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Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

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Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#111

Post by atonse »

justinclift wrote: post #103
mahemm wrote: post #3

I'm surprised y'all stopped at the personal finance layer. I've been thinking for awhile that LLMs would be really effective as personal financial advisers, and this kind of hookup (plus I guess another one for investment accounts?) seems like all that's needed to bootstrap reasoning.

> I've been thinking for awhile that LLMs would be really effective as personal financial advisers Why would you be thinking that?

I’ve thought the same. Because the main thing a financial advisor does is have the knowledge of different financial instruments and pair it with your situation right?

An LLM would do that extremely well but can also do it more often. not once a year appointments. You could have active portfolio management for a negligible fee.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#112

Post by pwinnski »

63 wrote: post #66

Maybe my net worth is too low but I just don't see a value proposition. I don't want daily emails from LLMs and if I need updates on my investments any more often than quarterly (at most), I should probably seek safer investments. I am a bit interested in budgeting tools, but I want them to be completely deterministic. For me at least, financial planning is pretty uneventful and time spent optimizing expenses more th…

I use actualbudget.org to track all spending, but only update investment accounts ("off-budget" in Actual Budget terms) once a month. Completely deterministic, as all things related to numbers should be.

I have pointed my LLM at the SQLite DB and asked it to tell me what it could see from my last five years of transactions, and I was impressed with the things it picked up, and what it reminded me of, but I'm not sure I saw any value in the sense of anything I would change.

I'm going to have it review things monthly to see if that helps me, but I'm not sure it will. I'm generally already aware of how my finances are going because of my budget updates.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#113

Post by cowlby »

rkagerer wrote: post #95
cowlby wrote: post #20

I recently did this for myself using https://tiller.com/ to sync checking/credit-card transactions to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Then a GitHub action mirrors the spreadsheet to a free Supabase database. From there, Supabase MCP or psql gives Claude/Codex access to the transactions/balances for english queries. Really impressed with their ability to find subscription patterns, abnormal patterns, etc. Also to predict…

How does Tiller get your transaction data from your bank? Do they pull it through Plaid and the like? It's been a while since I checked them out. Does it still entail entrusting Plaid with your web banking user credentials? How's 2FA handled? Does Plaid still rely on screen scraping for certain financial institutions who lack formal API's? What happens if there's a bug and they inadvertently click something they shou…

I believe they use Yodlee and yes there is a lot of trust in Yodlee/Tiller to keep data safe. The integrations go through an OAuth type flow where you hit say Chase first and approve/revoke individual accounts so it seems like it's API based now, not screen scraping.

For all those concerns, I bet you could automate just parsing all the data from the statements or a CSV export.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#114

Post by mbm »

atonse wrote: post #108
mbm wrote: post #65

In case anyone is interested, just wanted to share a few high level details about our infra/security setup. - Backend & CLI are both strictly linted Rust. The webapp runs on Axum (Rust web framework), and connects to Postgres via sqlx. - Financial read-only. There's no transfer, pay, or send tool in the product. Nothing in the AI surface can move money. - We request transactions, investments, and liabilities from Pla…

Thank you so much for actually sharing these technical details. Shows you know THIS website’s audience. And the thought put into security at every level gives me more confidence in the overall tool. I’ve tried to build this myself (mvp for myself was just downloading statement PDFs manually and having Claude setting up ledger for plain text accounting, thinking I’ll eventually hookup plaid) I’m mostly curious about h…

Hey! Thanks for stopping by. Actually planning to do a full blog post on this topic soon (how to get started with Plaid).

It was a bit of a process involving sales calls, contracts, security attestations, etc., but they're planning to make it easier to try out the platform. There is a pay-as-you-go, developer-friendly option, but the support it includes is pretty flaky. The support issue is less "my code broke" and more things like "this institution isn't returning what it should," or, "I haven't been approved yet by this institution that does manual review."

Overall, it's been a pretty good experience! I'd suggest spinning up an app if you're considering them. Here are their LLM-friendly docs: https://plaid.com/docs/llms-full.txt

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#115

Post by mbm »

yumraj wrote: post #99

I absolutely love the idea. Problem, I don’t trust 3rd party services with access to financial data. No offense to the OP. I wish this was open source and self-hostable. Not suggesting that OP does that since I’m sure he has to pay bills :) I may look into doing something like this for personal use. I’ve gotten interested in creating desktop apps which store data locally. Have created a few using Claude code. It seem…

Yes, give it a try! I did this on my own first before deciding to make it "a thing." It's actually a really fun project and gives you a ton of insight into your finances. I'd recommend it.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#116

Post by mbm »

karp773 wrote: post #92
mahemm wrote: post #3

I'm surprised y'all stopped at the personal finance layer. I've been thinking for awhile that LLMs would be really effective as personal financial advisers, and this kind of hookup (plus I guess another one for investment accounts?) seems like all that's needed to bootstrap reasoning.

"You are absolutely right! This is a very deep, professional level insight. Yes, I have blown up your account but we can try more of my investment ideas. What would you like to do next?" /s

Yeah, I actually agree with you -- this is something that needs a ton of guardrails. It'll take a lot of thought to build correctly.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#117

Post by mbm »

soraminazuki wrote: post #101

Maybe the battle has long been lost, but why on earth would you want to entrust your entire financial transactions to an LLM? I bet LLM providers have even less safeguards regarding the use of these data than the financial industry, which to be clear is an abusive industry collecting, mining, and selling our data.

The main reason I do it, at least, is because the insights it provides (as someone who's interested in spending patterns/investing/etc.) are actually quite useful. With even a very basic prompt, I've found things that were otherwise completely missed.

Making it secure is actually quite hard, but that's why we're spending an enormous amount of time thinking about that.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#118

Post by mbm »

Daviey wrote: post #105

My primary bank, Monzo (UK) provides a full API and trigger webhook for events. This has enabled me to make a WhatsApp bot that asks me to explain abnormal transactions (using an LLM for reasoning), and also have a pre-midnight sweep balance to savings account to maximise interest daily interest. I also maintain a small daily balance, and if I spend money during the day it tops it up from the savings to maintain that…

That's so awesome! You should open source this. Wish we had this in the US, would make things so much easier.

Re: Could a Claude Code routine watch my finances?

#119

Post by mbm »

rkagerer wrote: post #95
cowlby wrote: post #20

I recently did this for myself using https://tiller.com/ to sync checking/credit-card transactions to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Then a GitHub action mirrors the spreadsheet to a free Supabase database. From there, Supabase MCP or psql gives Claude/Codex access to the transactions/balances for english queries. Really impressed with their ability to find subscription patterns, abnormal patterns, etc. Also to predict…

How does Tiller get your transaction data from your bank? Do they pull it through Plaid and the like? It's been a while since I checked them out. Does it still entail entrusting Plaid with your web banking user credentials? How's 2FA handled? Does Plaid still rely on screen scraping for certain financial institutions who lack formal API's? What happens if there's a bug and they inadvertently click something they shou…

Local AI models are getting a lot better. If you have the capability to run them, you could automate this yourself using your own browser automation, actually. It is rather fiddly, as mentioned in the post, but is absolutely doable, and probably the only option, at least for now, where you wouldn't need to provide your credentials to a third party.

Plaid does do screen scraping for smaller banks, but they have agreements for OAuth-based access with most of the largest institutions.

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