security & pension income. (they will provide an estimate for your social security)
- Question 24 – Around what age do you plan to stop working? Around 60, between 60 – 70, around 70 or older.
- Question 25 – Do you have medical/health insurance? Life insurance? And have you received a home insurance quote in the past two years?
- Question 26 – Do you have a will that is up to date?
- Question 27 – Check any of the following that apply to you: own a small business, have a “side hustle”, have stock options, interested in crypto, own investment real estate.
- Question 28 – Do you have a service to monitor your credit? Do you use a password protection app?
- Question 29 – What to include in your plan: details or just a summary please.
- Question 30 – Choose your preference for your output: No ads, just ideas, include ads in my plan (and no copy via email). *Note: if you choose the no ad option, you are required to give your email in order to get your plan while if you do opt into ads you don’t have to provide them with your email)
That’s a LOT of questions- a lot more than what most advisors will ask up front before an initial consultation or even for the first meeting. That said, a lot of information obtained from questions like this are necessary to build a financial plan and make projections. However, (spoilers) this tool only generates basic projections that are pretty questionable…
But enough of that, onto the next section!
Review of “The Plan” Itself
Once you answer all of the questions, your “plan” is generated.
I chose the detailed option so the initial PDF result was a 12 page “financial plan”.
Spoilers, a total of 3 PDF documents were available for me to download and in the end the final page total was 27.
The following is a breakdown of each document provided, what was listed on each of the pages and snapshots of certain pages to show what they look like.
Financial Plan Document #1
Sample Pages:
Complete Page Breakdown:
- Page 1 is a cover page
- Page 2 is a summary of what’s included in the plan
- Page 3 is a summary of the information I provided to them formatted into some tables. One of the tables is in a net worth summary format.
- Page 4 dives into your primary goal and gives some “advice” for meeting that goal. Note, I picked both options given to me (reduce stress and plan for retirement), but it only gave me analysis for one of those goals (reduce stress).
- Page 5 is an action plan.
- Page 6 is other insights derive from the information you provided compared to other users who have completed this free financial plan tool.
- Page 7 is just… a nothing page
- Page 8 dives deeper into your balance sheet/net worth with some minimal education on what is net worth and what goes into it. Note: the title of this page is “What is the minimum we should understand?” which is… weird? This is definitely something in my opinion that is a result of the use of AI to generate this document.
- Page 9 is more about their matching process with bidders
- Page 10 provides a link to review the other financial planning goal not reviewed if you selected both options.
- Page 11 is a disclosure page and Page 12 is a page asking you to rate your financial plan.
Let’s go back to the link in Page 10 and review that….
Clicking that link generates another financial plan document. This one was 9 pages for me.
Financial Plan Document #2
Sample Pages:
Complete Document Breakdown:
- Page 1 and 2 are the same as the previous document.
- Page 3 is Tilted “The Mystery of Financial Planning” and goes into the factors that determine your financial future like how long you work, how you invest, how much you save, and what you do with debt Tis pa. Then it goes on to try to explain the science and math behind trying to determine your retirement number. This page is mainly “informational”, but it clearly reads like it was written by AI.
- Page 4 is an executive summary of your retirement need projections. This information provided in this section is very wishy-washy. The AI bot goes on about how “some people might need this, but other people might need this. Most of your peers need this amount though, and this is what you should try to shoot for”. I know from doing projections myself that the number they gave me, is so, SO far off from what I actually need and the AI bot does not explain at all what went into calculating the numbers it generated.
- Page 5 is titled “Your Strategic Financial Plan” and outlines key concepts to consider when planning for retirement and gives “tips” on how to achieve these. Most of the “advice” here is decent, but again not anything special. It is all generic advice you can find via Google or many personal finance blogs like “pay down debt that’s above 7% interest”, “shoot for 5% investment returns to beat inflation”.
- Page 6 is titled “Decision Making Framework” and goes into the logic behind paying off debt vs investing. This question I feel is one of the most asked questions this community and this page is actually pretty decent job of nicely organizing the logic presented by a lot of sources out there on how you should go about this decision.
- Page 7 is titled “Why These Ideas in Your Strategic Plan”….. Okay AI bot. This page seems to go over the different possibilities of how much you’ll need in retirement vs what you will have based on different retirement ages. Again, no details are provided on how this table was generated or the math that went behind creating these numbers so to me, everything is just bogus. This page also provides yet another link to “dive deeper into the details”.
Let’s see where that link takes us….
Supplemental Details to the Financial Plan
Sample Pages:
Complete Document Breakdown:
- Page 1 is the cover page
- Page 2 goes straight into the assumptions that are going into the presumed projections for retirement.
- Page 3 explains a bit about how taxes work in retirement and shows a chart of the different ways you could be taxes based on how you get your income. Not too bad of a chart since it does do a good job of visually showing how different sources of income can impact your tax situation in the future and it loosely ties this back to the decision you make now. It doesn’t fully drive that connection though, but I understand what it’s trying to say.
- Page 4 goes into the assumptions used in the retirement calculations and an explanation of each of the three scenarios presented which range from ultra-conservative to ultra-liberal.
- Page 5 and 6 are disclosures and request for feedback.
Rating the Content of the Plans
Overall, I would rate the contents of these plans a 2/10 for people already involved in the FI space and a 4/10 for absolute newbies.
The content generated for these plans is not 100% trash, but it’s a lot of junk that you don’t really need a tool like this to tell you.
You can easily look up Investopedia’s definition of a financial plan and follow what they list out there and come to the exact same conclusion. There’s also just the “AI” aspect of it with it’s misuse of certain terms and poor grammar at times.
The “advice” is very generic and the basic education provided is stuff you can easily find on Google or any personal finance blogger in the FI space. Then there are the “projections” that the plan generates that are very hard to quantify since no back up math is really provided to show how the AI tool go to those conclusions. The numbers do see very off though and are possibly just generic themselves.
Overall, this tool is nowhere near the quality of what a real financial planner can give you and is very gimmicky for what it is.
Final Thoughts and Alternatives
Even though the final results were just about what I expected, this was a fun exercise to complete and I hope you found it just as interesting!
If you are looking for resources for how building your own personal financial plan, there are so many better alternatives.
For starters, I recommend reading this Investopedia’s article on how to create your own financial plan if you want something fully comprehensive: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/your-annual-financial-planning-check-list.asp
Alternatively, NerdWallet has a simplified version that will walk you through the basic steps the AI tool does, but without selling your data to 3rd parties: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/what-is-a-financial-plan
If you want to read how I have applied the basic principles of financial planning to my own personal finances, check out that blog post here: https://personalfinanceweeb.wordpress.com/2023/10/20/our-2023-comprehensive-financial-plan-review/
And of course, if you actually are in need of professional financial planning help, definitely reach out to a fee-only certified financial planner (CFP)!
There are increasing number of planners out there offering hourly or project based planning with no requirement to manage your assets (key words to look out for for when searching for a planner like this include “advice-only” and/or “I do not manage assets or provide investment management services”.
Here are some search platforms you can use to find a financial planner in your area :
- Nectarine:https://hellonectarine.com/
- Fee-Only Network: https://www.feeonlynetwork.com/
- XY Planning Network: https://connect.xyplanningnetwork.com/find-an-advisor
Personal Finance Weeb 