04Lesson
Paste your statement, get a budget (and what to cancel first)
It reads a month of transactions and hands back a real budget, with what to cancel first.
The video lands soon. The complete lesson is already below, so you can start now and watch when it goes up.
Somewhere in your statement is the answer to where your money actually goes. You have just never had twenty minutes to add it all up by hand. ChatGPT can read a whole month of transactions and hand you back a real budget in about ten minutes.
First, the step that matters more than any of the others: before anything goes near ChatGPT, take out anything that identifies the account itself. It only needs the transaction lines, the date, the merchant, and the amount, and that is all it gets.
The prompts, free
The full prompts from this lesson, free. Before anything else: remove account numbers, routing numbers, and your name/address from the statement, keep only the transaction lines.
Here's a month of my transactions with account numbers removed. Group them into categories (groceries, dining out, subscriptions, transportation, etc.) and give me the total spent in each category. Then flag anything that looks like a recurring subscription.
Based on this, suggest a simple budget for next month. Keep my fixed bills the same, but suggest one realistic target for the categories where I'm overspending. Nothing extreme, just one change I could actually stick to in each.
Never paste account numbers, routing numbers, or card numbers into any AI tool. Only the transaction list.
The Money Snapshot
$12The prompts, the category list, and a simple tracker to compare month over month. The free lesson solves this month; this keeps it running without redoing the setup.