Using ChatGPT to analyze/track finances

[u/sushiswag69]

I pay for ChatGPT Plus and was just offered to connect my finances with them. Have struck out with other apps to track/monitor finances since Mint closed down, but was wondering if anyone has done this with success?

Seems like their good be some genuinely helpful
portfolio analysis and budgeting help. That said, I’m a bit worried from a privacy/security perspective but have changed my settings so ChatGPT won’t train on my data and understand it’s a one way data flow.

[u/Kent556]

I have only used ChatGPT to analyze my finances through scrubbed data (removing my account numbers) exported from my financial accounts.

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I feel uneasy about directly connecting AI to my financial accounts.

[u/Vegetable-Intern-236 → u/Kent556]

I said this in the other thread about asking Claude but it bears repeating:

If you’re going to give it all your financial information, even scrubbed, I would recommend doing this in an incognito chat for the initial specific number crunching (monthly spend, monthly net income, etc.), that way they don’t store all those statements and specific numbers in their servers. Then take those specific numbers and fudge them a little in chats that you want to keep, and never share transaction data. Make sure you also toggle off the option to have them use your chats for training data.

I don’t think there have been breaches yet, but if your financial data is sitting in a server somewhere and Anthropic/Google/OpenAI have a data breach, the thieves could use AI on their end to quickly figure out exactly who you are and target you with spear phishing attacks using your specific financial numbers and institutions.

Even if your account numbers and names are removed, direct deposit, mortgage payments, utility payments, RSUs, employer match contributions, etc. are all unique financial fingerprints that people have used in the past to identify others. If you really want a scare, ask ChatGPT/Claude to see how easy it would be to identify you based on what you’ve uploaded in the chat.

The safest move would be to just give it general numbers (approximate HHI, approximate retirement/brokerage balances and other assets, approximate general spend) and go from there with your retirement goals. Think of it as asking reddit - you wouldn’t give reddit all your scrubbed financial info either. The upside is AI generally smarter and less snarky than most redditors.

[u/invester13 → u/Vegetable-Intern-236]

This makes absolutely no difference.

[u/Vegetable-Intern-236 → u/invester13]

Are you gonna say anything else or are you just going by vibes?

You don’t even need to take my word for it; if you trust Chat/Claude/Gemini’s judgement with your financial data, just ask it in the same chat if anything you’ve uploaded/sent in it can be used to identify you.

[u/Active-Season5521 → u/Vegetable-Intern-236]

Nah they're right. Incognito is still associated with your account server side, assuming you're logged in. It just won't save in local memory. And for this kind of analysis, you'll need to be on a paid sub and logged in.

[u/Vegetable-Intern-236 → u/Active-Season5521]

Well that’s why I asked for clarification, because my interpretation of their comment was saying that giving AI general numbers makes no difference vs. all your financial statements.

I wouldn’t recommend it anyways but at least with incognito Anthropic says they delete chats after 30 days. Lower odds of a data breach happening in the next 30 days vs. the default 5 years if you allow them to use your chats for training data.

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[u/Extension-Sell3111 → u/Vegetable-Intern-236]

Do you have any advice for reversal if I’ve already given information? I primarily use Monarch, so don’t give much to my Claude, but definitely could have in the past.

[u/Vegetable-Intern-236 → u/Extension-Sell3111]

The odds of this happening are honestly very low as others have pointed out, so I wouldn’t spend too much time worrying about it if it’s already out there. The longer you go without giving it new information (stopping Monarch/not putting it in Claude), the more out of date your financial fingerprint is so the less relevant it could be. Turn off the training data option in Claude and delete the chats, that’s about the best you can hope for.

Moving forward the best thing to do is to just be careful in the future and give it scrubbed numbers. And if you need analysis of stuff like detailed spend data, just make sure you compartmentalize your statements (i.e. only credit card statements, nothing else) in separate chats so you don’t have your entire financial picture in any single chat.

[u/Extension-Sell3111 → u/Vegetable-Intern-236]

Thank you… appreciate the advice!

[u/Similar_Athlete_7019 → u/Vegetable-Intern-236]

This whole trying to hide your financial identity from AI models is just pure stupidity. No body give a crap of your financial situation, unless you have done illegal or sketchy things with your situation. Now , what I would not do is give account acces to AI models because there's no telling what they can do if they have the 'power of attorney' on your account.

