Should We Let AI Manage Our Money with Ronika Khanna - 196

Welcome money buddies to this week's episode of Money Talk. This week we're talking about AI and managing your money. I'm your host, Schuyler Fleming, and let's get talking. This week we are going to go to a topic that I've covered before on the show and that's AI and your money. Can you trust the robots to manage your money? Should you give all of your data to ChatGPT or Claude and let it run wild? While they may not be a great substitute for true face to face money talks, what can they do? Well, today we're going to talk about just that. What can you use AI and technology for to help you with your personal finances? Can you use it to solve your next money fight or help settle a debate? Let's find out. I brought on a money buddy today who is here to talk about just that. Ronica reached out to me about the possibility of doing an AI focused episode. So I am very excited to talk about this one today because the last time I talked about AI and money it was a solo episode. And this episode and podcast, they are not written by AI. And we're going to have a real human conversation today about the potential that this technology plays when it comes to managing our money. And one thing that everyone knows in my life is that I enjoy technology. So this episode is right up my alley and I cannot wait to talk about it. I love automation and seeing how technology can help us improve our lives. So if you're like me, you're in for a great money talk today. As always, be sure to take the money talking points and share them with a friend or family member and start your own money talk. A quick reminder about episode 200. It's coming up very soon and I am looking to do an Ask me Anything episode for episode 200. So please share your questions with me. Leave a comment on Spotify, YouTube, email me, reach out on social media. There are so many ways to reach me. Please send me your questions. I want to answer any question that you might have for me. Real quick, story time. And also speaking of technology and vacations, I got a couple things to talk about here. We got one of those cool robot vacuums we finally did and I'm going to put it out on recording and say I should have listened to my wife a year ago and she was right. I should have listened to her a year ago. And when we wanted to get a robot vacuum I said no, I can do the vacuuming and mopping. No, we got this robot vacuum and it is so nice. It's so cool, so easy. So be willing to let technology make things easier in your life. But the other story time that I have today is a New York City and a fincon trip coming up. So if you're going to be at fincon, please let me know. I'd love to chat with any of you who are going to be there and I'll have an update on the financial impact of those trips in a few weeks. But what do you do when you have two trips back to back right in the beginning of September? Well, I have had to adjust my podcast schedule. There's some planning that goes around that there are some financial ramifications of two trips back to back. Like that it impacts our grocery budget, it impacts our normal weekly budget. There's a lot that you have to consider financially and logistically. So that's going to be a fun update once we get back from both of those trips. And I'm going to record an episode live at fincon. I'm really excited for this one. I found a great guest to come on the show and I think you're all going to enjoy it. It's going to be pretty cool to have a live setting around me and you're going to hear some crowd noise. Going to be pretty fun. And also if you want to see some of the travel vlogs that my wife and I make, of course, I like to make content. I make this podcast and our travel vlog channel is RS Flamingos on YouTube. I'll link it in the show notes if you want to go check it out. But that's where you can see some of our travel vlogs if you really want to go check out some more content from me. Quick shout out to a few of our listeners from various locations across the world. This is pretty cool. We got some data coming in that there's someone listening from Brian, Texas, there's someone listening from Middletown, New Jersey. And then this one's really cool. Sydney, New South Wales. If that is you listening and you're in Sydney, in New South Wales, wherever that may be in the world, let me know. And if you're listening in a cool location, send me a picture. I'd love to see where people are listening to Money Talk. It's pretty cool to see some of the data trickle in on locations where you are. And another thing, you may have started hearing ads before the podcast and at the end, I really appreciate everyone listening to those ads because it does give me just enough money to support the podcast and keep it going and providing you with these good money talks. But let's get into the money talking points today and today's money buddy Today's money buddy is Ronica. Ronica is a CPA and CFA who helps solopreneurs and small business owners make sense of their money. Through her business, Montreal Financial. She offers straightforward guidance on everything from taxes to accounting and day to day financial decisions. Her goal is to take the stress out of finance and help people feel more confident about managing their money. This week's money talking points are first, how is AI actually useful in helping with our money? Second, should AI be avoided when it comes to helping us manage our money? And third, will the future of money management be humanless? With those money talking points in mind, let's get talking and welcome Veronica to the show.

Hello.

Yeah, thanks so much for joining. I'm excited for this conversation. It's been a hot minute since we've talked about AI and our money, so this is going to be a great episode I'm excited to maybe talk about. What if we take the human out of our personal finances? What if it's all the robots managing everything? How is that going to go and should we even do that? But we'll kick it off with the first money talking point today. Veronica, how have you seen AI actually be useful in helping with your money?

