How to Read This Book
The question Who is this book for, and how should I read it?
The answer It is a user's guide for families who open AI Family Investing for the first time. You follow one example household as it enters its information, reads the results and checks where each number came from. Every chapter opens with a question, a short answer and a one-line summary, so you can read only the chapters you need.
0.0 In one line One household · three ways to enter information · two views · a source for every number.
0.1 What this book is trying to do
This book is a first step toward a family office for everyone.
A family office is the team a wealthy family sets up to look after all of its money in one place. Such a team keeps one ledger for the whole family, writes down its rules for investing and spending, and leaves a record of why each decision was made. This book takes that way of working down to the size of an ordinary household. It helps you run your household like a small office of its own — with one ledger, written rules and a reason behind every number.
We had one kind of family especially in mind: households whose lives cross a border. A family that lives in the United States may still have a pension, savings or a house in Mexico, Colombia or another country, and relatives who depend on them on both sides. Their money, pensions and taxes are split between two countries and are hard to see in one place. The site tries to bring the pieces onto one ledger, show the assumptions and the uncertainty, and leave the next decision to the family.
What the site does today. AI Family Investing is a research and education tool. It organizes a household's financial information, calculates pensions, taxes and a spending range, and lets you compare results under different assumptions. It does not give investment advice, manage money, file taxes or provide estate or legal services (Chapter 17). "Family office" describes where we are headed. It does not mean the site offers a legal or financial service by that name.
0.2 What this book does not do
- It does not tell you what to buy or sell.
- It does not give investment, tax or legal advice tailored to your family.
- It does not promise any future result.
Every number in this book comes from the fictional example household as the site showed it on the date of the screenshots. Read the numbers to learn how to read them, not as a standard your own household should match.
0.3 How the book is organized — the same three parts as the site's menu
| Part | Chapter | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Part 1 Family retirement plan | 1 Getting started | First screen, three menus, two views, four labels |
| 2 Three ways to enter | Describe it by voice · Upload or photograph documents · Type it in | |
| 3 Building the family plan | The six boxes of "Type it in," assumptions, follow-up questions | |
| 4 Reading the results | At a glance · Cash flow · Portfolio link | |
| 5 Trying other plans | Three assumption sets, one-step what-if, comparing two ages | |
| 6 Easy view and expert view | Same nine tabs, a side-by-side map | |
| 7 Tax and pension rules, and the evidence | Who taxes what, pension formulas, rules, checks, unknowns | |
| 8 Saving and sharing | PDF report, CSV and JSON, sharing with a professional, a one-page "first ledger" | |
| Part 2 Product solutions | 9 Reading product solutions | From your plan's needs to product types |
| 10 Quotes and source status | Checking a quote you received; how fresh each number is | |
| Part 3 Assets & Estate | 11 What you own | Asset mix, by owner and by country |
| 12 Passing it on | How the federal estate tax is figured | |
| 13 Your home | Selling a home (§121), basis at death | |
| 14 Giving while living | Annual exclusion, lifetime credit, gifts over the years | |
| 15 Status, state and abroad | Citizen or not, state estate taxes, assets in other countries | |
| 16 What Part 3 does not calculate | Items left out, and where to go next | |
| For everyone | 17 Privacy and limits · 18 Spanish and Korean screens · 19 FAQ · Appendices A–E |
If you are new, read Chapter 1 → Chapter 17 → Chapters 2, 3 and 4. Reading the privacy chapter first tells you what not to type before you start. After that, go to the part you need: Part 2 for products, Part 3 for your home, gifts and estate.
A reading path for your household
Not every family needs every chapter in the same order. Here are three paths. Each ends with the one-page "first ledger" in Chapter 8, Section 8.7.
| Our household | Read in this order | Pay special attention to |
|---|---|---|
| Lives in the US, money mostly in the US | 1 → 17 → 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 → 7 → 8 | Chapter 7: Social Security claiming age, federal income tax, required withdrawals |
| Lives in the US, with a pension, savings or a house in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America | 1 → 17 → 2 → 3 → 4 → 7 → 15 → 16 → 8 | Chapter 3: entering assets abroad; Chapter 15: assets in other countries; Chapter 16: what is not calculated |
| Planning to pass money on or help children now | 1 → 17 → 3 → 4 → 11 → 12 → 13 → 14 → 8 | Chapters 12–14: estate, home and gifts under US federal rules |
If you are curious about product types, slot Part 2 (Chapters 9–10) in after Chapter 4 on any path.
0.4 How to read each chapter
- The opening box — question, answer, one-line summary. If you are short on time, the box alone gives you the chapter's main point.
- "Words worth knowing" boxes — a hard term is explained once, where it first appears. The glossary collects them.
- Three lines under every picture — the site itself labels its charts this way, and so does this book: What it shows · How to read it · What it does not say. Please read the third line. It keeps a picture from seeming to say more than it does.
- Excerpt boxes — where a deeper idea helps, we quote our other books word for word, with the title and where to find it.
- Screen date — the site is still being refined. The wording and pictures in this book are from the screen date given on the copyright page (October 17, 2026). When the screens change, the next edition changes with them.
Words worth knowing — the engine In this book, "the engine" means the program behind the site that does the math. It calculates only by fixed rules, and when it does not know something it says "Unknown" instead of guessing. Only the engine produces numbers.
0.5 Five ideas a family office offers an ordinary household
From the way large family offices work, we drew five ideas an ordinary household can borrow. They return throughout the book. They are about how to work, not about how much money you have.
- How you run things matters more than how much you have. A clear ledger and written rules separate outcomes more than size does.
- Look at the whole family's balance sheet, not only the investments. Put the house, pensions and debts on the same ledger — but do not spend them as if they were the same (Chapter 3).
- Money you can spend right away is an option. Cash may earn little, but it keeps you from selling in a bad market.
- What you pass on is not only money but the right to decide. Agree in advance who decides what, and when the next generation joins in (Chapter 3, "Our household rules," and Chapter 12).
- When you use AI, control what goes in, keep a person in charge, and keep a record. Decide what to share, have a person confirm, and keep the reasons (Chapters 7 and 17).
These ideas restate, in household terms, themes from a summer 2026 special report on family offices in an institutional-investing trade publication (Appendix C). No figures or sentences from that publication are reproduced.
0.6 This book and our other books
This is AI Family Investing Book 1 (eleventh in the overall series). It is a different book from AI Retirement Investing Book 1, Withdraw Only What the Evidence Supports.
- This book is about how to use the site.
- The research and simulations behind the site's methods are in the AI Retirement Investing and AI Portfolio Investing books. Where it helps, we quote them word for word.
Before you go on
- This is a user's guide for running your household like a small office — one ledger, written rules, a reason for every number.
- The site is a research and education tool. It does not give advice, manage money, file taxes or provide legal services.
- Please read the third line under every picture: what it does not say.