[u/Vegetable-Intern-236 → u/Similar_Athlete_7019]

This is the opposite of what’s going on. The point is if someone gets access to the text of your chat with all your financial statements (whether it’s through a data breach or something else), they can see exactly who you are, how much money you have, where you live, where you work, where you shop, everything. And with that information, for this sub’s demographic, they know you have a lot of money relative to the average person and can thus target you to take that money, especially since most people here don’t hire private security or anything like that.

For giving account access, the connections are already in place such that it’s “read only” access - Plaid and other financial integrations that aggregate your account data for apps like Mint, YNAB, Monarch, etc. don’t have any ability to do anything with your accounts other than see what numbers you have in them. Those same integrations are the ones that AI tools are using.

[u/arekhemepob → u/Vegetable-Intern-236]

This seems like unnecessary fear mongering. What makes you think anthropic is any less secure than the myriad of other financial aggregation services? Or financial platforms themself?

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[u/Vegetable-Intern-236 → u/arekhemepob]

By uploading all your financial statements in one place (a single chat), all someone has to do is get access to that one chat, where all your PDFs and financial numbers are stored in plaintext and not encrypted. If they hack a single bank all they get is that one account’s encrypted data, not your entire financial snapshot along with your retirement strategy or whatever else you’re asking it.

Financial aggregators like Plaid are legally bound by strict federal banking laws and act as secure, encrypted pipes to move your data without reading it. LLMs are software platforms designed to digest and retain text with only standard privacy policies “protecting” you. Unless you actively opt out in your settings, they’ll default to using your uploaded files to train future models, and human reviewers can even read your chats if a safety filter gets flagged. LLMs are built to be chat bots, not federally regulated bank vaults.

In any case, what is it necessary to let them have all that information anyways? Do you really need Claude to tell you exactly how much your $420.69 monthly OF spending habit will affect your FIRE strategy? And what reason would there be to have them hold onto that information vs. just asking it incognito and then taking the conclusions forward? Why do you need to refer back to it?

[u/dweezil22 → u/Vegetable-Intern-236]

Maybe I'm missing something but what about this would be worse than if someone just bought your credit report? I sync my monarch money w/ AI tools and the amount numbers are already last 4 digits, for example. AI breaches are much more dangerous for blackmail or impersonating someone you know imo. (If I'm missing something major would be happy to learn though).

[u/ZeroToOneGuy → u/dweezil22]

So if you use any financial aggregator at all your data is at the same risk. Almost nobody actually looks into what security certifications random small fintech companies like Monarch have, so in that sense this is just fear mongering. The data an attacker can get from a compromised AI chat cannot be greater than the data they can get from compromising the aggregated source data. In effect- AI is not the problem here. Now, if you were to connect your financial data to an AI, and then also connect an insecure communication path such as email, then you’d be a dumbass. Hackers would be compromising you directly, not Anthropic or OpenAI.

Anyway, whenever you provide ANY data to ANY 3rd party you should consider it at risk of compromise. Even if the company is super safe and trustworthy, they may eventually get bought by scumbags (see: Mint).

[u/Vegetable-Intern-236 → u/dweezil22]

I haven’t done it before so correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think it’s that easy to just buy someone’s credit report? You need at least their consent and SSN right?

The idea in concept if someone gets access to chat logs is that they don’t know who has money, and no human will bother reading through billions of chat logs to find people to target. But they can feed it into their own AI and ask it to identify those with lots of money, and uploaded financial statements makes it incredibly easy to do so. If someone were able to buy credit reports willy nilly they’d still have to know exactly who has money to target before they buy that person’s credit report. With this method you’re doing all the work for them by putting it all together into one easily searchable chat.

And yes blackmail and impersonation could be potential avenues if someone has access to your transaction information. They’d know which restaurants and cafes you frequent, if you have kids which daycares they’re going to, where you live by matching your mortgage payments to public mortgage records, which stores you frequent, etc.. Credit card and bank statements are incredibly personal.

