Beware of technology that wants to live your best life for you!
Let’s not kid ourselves that we can know our finances through technology. Having all our data to hand via an extended dashboard is an impossible dream that delays us managing our action today.
The Pension Dashboards will help people find lost pots , see the likely income they could get from their pension savings and encourage them to think beyond their state pension towards little considered areas of life, the issues of old age.
But the availability of technology won’t be much more than a novelty, unless people make the effort for themselves to match resources against aspiration,
No two ways about it, a full financial fact-find is the starting point of financial planning, I learned that on my first day as an insurance salesman over 40 years ago. But the skill of a financial planner is to translate data into something imaginable – plans for the future.
this requires an imaginative involvement with the future that must include a reasoned view not just on what has already been secured but on future income and anticipated capital.
This future resource cannot be sourced from an API and is not a feature of open banking so we are kidding ourselves that we will achieve the full picture – even artificial intelligence is unable to assess the timing and incidence of future payments from happenstance.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” , Tyson’s point is that it is our resilience in coming back from adversity that is likely to make the initial plan succeed. Most financial plans get knocked out early on by the vicissitudes of life. We are better accepting that committing to a plan at retirement is a start – but only that.
As for linking our finances through a single application , I think this a diversion – a hobby which can at best give us a sense of security and at worst stops us living our best lives.
There is also a fallacy in thinking that today’s technology will be tomorrow’s solution. We are currently working to complete version one of the dashboard using a technical architecture which is at least five year’s old. As the savant told the stranger “to get there, I wouldn’t start here”.
Finally, in rejecting the chimera of the holistic plan, I would remind all of us that whatever dread we may have of the future, it is most likely to bring private happiness we could never fully imagine. When I speak to grandparents, I realise how little I have considered my future life with grandchildren. For all the dread we may have of our deteriorating health, we must leave ourselves open to the opportunities of older age which we have yet to imagine. I do not mean the dreams or bucket lists we create today but the opportunities that arrive tomorrow, about which we cannot guess
There is no software package that can live our older lives, predict our older lives or deliver us with the finance to achieve the plans we have yet to consider.
