Artificial Intelligence
On Saturday, February 8th, we welcomed our daughter, Genevieve, to the world.
Unlike last time, I’ll spare you the full birth story, but the outcome is a healthy baby, healthy mom, happy dad, and excited big brother and big sister.
But as I held this tiny seven pound human in my arms, I looked over at Adele (my three-year-old daughter who now looks like a teenager by comparison) and remembered delivering her just three years ago.
Despite the significance of Adele’s arrival, the vividness of the memory is fading.
Time does that. (Thanks for nothing, Time.)
Fortunately, we have some photos and I wrote my blog about it.
Our modern smartphone ecosystem sometimes leads to excessive documentation. But certain momentous occasions where we can freeze a bit of time before life speeds on by — are worth capturing. We documented just a bit of my son’s birth, a little more of my older daughter’s arrival, and with this one we captured as much as possible. We’re thankful for the technology.
But technology is reciprocal like that (with upsides and downsides). Take the Artificial Intelligence craze we’re in, for example…
The tech has the potential to lead to medical breakthroughs, solve major societal problems, and make college students’ lives easier by using ChatGPT to write papers while they instead take advantage of $7 beer night at the local bar (It was $1 per beer when I was in college. Inflation is a killer).
But it also can kill our ability to think critically, demotivate us to create, and cause college students to blow their money on $7 beers instead of taking out fewer student loans or buying well-diversified ETFs with their extra money.
As a wealth management firm, we are striving to harness the good parts of the technology while aiming to keep out the bad parts.
Some examples of how we currently use AI:
- To analyze client tax returns; stripping out the meaningful pieces of data in a few seconds where we had previously needed to comb through documents manually. (Clients reading this, please let us know when you have your 2024 returns ready and we’ll send you your secure upload link).
- To challenge our investment thesis and present why it may or may not work out. Then we gauge these considerations against our own native reasoning.
- To spell-check our work. (Although I’m a bit fond of having an error here and there so you know this isn’t written by a robot).
- To analyze client estate plans. Then we use the same program to make updates or draft new legal documents, if needed.
Let’s touch on that last one for a minute.
Our daughter was born on Saturday and by Tuesday I had our family estate plan updated to reflect her arrival and I did it from the comfort of my home. No stuffy law office.
It was great to be able to do this for my growing family and we’re loving that we can offer this for clients at no additional cost.
I’ve included a video at the end of this blog which highlights a bit more about this estate planning offering for clients of Harding Wealth.
A final thought…
There are some things you don’t get to do very many times in our lives — and holding a newborn is one of them.
With Genevieve being our last child, holding her has felt different — knowing that it’s the last time I’ll have a newborn of my own makes me want to savor the moment even more than with the two kids prior.
While thinking about this, I asked Chat GPT “how much time would a father of three spend holding newborns less than one month old over their entire life?” and here was the response:
“In the first month, newborns are held 6–8 hours per day (on average, including feeding, soothing, and contact naps).
Let’s assume 7 hours/day for the first 30 days → 210 hours per child in the first month.
Expanding for Three Kids...210 hours × 3 kids = 630 hours spent holding newborns in their first month alone.
That’s over 26 full days.”
Then I asked “how many days does a man live in the US based on current life expectancy tables?
To which it responded:
“As of 2023, the average life expectancy for men in the United States is approximately 75.8 years.
This equates to about 27,658 days (75.8 years × 365.25 days per year).”
From here I did my own math and determined that 26 days out of a potential 27,658 days of life represents just 0.094% of your life spent holding a newborn baby.
That’s not much of your life at all.
If AI can help me spend more time holding our newborn instead of driving to a law office to update our trust, that’s a good tradeoff. I’m not trying to sacrifice even 5 minutes of those 26 days.
So as we continue to evaluate and adopt AI in our firm, it will be with lessons like this in mind:
Kids and grandkids grow. Anniversaries pass. Graduations and reunions and funerals come and go…
If we can prioritize saving clients time on the mundane to help focus on the exceptional things like these, that’s worth pursuing with whatever tools are available.
That’s all for today,
Adam Harding
Advisor & Lead @ Harding Wealth | CFP | Smartvestor Pro (Dave Ramsey)
Here’s the 2 minute video highlighting our estate planning offering. Glad to answer any questions if you have them!