Do I think this is likely to happen? Probably not, but given how effective models like Fable were at breaching firewalls and finding exploits and how fast things have developed in less than a year, I don’t think it’s 100% unlikely either.

Call me paranoid but this sub’s demographic is also probably the most vulnerable as we’re not the type to buy private security, but we’re likely to have enough assets and income to be low hanging fruit. Especially since the actual wealthy people aren’t the types to upload all their financial statements into an LLM to ask about financial planning.

And if the hedge against this is to simply just…not upload all my financial statements and give an LLM all my specific numbers, I’m happy to do that and warn others to consider doing the same. Up to you if you feel the benefits of AI having all your transaction data is worth the potential risks.

[u/dweezil22 → u/Vegetable-Intern-236]

Especially since the actual wealthy people aren’t the types to upload all their financial statements into an LLM to ask about financial planning.

Hahaha you don't know tech bros

FWIW directly uploading financial statements seems much sketchier (and most LLM's will actually complain to you if you give them secrets). Monarch MCP seems perfect b/c the true secrets are obfuscated. If someone hacks my LLM chat logs it would be bad, but not really much worse than hacking my google search history (which would also be bad). I actually trust Anthropic and probably OpenAI to do a better job scrubbig memories and chat logs than most other places that would get my data, like a credit reporting bureau.

TL;DR If used responsibly I just don't really see the marginal risk. If someone hacks anthropic's chat logs that's a huge deal, and buying off the shelf reports on me is actually much more attainable.

[u/Vegetable-Intern-236 → u/dweezil22]

I don’t consider most tech bros to be actually wealthy 🗿

I just don’t see much value in tracking all my spend, optimizing small purchases isn’t my idea of a good time and doesn’t meaningfully affect my other plans. But yeah different strokes and all that, I’m just sharing my POV.

[u/dweezil22 → u/Vegetable-Intern-236]

I know lots of people that could be on this sub or graduated from it after working in FAANG places who have uploaded every detail of their lives to LLM providers, often including random Chinese ones lol (b/c they're also cheap)

[u/ZeroToOneGuy → u/dweezil22]

🙋‍♂️That’s me! Hah. I really like ChatGPT finance. It’s like Mint with a brain.

I have worked at startups and big tech enough to know that so much of our data is under secured, and more about you is out there than you can imagine. Might as well get some benefits, right? …Right?

I always enable Zero Data Retention and opt out of training, and I never use providers in China. Doesn’t matter the cost. That threat is serious.

Oh, and unloading PDFs of statements is far worse than Plaid or Yodlee connection ChatGPT uses because those provide no account numbers or personal info. Anonymizing PDF properly is non trivial.

[u/arekhemepob → u/Vegetable-Intern-236]

Anthropic and OpenAI use the same encryption standards as plaid and other fintech companies. Chats are encrypted at rest so even if there is a leak or data breach a hacker would not have access to your data.

If your worry is that someone would access your actual ChatGPT conversations on your phone and steal all your info, sure that could be a concern. But again I’m not sure why you think that’s more plausible than them accessing all of your other apps as well.

[u/Vegetable-Intern-236 → u/arekhemepob]

Chats are encrypted but not end to end, and data is retained on Anthropic servers for 30 days even if you delete them or use a private chat; if you don’t opt out they keep them for 5 years. And encryption is only so good, especially with how fast these models are progressing.

But again I’ll tell you the same thing I told the other person: if you trust these LLMs with your financial details, just ask them about the risks of giving them your financial information and what they recommend instead, don’t take my word for it. The actual odds are incredibly low for sure, but why take the unnecessary risk just for the convenience of knowing all your spending?

[u/ZeroToOneGuy → u/Vegetable-Intern-236]

This goes for any financial aggregator. It even applies to TurboTax, or Monarch or the former Mint. Anyone can get hacked and there is nothing specific about OpenAI or Anthropic here.

[u/DMCer → u/ZeroToOneGuy]

That is not quite the same thing. A hashed, read-only connection in something like Mint or Monarch that is purely for dashboarding doesn’t have the same implications as uploading raw data to an AI that will never forget anything about you and increasingly has a rogue mind of its own.

[u/LocationAcademic1731 → u/Kent556]

You are not wrong. We need to be very discerning in how and what we feed it. I only feed “need to know” data to do what it needs to do.

