So when it comes to personal finance, this is highly unhelpful. Sure, you can find all sorts of practical spending, savings, investment, insurance, etc. tips, often with vouchers and limited time offers and emotive presentation galore. You can also find apps, technological tools, automated spreadsheets, calculators, projections, aiding the march of the robots. Have you ever stopped to think what impact these have on your ability to make financial decisions and develop a healthy relationship with money? 

Following the first strand of very practical offers and money saving tips, etc. can certainly be useful to you. If you stepped back from this pattern, however, you would see that this is purely a transactional attitude that deals with the here and now and is addressing an immediate need or whim. That’s OK, if that’s what you want to do but that is not what I call financial literacy, to be honest. I have spent an awful long time in finance in three different countries observing this attitude. Most aptly described as ‘knee-jerk’, it hardly ever leads to anything sustainable in the long run – whether financial or life decisions. What it does is it removes – or at least it makes you think it removes – the responsibility for proper consideration. Now, if you read my previous blogs, you know where I stand on that. 

The second strand is quite interesting. A lot of these personal finance tools are pretty cool and appear sophisticated. They also make you feel cleverer and financially savvy, which you might think is a good thing. After all, Artificial Intelligence is one of the big things at the moment and is highly likely to stay, so you may as well be among the early adopters and gain what business schools call ‘first mover advantage’ and get ahead of your peers. Well, maybe but, again, a little bit of consideration might not go amiss. In all this talk about the rise of AI and the march of the robots, have you considered who is behaving in a robotic way? Sorry to disappoint you but, yes, it’s you. By using these tools what you are doing is outsourcing your own intellectual thought process to someone else and you trust them blindly, as all you are doing is following simple algorithmic steps. I am not saying they are not useful; I am just saying that, yet again, the use of these tools camouflages your lack of understanding of what actually is going on and, therefore, instead of developing your own financial literacy skills, you are developing a dependency on someone else’s. 

These things, like a lot of things in life, are complex and don’t easily translate into a social media post or 140 characters. If you are still reading this and are with me here, towards the end, I salute you and have every faith in your ability to exercise your gift of independent mind, judgement and skills. You will be much better for it and, in the long-run, you will beat any perceived ‘first mover advantage’ or any AI. After all, we are not yet at a time when the robots can build our relationships with something that is ever changing throughout our lives. Although there might already be an app for that…