Okay, so first of all, AI has certainly changed the way that I have worked in general and as someone who my expertise is in small business finances, but I also help people with personal finances as well. And so I have found AI to be an incredible starting place for questions that relate to whatever I'm helping someone with. With ChatGPT, which is what I use, I have gotten a personal virtual assistant and to me that's the mindset is seeing your AI assistants as exactly that. Right? Like in assistant, it's not necessarily there to be, you know, the be all and the end all, but it is certainly there to. Well, it can be incredibly helpful and especially with brainstorming and talking.

Yeah, I like using it as a starting point as well. For me, I use it to help with my podcast. It certainly doesn't write everything because I tried that at one point and it made me feel disconnected from what I was trying to write and create. If you try to use it for absolutely everything, you're going to begin to feel disconnected with your money decisions and so on. So I love using it for that starting point. What kind of questions do you find yourself asking your personal finance chatbot to.

Your point on that, that Disconnection, I think, is a valid point. I mean, some of us certainly have read these articles about brain rot that sets in and everyone's using, using AI. I have found myself in recent days trying to write things out more. Trying to, rather than going straight to the AI, really develop my own thoughts more to just get a better output and write. Because I like writing. And there's again, it does make me feel more connected. But in terms of how I use it for personal finances, I will use it to ask questions about concepts that I don't necessarily fully, fully understand. So it'll help give me some context on that and it'll help me or it'll point me in a direction which I really like. There are so many areas in which I just go to ChatGPT and often what I use the LLM for is to refine my own thought, right? So in typing in a prompt, and often my prompt can be like two or three paragraphs long. This, this is what I want, this is what I need to know. And in doing that, sometimes the answer is even less relevant. It's just a way of reflecting.

Yeah, I love the point there. You say about it gets you moving in the right direction. Because if you're asking ChatGPT or Claude or whatever tool you'd like to use, if you're just asking it straight out, how can I save money on taxes? But one, you're not giving it sufficient data because you would have to give any sort of CPA or tax professional sufficient data anyway. So if you're going to use these tools in that fashion, you got to make sure you're giving it data which could get us into a whole conversation around data privacy and stuff like that, but we'll save that for another day. But you have to make sure you're actually giving it relevant information to make these decisions. I did like what you said, that maybe it helps point you in the right direction. Instead of saying, how can I save money on taxes? Perhaps you say, I'm considering using an ira and I've heard it can save money on taxes, but I'm not quite sure how that works. Can you explain some of the ways that IRAs can impact your tax situation? Stuff like that can get you some quick reading to say, oh, I didn't know that a traditional IRA's contributions were tax deductible. Maybe you didn't know that because you've only used Roth IRAs, and there's a little back and forth you can do just to begin to understand your situation and know A correct direction to head in. I really like that. A whole lot more of using it to point you in a direction. Because if you're asking it a question that you aren't confident in or maybe you don't understand, there is that element of what if it just gives you the wrong answer. Like what if it tells you that contributing to a taxable brokerage account is actually tax free when it's really not? And now you're expecting this tax free wealth machine to just keep generating you cash because CHAT GPT said so. Guess what? The IRS isn't going to give you your taxes back because chatgpt said so.

I'd love to be able to use chatgpt.

Yeah, I want CHAT GPT to represent me in front of the irs. That doesn't sound like a problem at all.

I was just gonna say. And again, further to your point, it's all about context. Right. And the more you give it, the better your answers are going to be. And this is how I characterize ChatGPT, again, which is the tool I use most frequently is it's, in some senses it's a people pleaser. Right. And so as a people pleaser, it will often just give you the answer that you want. Right. If you press it hard enough. And so it's really, as you said, important to be careful with the responses that you receive. But again, the more context you give it, the better your answers are going to be. So it's really important that you think through that.

Yeah. And there's one way that I've heard these large language models explained is that if they give you the wrong answer, they will always give you the wrong answer. Very confidently they will tell you that absolutely this is what you should do, even though it's completely incorrect, like they are 100% certain that they're giving you the wrong answer.

I specialize in Canadian tax. And so I have asked the questions that I know to be absolutely wrong.

And then I correct.

They're like, oh, yeah, yeah, no, you're right, it'll double down on its wrong answer some of the time or it just gets very confused. And so that's, that is a real risk, especially with technical subjects.

Yeah. And if you want a quick way to remember, remember that you're dealing with a technology and it's not perfect, come up with some sort of prompt that you know the answer to that maybe requires you to think a little bit more, like complexly about, or it's a little more complicated. Like for me, anytime these AI tools get an Upgrade. I have this prompt that I've already pre built of a certain commute using public transit and my bike. I would put in this prompt saying get me from this point to this point using an E bike, public transit and then an E bike. And it never gets it right. And once it gets that right, in terms of what time I need to leave, what train to catch, then I'll know that AI has made it. But if you figure out some sort of tool that you can use to test it against, just as a quick reminder to say, yeah, I shouldn't take everything this thing says as 100% gospel truth, when I would ask it that prompt, it would just say, you need to catch the 7:13am train that doesn't exist. So you need to give yourself a quick reminder that these tools are a little flawed still.

