alt Hacker NewsI use YNAB (https://www.ynab.com/) for budgeting so I already had all of my financial data in a single source. Exporting the CSVs locally and asking Claude to be my financial advisor legitimately gave me good advice. Not just nagging me to save more (which is always useful), but how to organize my budget categories better, detecting longer term spending patterns I wasn't thinking much about, researching credit card reward programs based on my spending patterns, digging deep into interest and tax rates in way I never bothered etc.
That was the first time I felt like real people's jobs were threatened by AI. Financial advisors and tax accountants better adapt quickly.
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>YNAB
I've fallen behind on keeping it up-to-date, but I feel I ought to plug anything self-hostable: https://actualbudget.org/
> Financial advisors and tax accountants
Financial advisors giving generic advice, sure. Tax accountants though? I'd be careful. I know the mistakes that llms make when complexity gets involved (especially tax codes and laws) and frankly I don't know enough about them to be able to verify whether what I'm getting out of it makes sense. I could probably verify it with enough research but then I just could so it myself anyway. Or I just pay an accountant a smallish fee and let them handle it.
I use Tiller. They take the transaction history from your linked bank accounts and store it in a google spreadsheet for you. That's it. $99 a year.
From there I unleashed claude on my spending habits. I'm only a few months in so I'm more focused on financial hygiene.
Nice idea! Do you mind sharing the prompt you used, interested in trying this out myself.
> I use YNAB
I was happy to pay for YNAB4, which was local-only data. I have no interest in paying a subscription for YNAB5 when I have no need for cloud-access or cross-device syncing.
If YNAB5 was one-time purchase plus optional syncing, I'd consider the one-time outlay.