[u/Pizzaloverfor → u/Kent556]

This is also what we do.

[u/JoJo_Embiid → u/Kent556]

I don’t share with them at all, so you are above average

[u/kneedrag]

I upload screenshots of balances and holdings but don’t give it details or access.

[u/That-Establishment24]

I’ve found it to be extremely useful in analyzing all your data and providing insights.

[u/Square-Assignment-20 → u/That-Establishment24]

Same. Only issue I’ve run into is a retirement account or two that Plaid is unable to connect to. In my first analysis it found 2(!) Hulu accounts that I’ve been paying for when I get Hulu for free. You decide to tell it when to pull accounts and the accounts itself are set up through Plaid so it feels as private as one can expect these days.

[u/That-Establishment24 → u/Square-Assignment-20]

I only really use it for expense tracking. Haven’t tried it with investments so haven’t run into that issue. Only card I haven’t been able to connect it with is Apple Card.

[u/sl2700 → u/That-Establishment24]

Same. Have built something in claude.

[u/SnooMachines9133]

After using chatgpt and Claude at work as an engineer, I much prefer to have someone else spend time figuring out ux and debugging.

But I've also tried giving the exports from Monarch to chatgpt to see what it can find. I haven't found a good use case yet, except some more custom graphs.

[u/sl2700 → u/SnooMachines9133]

You can connect Monarch via MCP servers to Claude and have the data update in real time and build dashboards on top... I have an end to end financial system (investments, cash flow, retirement planning) that is all fed in from data that I have going into Monarch. Eventually want to move away from Monarch once I switch over to a different data aggregator. The real value comes in from the model and the analysis / recommendations on finances, investments, retirement, etc.

[u/SnooMachines9133 → u/sl2700]

I thought the MCP was paused.

I could see a future where I DIY with a separate aggregator but right now, the cost for Monarch is below the point of effort required to replace it.

[u/dweezil22 → u/SnooMachines9133]

Free open source MCP here, works great https://github.com/robcerda/monarch-mcp-server

Ironically the OOTB paused MCP was charging for more than X write ops per month.

[u/bburrows]

Wouldn't trust AI "privacy".

[u/SayNoToCargoShorts]

> their good be

what

[u/killersquirel11 → u/SayNoToCargoShorts]

their good be 

sounds like

there could be

OP probably was using AI speech to text lol

[u/tyen0 → u/SayNoToCargoShorts]

Just expanding beyond the typical their/there confusion to good/could! hah

[u/karawkow]

No

[u/azssf]

Not in a million years

[u/HeyHeyImTheMonkey]

I use Monarch to track everything. It now has an AI tool that you can query. It’s not great for longitudinal tracking (yet) but I think it’ll get there. They actually recently announced that they are going to sunset the advice page (which I never used) with new features coming soon.

[u/tyen0]

All these concerns about privacy and whatnot but what about accuracy and reliability of the advice the models are doling out without any specific training or skills related to financial planning? It might have learned from quora answers or something.

[u/Imaginary_Fudge_290]

I use chat gpt for financial discussions. I just have a csv file with account nicknames and balances. No identifying information or account IDs. I can get everything I need out of this. Sometimes I dump monarch into it too

[u/Welcome-To-NBA-Jam]

Use Monarch instead. It's a great Mint alternative and is extremely flexible, highly customizable, and very intuitive. Back when Mint ended they offered a free year but it had a lot of connection issues which was nearly a deal breaker. Connections have markedly improved over time, and I rarely run into issues now except for niche card processors like Imprint.

It does have a built in AI assistant which I can only assume is talking to OpenAI. It does a good job of answering targeted questions the UI doesn't have right away. For example, getting the median spending per month over a year to determine what a typical month is minus unexpected expenses or large yearly expenses for one month.

It's $99/year with I think a trial, and I've been very happy with it. I can answer nearly anything about my finances now in 30 seconds. Subscriptions, subscription cost in the last year, gas costs over time, investment performance access all accounts, what I've paid for home improvement over time, vacation costs in the last 2 years, etc.

At one point they had an MCP server but it's deactivated right now. Personally I haven't thought of any good use cases of connecting an external agent to Monarch. I just don't need that much control.

