At this point, we've all heard of ChatGPT and have more than likely interacted with the platform for various things. The question is, have we interacted with it in a way that assists us with our finances? In my experience, being someone who works in technology, most people don't use ChatGPT to its full extent and are stuck with basic prompts. Today, I want to show you some prompts that you can start using to assist you with your personal finances.
I'd like to mention that coming up with prompts takes time and if you're not getting the answer you want, take some time to work with it - try rephrasing things, and play around with the prompts until you get an answer that's closer to what you need. I see too many people give up when they don't get exactly what you want, and that's not how we want to approach this.
Last thing before we start exploring some prompts - This isn't a replacement for a financial advisor or anything like that. It's incredibly useful to run some prompts and get some valuable insights but if you're trying to save or invest for the long-term, and you're not seasoned in this, please be careful - ChatGPT doesn't have your full context.
Prompt 1: Below are my incomes and expenses each month, please build me a budget I can stick to, making every dollar work for me.
For this prompt, you want to include all your monthly expenses (rent, groceries, vehicle, movies, education, etc.) as well as your incomes. ChatGPT will then give you feedback on what's going on. I gave it my full list of expenses as well as a monthly income of $10,000.
Here's the output for the test I did:
It's really useful to have ChatGPT go through all the expenses and break them down into these categories. Essentially, it can take a messy list of expenses and organise them like this, which is already valuable. However, it doesn't end there, it now gives us an overview of everything and shows us what's left over:
Once again, this is valuable because it gives us a very clear picture of where our money is going and what's left over afterwards. The output provides a few other insights and even offers to build you a downloadable spreadsheet to assist with tracking this going forward.
That's a useful first prompt, albeit rather simple, an invaluable part of learning to manage your money.
If you're starting out and want to track your expenses, please feel free to grab the free expense tracker I built.
The 50/30/20 rule is a rule you'll come across if you're searching for information on how to budget, where to spend your money and so forth. The 50/30/20 budget rule was popularised by U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi in their book, "All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan", published in 2005. The rule suggests allocating 50% of your after-tax income to "needs", 30% to "wants", and 20% to savings and debt repayment.
Prompt 2: Split my monthly income using the 50/30/20 rule, based on my real numbers.
In the same window that you've been working in for prompt 1, simply copy and paste the prompt above and click enter.
ChatGPT will quickly provide you with a table that you'll work against:
| Category | Percentage | Amount (on $10,000) |
|---|---|---|
| Needs (Essentials) | 50% | $5,000 |
| Wants (Lifestyle) | 30% | $3,000 |
| Savings/Debt (Future You) | 20% | $2,000 |
And now, it'll provide you with your current breakdown (based on my numbers from prompt 1):
Good news, we're way under the 50% limit for Needs: $3,485 / $5,000 = ~35% of income. What about the Wants?
Excellent, we’re far under the 30% limit for Wants as well: $574 / $3,000 = ~5.7% of income. Right, and Savings and Debt:
I'm allocating much more than 20% toward financial growth & flexibility, thanks to the surplus. $6,006 / $2,000 = ~60% of income - amazing! Wealthy 😀
And finally, ChatGPT gives us a final summary.
| Category | Actual Spend | Recommended by 50/30/20 |
|---|---|---|
| Needs | $3,485 (35%) | $5,000 (50%) |
| Wants | $574 (5.7%) | $3,000 (30%) |
| Savings/Debt | $6,006 (60%) | $2,000 (20%) |
What I'd encourage you to do here is to play around with the numbers, perhaps try 35/15/50 split as your prompt to see how that works out. Obviously, if you have a surplus, that makes this easier, but if you don't, play around to see where your numbers go. For example, even though this is a rule, you might want to reduce your Wants and put more into your Savings because of the phase of life you're in. You can also ask ChatGPT to create a pie chart to assist you in visually seeing this:
As you can see, there's a great deal we can get ChatGPT to assemble for us in a matter of minutes. These two prompts alone will probably be fairly eye-opening for a lot of people. I hope you're enjoying this so far!
