Budgeting often feels like a punishment. It requires you to look at your past mistakes and feel bad about them. I wanted to see if AI could do the "shame work" for me—crunching the numbers objectively to find patterns I was missing.
The setup was simple: I downloaded my bank statement CSV file from the last 90 days. I anonymized it (removing account numbers and names) and pasted the raw text into an LLM.
"Analyze this spending data. Group it into two categories: 'Survival' (Rent, Utilities, Groceries) vs. 'Leakage' (Everything else).
Constraint: Be ruthless. If it's not essential for biological survival, flag it as potential leakage."
The Analysis: What the AI Found
The results were instant, unemotional, and eye-opening. The AI didn't care about my feelings; it cared about the math.
The Good: Hidden Income
It instantly identified three recurring charges totaling $45/month that I thought I had cancelled. These were "Zombie Subscriptions"—digital services I wasn't using but was still funding. Canceling them was like giving myself a $540/year raise.
The Bad: The "Soul" Problem
It flagged my weekly Therapy Co-pay as "Discretionary Medical." This highlighted the limitation of AI: It has no soul. It viewed mental health maintenance as "optional" because it wasn't food or shelter. I had to manually recategorize this as "Essential."
The Ugly: The Convenience Tax
It highlighted a brutal statistic: I was spending 14% of my net income on "Convenience Food." This wasn't fine dining; it was DoorDash fees and 7-Eleven energy drinks. Seeing it aggregated into a single percentage made the leak impossible to ignore.
The Verdict
Use AI for Pattern Recognition, not Value Judgment.
The AI excelled at finding the "Leakage" I was blind to. It stripped away the rationalizations ("I deserve this treat") and showed me the raw cost of my habits. However, I had to correct its labels. Only I can decide what is truly essential for my well-being.
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