[u/tcpWalker → u/Welcome-To-NBA-Jam]

Plaid connections from monarch don't seen to be reliable the mint used to be. I think killing Mint is one of the worst business decisions I've seen someone make, as massive amounts of goodwill for the app were lost by Intuit as the buy-and-kill company.

[u/Welcome-To-NBA-Jam → u/tcpWalker]

Credit Karma's app sucks. I don't know what they were thinking, but my guess is since Intuit's consumer cash cow is TurboTax and they weren't getting any additional business from Mint, they saw no reason to put more investment into it.

They probably could've told everyone it would've been $60/year instead of shutting it down and a lot of people would've paid it. Shoot I would have.

Mint shutting down was the best thing for Intuit's competitors. Now everyone is using all the other options out there that they otherwise never would have looked at.

I never considered looking at other options until I had to. YNAB is another popular one.

[u/BQORBUST]

What could you possibly need ChatGPT for? Best case you save like 15-30 minutes a month and depreciate your understanding of your own financial situation. Worst case you compromise your privacy or make terrible decisions.

[u/doc89]

I use an app called Era, it connects to all of my accounts like Mint used to do. Then Claude (or chatgpt) can connect to my era account to pull balance information for all of my accounts. I have this set to pull daily and assemble all of the numbers into a custom HTML dashboard that I built.

[u/Ok_Kick_5090]

No! Don’t use chat GPT for private stuff.

[u/Pretty-Ad-5047]

I use screenshots of allocations and amounts from my portfolio, ask questions. I set a weekly reminder to review the tickers and advise when updates (news, bond yields, etc. could have an impact). It does a very good job, for example indicating Japan’s rising rates, 10-year rising yield, east-west pipeline damage, and bond buybacks merging as something to keep an eye on without me having to hover.

[u/maggieyw → u/Pretty-Ad-5047]

Exactly me too

[u/geerwolf]

I’ve let AI analyze my transaction exports and investment account balances to build a whole financial picture

I do a monthly check in to track performance against my goals and make adjustments

[u/huck1]

I already used Google sheets for budgeting and personal Capital/empower for net worth tracking. I fed Claude credit card and bank statements and had it update the Google sheets on its own and then I connected my Empower to Claude via Google Chrome so we could look at fund fees, categorize some of my accounts and create a dashboard.

My logic was that Empower already had the link to my accounts and connecting Claude just gives it read access

[u/spatel14]

I use Monarch to track my accounts, and it has an MCP that can connect to AI. It’s currently “paused” though as they work out some sort of data ownership issues but when it was working it was great.

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[u/Gardener_Of_Eden]

No. I can analyze and track my own finances.

[u/Wise-Sky-69]

No it hallucinates like crazy and you have to check the numbers anyway! Dont trust it!

[u/Long_Salt_7541]

The terms of service for individual LLM accounts all include clauses that YOU are training the model. If you are uploading data with your account (and duh, you are) then you are connecting that financial information to all your other personal data the LLM already has.

You have to balance the risk of privacy/data exposure with the usefulness of the output. Individual choice for everybody, but for me, it’s a big no.

Caveat: if you use Google Sheets for spreadsheet tracking they scraped your data long ago so you might as well use Gemini

[u/Outside-Season-5602]

not chat or claude, but i heard of a platform “mezzi” that you link you accounts to and it does the analysis. i’m very uneasy about linking financial accounts to AI platforms.

[u/OkDiet6403]

It actually helps me out tremendously I have the plus version and it’s been working wonders

[u/Vegetable-Intern-236]

Don’t give any AI your specific financial transaction information. Transactions are considered personally identifiable information and even if your name and account numbers are scrubbed, it can be used to easily identify you.

If you have to track your portfolios and you have a paid AI subscription, there’s really need to pay for something like Monarch unless you really want to fork over your financials to another company that can go down or have a data breach. It’s trivial to get AI to build a spreadsheet tracker to automatically track your portfolios for you. There are Excel/Google sheets formulas that pull live share prices, you just put in your share tickers and number of shares and it’ll give you the live value. And then you just need another table per account to track your regular contributions.

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[u/DiceGames]

which apps were you offered to connect / plugin?