Let's move onto the next prompt.
Let's move onto saving/investing as that's what we're often talking about on 100MPM. Here's your next prompt:
Prompt 3: Based on my income, if I want to reach $20,000 in 12 months, how much should I save?
Once again, ChatGPT to the rescue, and what's better is that the output will offer you options to create a savings tracker or downloadable spreadsheet to assist you with your saving. So, if you're wanting to go on holiday, or make a special purchase, you can play around with this prompt to see what it's going to take. When I played around with this, I adjusted the prompt to also take into account an unplanned expense of $1,000 because you never know what might come up and in doing so, you build some buffer and that moves you into a more realistic plan of action.
Prompt 4: I need to start investing, give me a simple 3 step plan for beginners, please keep it simple and focus on long-term growth.
This is where I go back to what I said at the beginning of this post - Be careful here, this is not a replacement for doing your own research or finding a financial advisor. Use this as part of your research only, please. Let's see what ChatGPT recommends and then I'll comment on it from my experience:
This is actually pretty good if I'm honest. Look, it didn't speak to paying off debt first or building an emergency fund, but that's understandable based on the prompt, so I won't comment on that. But, the recommendation of a TFSA is excellent, and the two ETFs it's recommended are what I'd recommend to friends and family for investing, so I'm happy with this output.
This is really important, being able to automate your investing pushes you to commit to it and that's the secret to investing - small, consistent deposits each month. Again, I'm happy with what ChatGPT has said here, and it aligns with what I'd be telling my friends. Remember, if you're not sure what dollar-cost averaging is, you could Google it or even ask ChatGPT to explain it to you with another prompt. Let's move to the next output:
That's amusing, exactly what I said above 😀
I really like this - A quick summary, but the recommendation of EasyEquities and Satrix is great, both of these platforms are fantastic and are the exact platforms you'd be told about on any forum or Facebook group that deals with investing. Well done, ChatGPT!
Prompt 5: Give me quick and easy weekly check-in for my money.
It's great to know where we're spending, where we can spend, what we can change and where we should invest, but a big missing piece of the puzzle is staying on top of our money. So, this next prompt is about staying on top of our money and empowering ourselves to know what our money is doing.
Here's the output from ChatGPT:
I cannot stress how important a routine is like this! Most people don't want to commit to something like this, but those who do, generally succeed far more. I say this from experience, looking at all my friends and colleagues who've committed to tracking their personal finances, have definitely progressed further and created more success for themselves. It's your call, but the statistics point clearly that those who do, have more success and financial freedom.
You could also turn this query into a monthly task list / routine, I'd encourage you to run a prompt like that to see the difference. So, instead of a weekly set list of tasks, it would give you tasks throughout the month to follow. The monthly approach is less repetitive, in my opinion, and gives you more to work with so that would be my recommendation here.
There are so many prompts that you can work into these exercises, so I wanted to leave you with a bunch that you can use, or perhaps they'll serve as inspiration:
I hope you've enjoyed this post - ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and all these LLM / AI-type tools are really valuable when it comes to managing your personal finance or choosing how to invest. As I mentioned twice, you need to do your own research and be careful about simply taking what an LLM says and using it, but they most definitely provide you with a direction or food for thought.
Personally, I pay for ChatGPT and created a project for my investments. I fed the project my portfolio, my thinking and my aims, and each time I make a change, I feed the change into the ChatGPT project. ChatGPT now understands what I have, what my risk appetite is and what my goals are, so each time I need to ask a question, it has incredible context to work with. This has, honestly, proved to be priceless, and it's paid for itself ten times over. For example, I can ask it for a breakdown of asset classes over the last year that I've focused on and compare that to the overall asset breakdown from the entire time I've been investing. I can ask it to do an asset class gap analysis, ask it what other ETFs or options are available based on my style, and so the list goes on.
If you've made it far, you'll probably appreciate the free expense tracker I built, which you may access here.
