We’re incorporating AI into our lives more and more as a digital assistant. Personally, I’m getting curious about Custom GPTs and AI assistant agents; however, so far I’ve mostly stuck to conversational chats—most recently to help me navigate my tax returns! 
How have you been using AI as a sounding board and partner in your personal finances?
I mostly use AI for help with formulas that I can’t figure out. Occasionally I’ll ask a question about how to do something else.
Same here, haven’t yet used AI to talk about my finances, but use it to help with managing my financial tools (Tiller!).
Similar here. Use it to help develop Google sheet formulas. I don’t use it to help with my budget, expenses, etc.
What I have started playing with is asking it to analyze hypothetical investment portfolios. AI can pull historical returns for any time period for any portfolio you throw at it. It can compare different portfolios, showing a multitude of metrics over any time period you choose. Some examples of what it did for me…
This was all historical analysis. I like to see how investments would have done from 2000 - 2025. I figure this timeframe pretty much covers every market scenario that could happen.
What AI did in 15 minutes (mostly because I kept asking more questions) would have taken me multiple weeks (probably months) to build a spreadsheet, download the data, debug, etc.; and I most likely would have had multiple errors.
FWIW- to validate what it was telling me was true, I did the same prompts on both Claude and Gemini to see how they compared. They were very similar which gave me confidence that it was not hallucinating.
You definitely need to be sceptical of every answer. @Cowboy13 's approach of comparing two AI responses is a good start to get rid of the worse hallucinations, but for important decisions, further research should always be done!
Absolutely. AI may get you 80% there (or may hallucinate like Martha said- I have seen this) , but you should always do your own due diligence before taking any actions.
With the limited privacy controls we have these days, I don’t trust any AI agent with my full financial history. I ask it targeted questions and share only the relevant data for the request. I use it to help with spreadsheet formulas and report design.
I’ve been using AI to develop “Dashboards” to summarize and analyze my options trading. It accesses the Transactions worksheet (modified to identify options trades) to provide insights and help develop strategies.
I’m using claude code to build out my own personal finance website using data from tiller and other spreadsheets. At this point I have just about everything you would expect to find in something like personal capital, but i’ve made it using the visualizations I want and with code that I possess and host. I’ve created a mobile version as well. I have seperate tabs for account balances, net worth, budgeting and transactions, and investment.
I’ve recently figured out how to calculate my investment returns with it in a way that spreadsheets were always very cumbersome for. My self-calculated returns match fairly precisely what is reported by our brokerages, but I can consolidate across brokerages. I can calculate time-weighted and money-weighted returns across one or more accounts and groups over various time frames. I can follow our asset allocation, though this still requires some monthly data input.
I’m satisfied with the security that I’ve been able to implement through clouflare and google.
I did this all with natural language coding, and only a rudimentary undersanding of html and javascript. Though I’ve learned a bit as I’ve gone.
At this point I rarely interact with google sheets directly.
How long would you say it took you? Are we talking hours or days?
I use Claude for quite a few things. It recently diagnosed a health issue, later confirmed by expert doctors. But yes, I’ve used it as a sounding board for financial decisions. Some it is more helpful with than others. I’ve found that the more data and the better your questions are, the more helpful it is.
It isn’t prescient, can’t predict the future, so it is pretty limited. It is built from human knowledge which is quite often wrong. Sometimes it leaves out important information, so you’ve got to sharpen your questions.
Also, I’ve used it to figure out how to build more functionality into my financial spreadsheets with it. Some of the formulas it helped me figure out are really complicated. I think of it as a “super google”.
It helps to make projects and upload your data to them.
Within a couple hours I had an html file that could access the Google Sheets api to generate visualizations of net worth and cash flow. Took some more time to add “features” like investment tracking or being able to edit transactions through the web interface. Also needed to verify that numbers on the web agreed with my own calculations.
Also took a little time to put the file on private repo on GitHub and ultimately a domain on cloudflare with identify verification and access restrictions.
Not “free” but very cheap. Like $7 a year to register the domain and $4 a month for GitHub pro to keep the repo private. Claude pro is $20 a month and obviously I still subscribe to Tiller.
I plan to see if I can migrate my retirement models and taxes that I currently run in sheets to the web. I run a Monte Carlo sim in Google Sheets but it struggles with the amount of code it’s a huge sheet. I can imagine a world where I dump the tax code into Claude and then enter my W-2 etc and roll my own taxes with it but I’m not there yet.
I use Claude pro for other things and I’m starting to plan for other projects that I can use the domain for. It’s an eyeopener for me.
