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Look inside, but check the undercarriage for magnetic holders. Join the smart listeners who start their day with the Kim Commando Today podcast. That's Kim Commando Today. K-O-M-A-N-D-O. Before I get into the main topic of this show, I want to correct an error which I made in the previous episode here, which was about the value of fully funding a Roth IRA.

And I want to not only correct the error that I made, but I want to tell you why I made that error, because it's something that's embarrassing to me, but importantly, it may also help you to learn from my mistake. I got an email from a listener who pointed out two small errors that I had made.

Number one, that the maximum contribution for the year 2024 to a Roth IRA is $7,000, not $6,500. Upon verification, the listener is absolutely correct. I misstated the 2024 contribution limit as being $6,500, when in reality, it is $7,000. In addition, the listener says that you can do futures on a Roth IRA, that he sells puts and does futures on Tasty Trade, evidently, and is Roth at a platform called Tasty Trade.

So I assume that I was in error on saying that you can't do futures. So these are both important corrections. And the reason for my error has to do with my use of AI in preparing my show notes. Let me explain. When I do a show, most of the show is written in my head before I sit down and make notes.

So I have most of the content, most of the ideas, basically, the basic theme of what I want to do and to create is there in my head before I ever open my mouth or even make any notes. I think about my topics constantly, and sometimes they're the product of a couple of hours of thinking, sometimes they're the product of years of thinking before I finally decide, "You know what?

I'm going to go ahead and do it." So the show of "Max Out a Roth IRA" is something that's based upon years and years of thinking of simply, "This should be the fundamental step." Now, I learned early in the annals of radical personal finance that in order to keep myself from rambling, it's really good for me to sit down and plop out a few notes that I'm going to work from because I don't want to go off onto rabbit trails.

I don't want to be ineffective with my use of time. I really want to be focused. And I found that if I just created some basic notes to speak from, then I can be focused. In years past, I've done extensive notes, many, many pages of notes, and that allows me to create a very tight show with lots of good information, but it takes so long to create those notes that it doesn't seem like a good trade-off of time invested in creating the show versus the actual impact of any one particular podcast.

And so I try to just spend a little time creating some basic notes or outline that I'm going to speak from. What I have found is that AI tools, such as ChatGPT, I primarily use ChatGPT, simplify the process of creating notes because they think relatively structurally. So AI is really good at generating lists.

My brain also works from lists. So having AI as a list maker for me basically streamlines everything. So when I went to create my most previous episode in this podcast series, the Roth IRA episode, I sat down and simply decided, okay, well, I know all the basic reasons I'm going to promote a Roth IRA, but I went to ChatGPT and I just said, give me a bullet point list of all of the basic features of the Roth IRA and all of the basic rules.

And that created for me a very simple list of rules that I already know. I've already studied, I've already learned all these things, proven it, taken exams on all this stuff, but it gave me a current list of some of the things that have changed over the last couple of years.

So I had it all sitting right in front of me and I could reference that while I was working. I also, in preparation for that podcast, I also used ChatGPT to create a couple of the spreadsheets that I alluded to in terms of the total accumulation of the Roth IRA account.

I can do all those calculations when they're static, really straightforwardly with just my simple financial calculator. If I want to take an annual contribution amount and project it forward to the future, that's simple to do. I can also build a spreadsheet to forecast what I want to do in the future.

And that's what I would need to do generally to have an increasing annual investment amount with also an increase showing the return on investment. I would need to build a spreadsheet. That's not an easy thing to do with a financial calculator. But ChatGPT makes spreadsheets pretty beautifully for me.

And I can give it pretty simple instructions, such as show me the account value and I give it the assumptions that I want it to use for present value and increases rates of increase. And I can say project for me what this would look like with an increasing contribution amount and then do step up contributions for me at age 50.

And so things like that are a very fast and easy task for AI tools like ChatGPT and much faster than my sitting down and creating the spreadsheet with it. So these were the tools that I used to speak from. Now, where's the problem? Well, the problem comes in, in that I didn't myself verify the accuracy of every piece of information from ChatGPT.

I know if it's directionally correct, it didn't give me any, you know, wrong, really wrong things, but I didn't check every single one. And in fact, if you were to go back and listen to the podcast again, where you will hear me realize that I need to be really careful with what I'm speaking from is when I reviewed the income limits for Roth IRA contributors.

Ordinarily, whenever I'm talking about numbers, I'll just go straight to irs.gov. I'll pull up the most recent press release of them that has all of the 401k limits in it, the income limits, the Roth limits in it, and I'll pull from that direct news release all of my current data.

The irs.gov website is perfectly useful, works fine. But in this case, the ChatGPT had included that in it, they included the income ranges. And as I was speaking the show, and I was alluding to those income ranges, I realized, wait a second, I didn't double verify this information. Is this number actually correct?

Or is this a different year's number? And if you listen to my voice, you'll hear that I basically tried to generalize the number. I backed off the specific number and I said, oh, it's about $230,000 instead of using a precise number. I knew as I was speaking that I wanted to be accurate.

And most of the thrust of my message was to be directionally accurate, big picture concepts. And so I needed to not create the sense of certainty with the specific number. So I tried to back off the numbers there. And that's why I kind of hemmed and hawed briefly and then tried to generalize.

Because I was realizing in the moment as I was recording that, wait a second, I didn't verify before hitting record, I didn't pull up the 2024 numbers. I don't have them here from the IRS website. Is my data source correct? What I hadn't done is I didn't do the same thing with my use of the $6,500 number.

