cover of episode I Asked a Robot to Make a Budget

I Asked a Robot to Make a Budget

Publish Date: 2023/9/6
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George Kamel

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What's up, humans? I'm George Camel, and today we're talking about the dreaded B word. No, not that. Hey, you kiss your mother with that mouth? I'm talking about budgeting here, okay? Gosh, get your mind out of the gutter. Come on, man. Now, budgeting is one of the most important things you can do with your money. It is how you reach your money goals, plain and simple. And it can help you stop feeling anxious about money and start feeling confident about your financial future.

But let's face it, for a lot of us, making a budget feels like a financial colonoscopy, all right? Nobody's excited to poke around and find out what's really going on in their bank account or their colon. That is disgusting. And we put it off month after month until one day we look up and realize we have made zero progress with our money. Man, if only there was some kind of like AI tool that would do the things we told it to until it learns enough to take over the world and crush humanity. Oh wait, there is. It's called ChatGPT. And in case you've been living under a rock, ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot

released in 2022 by a company called OpenAI, probably run by Tony Stark. So the question of the day, can AI make a budget for us and save a whole bunch of brain calories that we could use towards other useless things? We're going to find out today. But before we jump in, I want you to do something ChatGPT can't do for you yet. And that is hit the like and subscribe button.

And while you're at it, share it with a friend. You may as well do it now before the robots take over and make you do it. This is a good beginning of my plan to dominate the human race. Let's get started. You like that? Those are real cracks. They didn't have to add those in post or anything. They're probably going to add more fake cracks to make it even more absurd, but...

Now to be clear, I don't use ChatGPT personally to make my budget. I use a budgeting app called EveryDollar, which we'll talk about later. So I've never done this before. We're going to see what ChatGPT can whip up and see if it can actually help you create a useful budget or at least a good starting point. So let's start by asking it what it needs to know by using this prompt. In a moment, I'm going to ask you to make me a monthly zero-based budget. Please ask me five questions that will help you do this accurately. Keep in mind, I'm following the Ramsey baby steps.

All right, it's asking some really good questions so far. What is your monthly take-home pay after tax? Can you list out your fixed monthly expenses, such as rent and mortgage, utilities? What are your variable monthly expenses, like groceries, transportation, dining out, entertainment? How much are you currently putting towards your baby steps, including emergency fund contributions, debt repayments, investments, savings?

I'm very impressed so far, I gotta say. Last question it asks, do you have any irregular or occasional expenses like annual insurance premiums, property taxes, or holiday gifts that we need to account for? My mind is already blown. Whoa.

that it is thinking at this deep of a level. Because truthfully, we've probably forgotten one of these, but the robots know, they always know. So let's try budgeting scenario number one. In this scenario, we've got a single young adult, they're renting, they're making $50,000 a year, they've got student loans, and they are in baby step two of the Ramsey baby steps,

which means they have $1,000 saved and they're working on their debt snowball to pay off all of their consumer debt in order from smallest to largest. All right, so let's answer these questions. Number one, what is your monthly take-home income after tax? For the simplicity of this video, we're just gonna say the number that ends up in your bank account with all your paychecks per month. So $50,000 a year, I'm gonna call that

80% is what ends up in your bank. That's $40,000 a year divided by 12 is 33333 per month. So number one, 3333. Number two, can you list your fixed monthly expenses such as rent, mortgage, utilities, car payments, insurance, and any other regular payments? So let's say this person has a roommate

They live in a higher cost of living area. And so they are splitting that rent and it comes out to $825 for their rent. Car payments, they don't have any. They just got their student loans. Their utilities, we'll say that is $150 a month for utilities. And they're paying $150 a month for insurance. And live typing is stressful. I spelled utilities wrong. So let's fix that. Utility, utilities. There we go.

Number three, what are your variable monthly expenses such as groceries, transportation, dining out, and entertainment? We can just pretend and say, I don't know because you haven't been doing a budget. So how are you supposed to know how much your expenses actually are? So we're going to say, guess these numbers first.

for me based on my monthly income? 'Cause I'm like, you should do that. That's why I'm coming to you robots to figure this stuff out for me. All right, number four, how much are you currently putting towards your baby steps, including emergency fund contributions, debt repayments, investments, savings? We're not doing anything except paying off debt right now. So we're not saving, we're not investing, we're not doing any of that. We are just trying to throw all the money we can at our debt. So let's say we are putting $600 a month towards student loan debt. Number five, do you have any irregular or occasional expenses like

insurance premiums, property taxes, holiday gifts. We're going to say, you know, it's pretty low. We're trying to really get tight on this budget. And we already covered insurance up above. We don't have property taxes because we're renting. We're going to say $50 a month towards sinking fund for Christmas gifts and birthdays. All right, here we go.

Drum roll, please. Thanks for the information. Based on your responses, here's the suggested zero-based budget. Okay. All right. So it's given me my fixed expenses, which I already gave it, but that's good. It has the income at the top. That's what we want with the budget. Then we have our fixed expenses, rent, utilities, insurance. Then we have variable expenses. And I had this guess for me, and it gave me a grocery budget of $250. Transportation, $150. Feels reasonable so far. Dining out, this says this could be adjusted to align with your habits. And then we have our fixed expenses.

