Your financial mistake isn’t money … it’s time #YOLO

One of the more interesting articles I read over the weekend wasn't about artificial intelligence, stablecoins or digital banks. It was about something far more uncomfortable: regret. Specifically, the financial regrets people reach in their sixties.

At first glance, the list looks predictable: people wish they had saved more, invested earlier, worried less about spending on experiences, planned their estates sooner and stopped trying to optimise every tax decision. None of that is particularly surprising but what struck me wasn't the individual mistakes. It was what they all had in common. They were all decisions about time.

We spend our twenties believing we have plenty of it; we spend our thirties assuming next year will be easier; by our forties we're busy juggling careers, children and mortgages; in our fifties, it is all about the decade of catching up on what we missed; and then, suddenly, you're in your sixties wondering how forty years disappeared so quickly.

Money compounds and regret compounds even faster.

Take investing. Almost every survey of older generations finds the same answer: “I wish I’d started earlier.” It isn’t because people suddenly become investment experts at sixty-five. It’s because they finally appreciate that compound interest isn’t really about percentage returns.

The same applies to pensions. Most people don’t under-save because they don’t understand pensions. They under-save because retirement feels impossibly distant. Humans discount the future.

Behavioural economists have known this for decades. We value today’s pleasures more highly than tomorrow’s security.

Technology has made that bias even worse as every app encourages immediate gratification.

Buy now, Pay later; one-click purchasing; instant credit; same-day delivery ... our financial lives have become engineered around the present moment. Meanwhile, retirement remains an abstract concept somewhere beyond the horizon and, ironically, artificial intelligence may become the solution to a problem that technology helped create.

Imagine an AI-native financial assistant that quietly watches over your financial life. It notices you’ve received a pay rise and automatically increases your pension contribution before lifestyle inflation absorbs it. It spots idle cash earning next to nothing and moves it on your behalf. It predicts the tax implications of selling assets years before you make the decision. It models your retirement not once every decade with a financial adviser, but every single day.

That’s where finance is heading.

The future AI-native financial systems will not be about giving us more information, but will focus on making better, more intelligent, decisions before we even realise they’re needed. A proactive, predictive financial twin for each and everyone of us.

Moving on, there is another regret seniors have. It is delaying difficult conversations like writing a will and creating lasting powers of attorney; planning inheritance and making sensible gifts whilst you’re still healthy enough to enjoy seeing the benefits. These are difficult conversations, which is precisely why they’re postponed and there’s a curious irony here.

We spend years optimising investment portfolios whilst ignoring the decisions that have a much larger financial impact. Families argue over estates, not because the tax rules are especially complicated but because nobody wanted to discuss them whilst everyone was alive.

Then there is perhaps the biggest surprise which is that many people regret not spending enough.

That sounds almost heretical in a world obsessed with saving and the complaint isn’t that they wish they’d bought more cars or bigger houses ... it’s that they postponed experiences. They missed out on holidays and time with grandchildren. They missed out on adventures whilst they were healthy enough to enjoy them. They spent decades accumulating financial capital, whilst allowing their physical capital to depreciate.

Health, unlike wealth, has no compound interest. In fact it compounds in reverse. The less you invest in your life whilst you can enjoy it, the more you regret when you can’t.

This is where personal finance becomes deeply personal.

The objective isn’t to die with the largest investment portfolio but to maximise enjoyment of your life ... or so most sixty-year-olds say.

Perhaps that’s the real lesson here. Very few pensioners (seniors in American parlance) regret buying fewer gadgets or missing a stock market rally but almost all regret postponing decisions they already knew they should make.

The result is that the future of finance won’t simply be about helping us make payments or invest more efficiently but, increasingly, it will be about helping us make better life decisions at the right moment. AI won't replace financial advisers, but it could become the gentle nudge that prevents today's hesitation becoming tomorrow's regret because, in the end, the scarcest asset in any portfolio isn't money.

It's time.