And I love that. I've never thought of that. But actually, because you know ChatGPT, he just released version five, I guess. And I love having a fixed prompt that you ask it what it has historically gotten wrong. I think that's such.

That's a fun way to test it sometimes. It used to just make up names of the transit system. It used to just be completely wrong. It's at least a lot closer.

Now you're like, wait a second and it'll give you link. That link takes.

It's just, it just writes in like utahtransit.com skylerswork and it's like, what are you talking about? You just make stuff up. It's pretty funny. We've painted some pictures so far about how these tools need some caution around them. What are some things that we should maybe avoid with these AI tools when it comes to managing our money?

So just building on what we've already spoken about, you want to first of all have an idea of what you're asking it. So don't ask it the blanket question necessarily. Right? Don't just say, how do I save on taxes? So the more specific your question can be, the better. So areas in which. And so certainly ChatGPT has this empathy built into it, but they're not human, right? And without context, they're going to give you an answer. And so an LLM at its core is a pattern recognition system. So what it's doing, it's taking millions, billions of lines of data, data and turning that into patterns, which is amazing and interesting. But the thing is it's still taking what's out there, which is not necessarily your situation. So you can get much closer to your situation with LLMs. By typing in more about your content rather than just putting that into Google, which you could never do, you could write two paragraphs about your situation. It would still give you the same answers. Right. So this is certainly an improvement upon that. But you don't want to take that as gospel. You want to take it as a starting point from which you decide. And you have to use critical thinking and judgment. And so many of these decisions, some aren't. What tool should I use to track my expenses? You don't necessarily need that much critical thinking in that. But should I be doing taking this major life event again, great, great starting point, using the LLM. But then you move on to speaking to someone who has some expertise in the subject.

Yeah, using it as a more complex search engine can get you more in the correct direction. I think it's a fantastic way to use it, especially with money, because they've started integrating more search results where it'll show you actual people or websites. I've seen people find my podcast through chat, GPT or things like that because they ask for a podcast that's similar similar to certain things that they're interested in. And then it'll say, hey, here's a link to the an actual website that can teach you about money. But that does it for these money talking points. That was a phenomenal conversation right there. There's a third one that I'm going to save for the audience to take to their family and friends to talk about. And that is will the future of money management be humanless? I don't think it will be. We'll talk about that more after the interview today, but I want all the listeners to make sure to take that question less. Ask your family and friends. How do you think that'll pan out? I don't think it'll go well. I think there will certainly be humans involved in it. But I do want to move us towards a conversation. Let's get a little bit more into detail about using AI with our money and some of the decision making. Maybe it can help us settle fights and differences. Even though there was one point that you mentioned it's not human and sometimes there can be. There's more human elements in these money fights. Right. A perfect example that I've shared before is my wife and I trying to figure out how quickly to pay off her student loans from her PA program. There was a whole lot more that went into that decision than just the math. Because if it was the math, I know how to figure that out on a spreadsheet. The Chatbot knows how to figure that out on a spreadsheet. So we're going to dive a little bit more here into some of the nitty gritty of how this tool can maybe get in the way or help us out. Ronica, I want to ask you a question. How can people aid decision making with their AI when it comes to finances?

Okay, that's a great question. Let's take your example of trying to work through some kind of money management with a spouse or partner in business or whatever. My starting point for that would be to ask ways in which I would think about this issue, right? Like, because so if you're on your own, you might just think, okay, I'll put it all into a spreadsheet. This is, you know, and we'll share it, 5050 or whatever. But that doesn't take into account, as you mentioned, right, the, the communication, the compromise that's involved or whatever. But there may be other ways of doing it, and I personally love using AI for exactly that. Be creative, and that will be part of my prompt and in ways that I can solve this problem. The important thing to remember is that what AI does really well is it gives you options, right? And those options help you expand on what you can do, how you can solve a specific problem. But then you take those options, you evaluate them, you critically evaluate them, and then you decide what you need to do. Broadly speaking, that's how it helps decision making. And I have used it a lot in that context. Just help me work through this problem and give me those options.

Yeah, I love that idea of having it just give you a list of different options. And the thing that I like to do when I'm prompting these chatbots is to have IT interview me before giving a recommendation. Because maybe there's a couple things that I forgot to include that it, through its wealth of knowledge would say, yeah, I want to know more about what your credit card debt is like, even though you forgot to include it in your prompt, where you're saying, can you help me work through this debt payoff versus investing scenario, how much should go towards each route? And you forgot maybe the biggest debt that you have, maybe you left your mortgage out of it and the bot is going to give you a completely different answer whether you have a $2,000 mortgage payment or not. Like, that's going to completely change everything. So I love to throw in a interview me any other questions you might have before giving me an answer, and then you can talk with it a little bit more instead of just saying, here's what I want. And then it spits out exactly what you want. I love to have it work through. I think that can be super helpful as well.