By the way, both of the numbers that I used, both for the phase out amounts and for the number, were the 2023 numbers, not the 2024 numbers. But ChatGPT didn't label them as 2024 numbers. I mentioned it to it as current, but I didn't specifically inquire of the software whether or not it was 2023 or 2024 numbers.

And so I point this out to say, number one, it's an error. It's an error that I committed. And I will be more careful in the future to make certain that I have the proper current data with me. It's hard for me to remember all the specifics. There's so many numbers, they change all the time.

I don't follow them on a day-to-day basis, but none of that is an excuse. I'm a professional and I need to do better with it. But more importantly, this, I think, is the big weakness of using these various tools of ChatGPT and other AI models. And I think we're going to see more and more of this.

These tools are so good that they lull us into a false sense of security because we don't know what we don't know. Let me give just one other funny story from when I was younger. When I was in college, I was working for somebody and I was requested, this boss that I had told me to put together some information and create basically a quick presentation about Cisco company.

Now, where I'm from in Florida, we have a company called Cisco, spelled S-Y-S-C-O. And Cisco is a food service distributor, I think a pretty big one. I'm not sure whether they're regional, national, I don't know. But I was very familiar with that Cisco company. And so I ignorantly put together all the information on that Cisco food service company.

Well, as it turns out, what my boss actually wanted was information on Cisco Systems, C-I-S-C-O, the big technology company. And both of them are called Cisco. It's just a difference of spelling. And I was too ignorant at the time to intuit, well, why would anybody care about this food service company?

What really we need is for the electronics technology company. And it's kind of a similar error that the tool is good. I did my best job, but there was an error in knowledge and I wasn't smart enough to catch it there. And the same thing is going to happen to us more and more with AI.

AI is writing a lot of our news reports. AI is producing all kinds of content. And you need to be knowledgeable in a space in order to pick up on it. And once you pick up on it, then you can identify, wait a second, where is this coming from?

Expertise is not less important in a space of modern AI systems. It's more important because only the real expert is increasingly able to spot the error in the actual content. It's really hard to articulate these things to non-experts sometimes. Let me give you one more example. Years ago, a family member had a book that was called something like The Thomas Jefferson Education.

And it was a book that was written by this guy who was going on and on about how the best education is something referred to as a Thomas Jefferson education. And I read the book originally years ago, and I thought, wow, that's really cool. I really want a Thomas Jefferson education for my children.

I really want that. And then I forgot about it. I didn't own the book, but I had seen it. I was really inspired by it, and I moved on. Then a number of years later, after I myself had been homeschooling my children, after I myself had read a couple dozen more books on education and really thought about the concepts of everything involved with it, later on, the family member that had had the book was getting rid of it.

And I picked it up and took it home, and I read it again. And the second time I read through the book, I thought to myself, wait a second. This is all fake. The guy was speaking with such sweeping terms about the importance of a classical education, and wouldn't it be amazing if our children learned their geometry from Euclid?

And that's far better than learning it from a textbook and many other things. I can't even cite at the moment all the specific things. And I thought, this is a fake. This is not real stuff. This is a guy trying to present ideas that are bigger than they should be.

And while I appreciate the direction he's going, none of this is real. This is just made up stuff to sound cool, and basically is ripping off classical education, putting his own spins and terms on it. And this is fake. Well, as it turns out, while I never dug deeply into the controversy, sometime later, I came across some online controversy that was exposing the author, and the whole movement is basically a fraud.

And I thought, well, I figured that out. But I never could have figured it out in the first place around, because I was so engaged with the ideas. But the next time around, I just knew the whole feeling was off. So it's nice when mistakes are easily countable when it comes to which year's contribution limits are we talking about.

But the same thing holds for spotting errors and mistakes of ideas that are less easily identified and calculated. So be super careful. I think that all of us need to be using these tools in order for us to stay current. I find chatGBT specifically, and I'm trying not to, that's the one I use all day, every day.

But I find these tools are enormously valuable. And for an expert, for something that you really know about, they're enormously valuable. They're also, by the way, really valuable for a beginner. Because if you're trying to learn about something, it can be a great tutor and can really show you how to gain access to information.

I find them wonderful. So many good things to say about them. But they're not perfect. And if we're not aware of it, and we don't double check them, we've got trouble. Real trouble. So if you're using these tools, as you almost certainly should be, make certain that you're verifying them.

Don't be lazy, like I was, and not go ahead and pull up the IRS current numbers, knowing that I'm going to be talking about 2024 numbers, and I didn't double check everything. If something is really important, and you use AI to create a spreadsheet, make certain that you manually create the spreadsheet and manually test it yourself, that you go through and you carefully check all of the assumptions.

Don't be lazy, or you'll be caught with an error, as I was in yesterday's show. The show still stands. I'm not going to take it down or anything, because 95% of what I wanted to say was just big picture concepts. The actual specific numbers were not meaningful at all to the exact concept.

And the fact that I mistakenly used 2023 numbers instead of the current 2024 numbers doesn't matter, and it's not going to matter in 2029 when someone's listening to this. But the lesson that I am reminded of, and am learning again, because I'm now embarrassed, and the lesson for you to hopefully learn before you're embarrassed publicly, is use the tools, but make certain that you fact-check them.

Even as the tools themselves will show you, they make mistakes, and you've got to be good enough to catch the mistakes. Heading back to school is a breeze, and so are the savings at your local Amazon Fresh grocery store. Our favorite class? Lunch. Plan, prep, and pack in one convenient place.

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