AI-Powered Retirement Planning Assistant

What the AI assistant does

The assistant is a conversational layer over your retirement plan. It explains results — why aMonte Carlo simulation shows a particular success rate, what a FIRE target actually means, or how the bucket strategy changes your withdrawal risk. It sanity-checks assumptions by asking whether your return or inflation inputs are reasonable. It walks through scenarios, such as "what if I retire at 50 instead of 55" or "what if my expenses rise by 10%." And it suggests questions to consider, helping you notice gaps you may not have thought about, from emergency buffers to withdrawal sequencing.

It is designed to be useful early and often: run the numbers in the calculators first, then ask the assistant to interpret them. The chat is free to use within the planning dashboard.

What information it uses

To give useful answers, the assistant draws on a summary of your plan — your portfolio summary, the outputs of the calculators you have run, and general financial concepts. It does not pull your full asset ledger blindly; a compact summary of relevant figures is prepared and sent with each question so the model has context. Be transparent with yourself about this: any information you include in a question, or that is included in the summary, is what the AI sees. Avoid putting anything sensitive you would not want shared into the chat. You can also ask general questions without any portfolio context — the assistant is happy to explain a concept like withdrawal rates or the effect of inflation on a corpus on its own.

How it helps you understand your retirement plan

Most people build a plan, see a number, and do not quite know what to do with it. The assistant closes that gap by translating outputs into plain-language reasoning. A Monte Carlo success rate of 82% stops being a mystery when it is explained as "your plan survives four out of five simulated futures, and the main failure mode is a bad sequence of early returns." Understanding why a number is what it is matters more than the number itself, because it tells you what to adjust.

What it cannot do

The assistant is not a licensed professional and has real limits. It does not give personalized legal, tax or investment advice, and it cannot take responsibility for your decisions. It may make errors, misunderstand a question, or produce an answer that looks confident but is wrong. Treat its output as a starting point for thinking, not an instruction, and verify important numbers against your own figures. For binding decisions — estate planning, major tax choices, large sums — a qualified human advisor is the appropriate person. If you are looking for one, our advisor directory can help you find a retirement planning advisor.

AI output and financial decisions

Not financial advice. AI-generated information should not be treated as financial advice. The assistant is an educational tool, and its answers are machine-generated, based on the assumptions you provided, and not personalized to your full financial situation. Before acting on anything it says, consider a qualified financial professional — and remember that every figure in a plan is an estimate.

Privacy

The general approach keeps your data as local as practical. On the live site, chat is processed by a secure server-side AI, which means a summary of your plan is transmitted to generate each reply. In local development, you can connect your own Ollama server instead, in which case the conversation runs entirely on your machine and nothing leaves it. The exact setup is described in the chat panel itself; this page only covers the general approach. Use the tool the way that matches your comfort with data handling.