The start of a new year can feel financially draining. After a full month of Christmas drinks, plenty of present buying, and more, January is the time for resolutions and trying your best to save your money once again.
With this in mind, it is worth taking some time to plan out a budget and work on perfecting your finances. But how do you actually go about that? There are plenty of financial apps and tools that can step in and help you keep track, but AI can be just as helpful.
Whether you’re a ChatGPT user or a Gemini fanatic, AI chatbots can be an effective advisor. These are the prompts that I plan to use to get my finances in order.
Make a budget
Prompt: Act as a personal finance coach and budget analyst. Ask me for my income, fixed expenses, variable spending, debts, and savings goals, then create a clear, realistic monthly budget. Break it down by category, show recommended spending limits, and explain where adjustments will have the biggest impact.
This will be one of the more important prompts for your finances. If you’re looking to make a budget, the best way to approach the challenge is by offering up as much information as you’re comfortable to share.
This could include your expenses, your income, debts and what you’re hoping to save. The more information you’re willing to give, the better response back you’ll get. You can even include spreadsheets or screenshots of some of your spending, too.
The end result will be a planned budget, including areas you can save money and tips toward your planned spending goals.
Weekly meal plan
Prompt: Create a realistic weekly meal plan and grocery list for a household of [number] people with a budget of [$ amount], focusing on low-cost, healthy meals.
Grocery bills are shooting up rapidly, and food is suddenly very expensive. That makes this an area where you could potentially save a hefty amount of cash.
Asking your chatbot a query like this could potentially save you a considerable amount of money. By focusing on healthy, but low-cost meals, the chatbot can help plan in a way that doesn’t sacrifice health for money.
Money saving challenge
Prompt: Develop a 30-day money-saving challenge tailored to my income level and spending habits, with daily actions I can realistically follow.
A simple prompt, but a great one if you benefit from some gamifying in your life to achieve your goals. This prompt will trigger the AI system to come up with a simple money-saving challenge for the month.
You can try adjusting the length of time, or your goals to alter the challenge to your own individual needs.
Financial advisor
Prompt: Act as a personal finance coach. Review my monthly expenses and identify specific areas where I can cut costs without reducing my quality of life.
Similar to the budget plan above, this prompt can help look through your spending and save you money. The idea here is to eliminate any unnecessary expenses or pick out areas where you might be overspending.
This can be useful if you have a tendency to overspend in one particular area. Chatbots can be more critical than yourself, able to identify spending habits that are causing problems.
This could be small things like extra coffees when you’re heading into the office, subscriptions you’re not using, or big overspends on certain clothing brands.
Brand change
Prompt: Find cheaper alternatives for the brands and services I regularly use without sacrificing reliability or quality.
If you’ve found yourself spending too much on luxury goods, you can employ chatbots to help you reduce that spending.
Use this prompt to find some cheaper alternatives to your favorite brands. The key part of this prompt is that it will theoretically keep the focus on similar levels of reliability and quality when looking at alternatives.
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