How To Use Claude / ChatGPT To Improve Budgeting & Spending
Like eating better, reducing spending is both extremely difficult…and not difficult at all. There are a million reasons why humans are terrible at money. My personal two reasons are: getting fixated on spending that doesn’t really matter; not maintaining discipline on things that do matter. Like exercise, better spending only matters if you do the right thing, consistently, over a long period of time.
This year, I tried looping in our new AI overlords to help out – hopefully as an unbiased 3rd party. It worked so well, that I wanted to note it for my future self.
1. Get all Spending Into a Spreadsheet
Between digital banking and credit cards, this is no longer that hard.
I cleaned mine up a little bit, but it’s not necessary.
2. Prompt Your Favorite AI Tool
I like using Anthropic’s Claude, but OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Claude provide similar results. Here’s the prompt that worked best for me.
you are a personal financial advisor. attached is an export my spending transactions. please analyze the spending for patterns, amounts, and costs. we are a family of four. my goal is to identify unique, unlabeled categories of spending or spending habits where we spend much more than expected and can look to save significant (i.e., >$1000) of money over the next year by being more intentional with spending. after you analyze the data, please provide at least 20 insights for me to consider.3. Review Insights & Plan Action
My top four takeaways were –
Primary Areas for $1000+ Annual Savings:
- Grocery optimization: Potential savings of $xxxx-xxxx
- Dining out reduction or optimization: Potential savings of $xxxx+
- Insurance review and bundling: Potential savings of $xxx-xxxx
- Utility and energy efficiency: Potential savings of $xxx-xxxx
For me, this focus was extremely useful. I find it very easy to get distracted by spending, honestly, does not matter (or, does matter when it comes to improving life) compared to “big wins” or analysis via the 80/20 Principle.
4. Delete The Chat For a Veneer of Privacy
None of the AI companies are playing “by the book” when it comes to data & privacy. It definitely feels like when we all started trading data to Facebook, et al for benefits, so user beware. I think it’s worth the tradeoff, but I also might be totally wrong.*