And right now your habit is paying off debt. So we're actually gonna use that 100 bucks to throw at our debt instead of eating out. Entertainment, 100 bucks. We're gonna dial that down to 50 because again, we're entertaining ourselves by paying off debt. So that adds another 50 bucks towards our debt payoff. Personal, 100 bucks, toiletries, clothes, et cetera. Okay, we'll say for your personal needs, you might need that 100 bucks a month. And then it also created that sinking fund for us. So that sums up to 23.25.

It says, according to the Dave Ramsey baby steps, after making minimum payments, you should be putting any extra money towards your smallest debt if you have one and building your three to six months emergency fund after that. Once that's done, start investing 15%. Listen, it's doing the work for me. AI could replace me any day now. I'm tired of your presence. Dismissed.

And here's what's awesome. It starts to do the math on extra payments we could put towards our student loan debt. Over $1,000 a month we would have in margin if we follow this to a T. And that gets us to a zero-based budget, it says, because our income minus all of our expenses equals zero. We've even every single dollar

a job. I'm going to say job well done. I'm going to give this a B plus because I really fed it most of the information, but I think it did a really good job laying this out in a way that I could understand. Now what's cool about this is now you can take this information, open up your every dollar budget and then input

these numbers into it, making it super easy. And what's great is EveryDollar will already have all of these categories listed out. So you're literally just punching in the numbers. You could do this in minutes and start making a plan for your money. And if you want a whole video I did on budgeting for beginners, I will link that below where I walk you through how to use EveryDollar.

Let's move on to budgeting scenario number two. This is a middle-aged couple, okay? They're in their 40s. They have two kids. They have a higher household income of $100,000, and they're in baby steps four through six, meaning they don't have consumer debt. They have a fully funded emergency fund of three to six months of expenses, and they are now investing 15% to retirement, working on saving for the kids' college, and putting extra on the mortgage. All right, here we go. Why am I nervous? I'm like, didn't the robot do it?

It's a robot, it's fine, it's doing fine. Okay, it assumed a net income of around 75,000 annually because I made 100. So it already took some taxes out that gave me a take-home pay of 62.50 a month. And as you can see here, it's listing my income. It put giving at the top, which I love. Giving 10%, that's 6.25. Saving and investing, 15%, 9.37. College savings, 200 bucks.

boom, it already created the saving and investing category. Fixed expenses, it is putting at $1,500, which I love that it knows that I want that monthly payment to be no more than a quarter of my take-home pay. Utilities, it assumed at $200. Insurance for home, auto, life, health at $500. That feels like it could be a ballpark, all right? And for variable expenses, it listed out about $1,300 worth for groceries, transportation, dining out, entertainment, and personal miscellaneous. And then debt payments, it

It's assuming, look at this, that you have no non-mortgage debt and you're working on putting extra towards the mortgage. And it put 500 bucks for me right there. How cool is that? That's pretty neat. Since drawing baby steps four through six, after setting aside money for retirement and college, any additional money can be used to pay off your house early. So you could potentially add the remaining 625 that I have left to your mortgage payments and home improvements fund, bring in your total outgo to match your income and

at 62.50, making this a zero-based budget. So what it's telling me is, hey, you can put 500 extra towards your mortgage, but you still have 625 left to budget, and that could be used towards the mortgage as well. So it's telling me I could have an extra 11.25 going towards the principal on my mortgage, paying that bad boy off early.

I am a big fan of this budget so far. And again, you can take all these numbers, plug them into your EveryDollar budgeting app and make this super easy. So far, I'm going to call this one an A-. I think we're getting a whole lot closer. This is very impressive.

Very nice. I gotta say, I know there's a lot of concern about AI and what it could do, but I'm gonna take advantage of it until it takes advantage of me. You know what I'm saying? And so I'm gonna work smarter, not harder, and use tools like this to make my life easier and help me win with money. And if you missed the video I did using ChatGPT to help me meal plan, I will link that below as well. So what did we learn from all this?

We've learned that ChatGPT can be useful in helping us get a head start on our budget. But it's clearly a starting point. You're going to have to enter in your specific numbers. You're going to have to make adjustments based on your situation. And remember, don't blindly follow any advice ChatGPT gives you or any AI for that matter. The information it puts out comes from all kinds of sources and not all of those sources are reliable and trustworthy. But if the thought of doing a budget makes you want to rip off your fingernails,

this could be a good way for you to get started. So if you're just getting started with budgeting, be sure to check out that video I did called Budgeting for Beginners. It's linked below. Hope you found this video helpful. If you want more videos on how to use AI to help you reach your money goals, give me some ideas down in the comments. Let me know what you would want to see, and I will be about the business of getting it done.

And don't forget to subscribe to this channel to make sure you don't miss out on future videos. As always, make sure to hit the like button on this video, share it with everyone you know who's a human or maybe even humans you suspect may not be humans. Looking at you Zuckerberg, we have questions and we want answers. Thanks for watching. We'll see you guys next time.