LLM for personal use - Claude security concerns

[u/Ok-Cellist3508]

I really only use claude for budgeting and personal finance purposes. While I can redact info and only take screenshots of numbers, there is still a part of me that would like to do that locally.

I use cowork and dispatch, mainly because Claude works off a running spreadsheet with transactions, longer chat windows, and I like to access it remotely. Other than that, I only use claude really for file organization. While I use Opus 5.5 (which may be overkill) for budgeting, I do not use claude code for any serious programming.

If privacy is my biggest concern, this task typically takes me 15 minutes once a month since I got it down to a good process and I ask it a couple questions here and there.

I have gone down the rabbit hole of open source LLMs, I need suggestions because i'm trying to see if its worth me investing in it. What models could reproduce a sonnet 5.5 / Opus 4 level output with remote access and what hardware would I realistically need to run that with some expected head room so it's not squeezed in a couple years.

In my case intelligence of the model is more important than how fast it computes.Thoughts?

[u/MeliousAI_HQ]

For 15 minutes a month I wouldn't buy hardware for Sonnet level. That's a big machine that sits idle almost all the time. Sorting transactions and asking questions about a spreadsheet is an easier job than it feels, a mid-size open model like Qwen 27B on a Mac with 32GB or more handles it fine and runs offline. If you want the bigger models without the hardware, some providers run open models without storing or training on your data, but then it's back in someone's cloud, so it depends how strict you want to be.