The bad news is that ChatGPT might target your place of employment. The good news is that it can assist you in setting a budget and saving money in advance of the takeover by generative AI.
The OpenAI chatbot may assist just about anyone in strategizing and planning for better organised and effective spending and saving, but it is not yet a replacement for human financial counsellors.
Get Organised and Confront Your Finances
Only if you provide ChatGPT with an accurate and thorough accounting of your financial life will it be able to quickly and precisely design you a full and personalised financial plan. Your debts, bills, and fixed and variable monthly expenses cannot be calculated for you by this tool.
Gather all the data you would require for a first consultation with a real financial professional before you begin.
The findings ChatGPT will provide are more trustworthy the more thorough, honest, and detailed your inputs are. Take the time and deal with the pressure of going over your money first since the fine details will make the difference between success and failure.
Tell It About Your Situation
Once your income, expenses, and obligations are listed, enter them into ChatGPT in a casual manner along with a description of the type of budget you hope to establish.
I make [whatever amount] per month, pay [amount] in rent or mortgage, [amount] in bills, [amount] in food, [amount] in petrol, and I'm [amount] in debt, according to a sample prompt provided by Forbes. Create a budget for me to aid with savings.
Analyze the Results
In response, ChatGPT will provide a personalised, in-depth breakdown of how to divide up your funds between paying off debts and bills and setting aside money for retirement or an emergency reserve.
Now is the moment to compare the results to your actual financial status and, more importantly, your goals, so you may keep adding new information to the results.
Fine-Tune and Follow Up
The capability of ChatGPT to remember past inputs and utilise them in new queries is one of the things that makes it so helpful. The more precise ChatGPT's responses are, the more you can narrow down your initial inputs with more detailed instructions.
You may, for instance, expand on the bot's original response by making the following follow-ups:
"What happens if I want to save for a car that costs $40,000?"
Please switch to focusing on raising my credit score first.
How do I combine a tax refund and an annual bonus?
Change, Refine, and Put Yourself First Rather Than an Algorithm
Ivana Pino, a staff writer for Fortune, used her publication to document her experience using ChatGPT to create a budget for a $500,000 property purchase. She entered:
- Price of the house
- Her earnings
- Her outstanding debts
- Her ongoing monthly costs
- Balances in her brokerage and savings accounts
ChatGPT soon provided Pino with a list of priorities and the sequence in which to complete them.
- remit her credit card debt
- repay her student loan debt
- Create an emergency fund.
- decrease spending
- Amass funds for a 20% down payment.
The recommendations made by human financial advisors Fortune hired to construct an outline using the same inputs were strikingly comparable to those of the bot, but they added a human touch that the computer lacked.
For instance, ChatGPT presumptively knew exactly how much Pino spent each month. Additionally, it failed to take into account the rise in interest rates since its data updates ceased in 2021, as well as future changes in income.
The financial consultants concurred that ChatGPT is a potent instrument that excels at offering broad roadmaps. However, consumers should view the outcomes of AI as a solid beginning point that needs to be amended and improved based on human intelligence.
