I’m not necessarily interested in the traditional full budgeting and planning type stuff, but more like “AI take all these statements and tell me how to save money” purpose built tools. Anyone used anything they’d suggest?
(And to hopefully head off any unhelpful answers like I got on Reddit, I am not trying to have an AI manage my money, nor am I talking about just a wrapper for ChatGPT. AI in the broad sense of the term that can be intelligently used as part of larger programmatic workflows.)
Edit: For anyone actually trying to understand the possible applications, I found this: https://midday.ai/updates/automatic-reconciliation-engine/. The product is overkill for the sort of personal use I was asking about, but this article does a good job of showing the why and how.
I am not aware of any self-hostable AI-powered financial/budgeting software. I am using Actual budget and finding it pretty awesome tho. It has an API you might be able to do something with
Saving money doesn’t really need an AI, there really aren’t many ways to cut budgets down short of paying attention to the most obvious spending problems (Too much housing, too much vehicle, too much food (especially eating out), and too much entertainment(too many subscription platforms))
It’s usually a far better investment of time to improve your earning power (upskill, change jobs, add hours, etc.)
Cutting $40 per month from your budget by not going to the movies every week just isn’t going to have the impact you need in your life.
Where I could see an LLM being useful is categorizing entries and maybe proposing sanitization (for example when the payment provider uppercases or abbreviates stuff)
Yep, that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m thinking about here. And it doesn’t even need to be full on chat style LLM, just some decent NLP that can recognize WALMART, WAL-MART, or WMART are all the same thing and label it.
But for some reason this question brings out all the assumption people who want to give financial advice or talk about the AI image the saw last year with 6 fingers.
This is an interesting and smart use case for locally run (and properly siloed) AI. Kind of an “identify any broad trends when it comes to spending habits based on this statement data, with particular focus on discretionary spending and areas where I can save money”.
Have you tinkered with any LLMs for this? If so, which ones do better than others? I could see SLMs being really good for this eventually.
I played a bit with the basic concept of identifying and categorizing merchants by importing a transaction csv into google sheets and writing a custom function that called the OpenAI API, basically just passing the raw merchant string along with “What category of business is this?”. It did well, the next step would have been to add a step that compared to a predefined list of possible categories. I didn’t compare any models or other platforms though. This was last year so I might play with it again.
