AI prompts for personal finance, budgeting and spending analysis
Updated 2026-10-01
These prompts work once your assistant can read your transactions, for example through a read-only Simpl Finance MCP connector on Claude or ChatGPT. Each one can be answered with four tools: transactions, balances, accounts and spending by category. Copy one, paste it into your assistant, and ask.
See where the money went
- Make me a spreadsheet of all my transactions last month, grouped by category, with a total per category.
- What did I spend the most on in the last 90 days? Show me the top 5 categories and how they've trended month over month.
- How much did I spend on restaurants and food delivery last month versus groceries?
- Break down last month’s spending by category and show it as a chart I can drop into a slide.
- List every transaction over $200 in the last 60 days and tell me which ones look non-recurring.
- Which merchants do I spend the most at? Rank my top 15 by total dollars for the year so far.
Catch things worth catching
- Find every subscription or recurring charge in my transactions and total up what they cost me per month.
- Are there any charges in the last 30 days I should look at twice — duplicates, unfamiliar merchants, or amounts that jumped from last month?
- Compare this month’s spending to last month’s, category by category, and tell me what actually changed.
- How much did I spend on fees — overdraft, ATM, interest, service charges — in the last six months?
- Did any of my recurring bills go up in price this year? Show me the before and after.
Plan ahead
- Help me build a savings plan to buy a car. Based on my last 6 months of income and spending, how much can I realistically put away each month, and how long until I hit $8,000?
- Set me a realistic monthly budget by category based on what I actually spent over the last three months, not what I wish I spent.
- If I cut my dining-out spending in half, how much would I save over a year?
- How many months of expenses do I have covered by my current balances? What would a 3-month emergency fund need to be?
- I want to save $5,000 by next summer. Look at my spending and tell me the three specific cuts that would get me there with the least pain.
Accounts and cash flow
- What’s the balance across all my accounts right now, and how much of it is actually spendable?
- What accounts do I have connected, and at which banks?
- How much money came in versus went out each month for the last six months? Am I net positive?
- I have a $3,200 payment due in two weeks. Based on my typical spending, will I have enough in checking?
Reports
- Write me a one-page monthly finance recap for last month — income, spending, biggest categories, what changed — that I could send to my partner.
- Export my last full quarter of transactions to a spreadsheet with columns for date, merchant, category, amount, and account.
Tips for better answers
- Give a date range. Last month, the last 90 days, and year to date all work well.
- Ask for a format: a table, a spreadsheet, a chart, or a one-page summary.
- Ask the assistant to say which transactions it used, so you can check the numbers against your bank.
Frequently asked questions
- Do these prompts work without connecting a bank?
- They need your assistant to be able to read your transactions. Without a connector, the assistant has no real data and can only give general advice.
- Which assistants can use them?
- Claude, ChatGPT, and any assistant that supports remote MCP servers.
- Is the output financial advice?
- No. The assistant analyzes your own data. It is not financial, investment or tax advice.
Ask your AI about your actual money
Read-only access to your transactions, balances and spending. Works with Claude, ChatGPT and any MCP client. $10/month.