A household budget you will actually keep, with a little help from AI

This is not financial advice, and an AI assistant should not be making money decisions for you. What it can do is the tedious part of budgeting: sorting transactions into categories and adding them up.

Export, then anonymise

Most banks let you download a month of transactions as a spreadsheet. Before pasting anything into an AI tool, delete the columns you do not need: account numbers, balances, reference codes. Keep date, description and amount. That is enough.

Ask for categories, then correct them

Paste the list and ask: "Put each line into one of these categories: housing, groceries, eating out, transport, utilities, subscriptions, health, other. Return a table and a total per category." The first pass is usually 80 percent right. Fix the rest by hand; it takes a few minutes and you learn where the money goes while doing it.

Build a one-page monthly table

Ask for a simple table: category, this month, last month, difference. Copy it into a spreadsheet or a note. That one page is the whole budget. Look at it once a week.

Three things to decide yourself

• What counts as a fixed cost and what you want to reduce.
• How much goes to savings before anything else.
• Which subscriptions you had forgotten about. The assistant will find them; cancelling is up to you.

Keep the file local

Delete the pasted data from the assistant's history afterwards if the tool allows it, and keep the spreadsheet in your own storage. Convenience should not cost you your bank statements.