Completely agreed. And I think that is such an important point that I often forget to do this. But at the end of every prompt, say ask me questions to bring clarity to the situation. And look, my number one use case of ChatGPT is brainstorming. So you just go back, say something. It'll be kind of general, it'll be kind of generic. I'll be like, well, no, but this particular thing doesn't really, you know, fit my situation. So let me throw that in. You're going back and forth and you get to a much better response that way. But again, coming back to your point of asking it to ask you questions, it does that very, very well. But it won't do it if you don't tell it to. So as part of your process, I think that's a great idea.

Yeah. Because maybe you're in the heat of the moment, you're trying to figure out this decision and it's a big one that's weighing on you. But you're so tunnel visioned on one specific area that just taking a deep breath and taking a step back and having the spot ask you some questions can be super useful. Which leads us to our next point of money fights. Let's say you're working on money with someone else. Money's a tentious topic and it's really challenging. And maybe you're in one of those heated money discussions where one person wants to do one thing and the other wants to do something else. How can or is it even possible to use AI to help us mitigate and solve some of these things before they become a disaster?

I think you could use it in the same way that we've been using. So again, you give it as much context as possible. This is really important. And then you ask it to see what's a fair way to out. Like what do you think? And the thing about an AI is is that again, with the right context, as long as both people are, you know, helping craft the prompt.

Right, yeah, that's what I was going to say.

It's going to give you with a fair and neutral answer. Right. It's judgment free, which is really a huge strength. So you're not going to your wife's financial advisor, your father in law or whatever. Right. You're going to something that is going to respond to you in a way that gives you a list of options and maybe this is the starting point. You go from here, and then those become talking points for you and your spouse to work through. Because, again, there's. I would say it's virtually impossible to give it all the context. Number two, this is an emo, emotionally fraught situation. Right. Money fights are not just about the money. Right. As we all know, there's so much else that's going on, but as a blueprint, as a starting point, I think it could be super helpful to. Rather than just starting from nothing, right? Like. Well, I think it should be this way. And I think that my spreadsheet, you know, and. And if the other in another way. Look, a lot of us, you know, a lot of people don't, you know, a spreadsheet is like their eyes glaze over, right? Like, they have no idea what they're looking at. And so you can ask the AI to sort of make sense of the spreadsheet, right? Give you the key points from the spreadsheet that I need to understand and explain it to the person who's not really into the spreadsheet. So that's another way in which people can absolutely begin the conversation and get pretty far. Again, you can brainstorm and come to maybe some sort of a decision, throw it into AI. What do you think of this? And then you have a third perspective. So I think those are ways in which it can be really helpful.

Yeah, I absolutely love that idea of having the chatbot rewrite it in a way that's maybe a little bit more understandable because, like you said, I am a huge spreadsheet nerd, which makes sense. I'm the person hosting the podcast, of course. I love spreadsheets, and I can make our spreadsheet say whatever I want it to say through all these stats and charts. Like, if there's one thing about statistics, is that it's possible to manipulate them to paint the picture you want to paint. So if I'm able to give the data to this chatbot, right, and say, can you explain it just in different terms, maybe a couple different stories where you relate this to a different element that I'm not thinking about, because when I get going about my spreadsheet, I get tunneled and think, this is how it is. This is how I should explain it. And I don't know how to explain it in a different way. So if there's ever a time where my wife or whoever isn't getting what I'm saying from the spreadsheet, I love that idea of using it to craft a different story. Story to maybe help make it a little bit more relatable. Because I will just keep repeating myself and say, what do you mean you don't get it? Here's what it is. Oh, you still don't get it. Here it is again. You still don't get it. So that idea of changing it up with a different story and a different approach, that's a fantastic one for me to just take away and use in my personal life. So thank you.

My pleasure. And again, just to build on that, you have this third party, right? An ostensibly neutral third party who is helping you on both sides of it. And again, you both have to be involved, sitting at your computer, typing it in. But, yeah, it goes for concepts that I don't understand, of which there are many. I am also a spreadsheet nerd. Vote for technical concepts like engineering or I'm in the middle of a home renovation right now. I don't understand, like 80% of it. So, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's fantastic. Using it to repaint a picture and telling a story, maybe in a fun way or something. That's fantastic. But let's get into some questions that maybe go into that third money talking point that we mentioned about the future of money being human. I want to ask you and get your take on this. What are we missing out if we're only talking to robots about money? If all we're doing is a chatbot money talk, what are we missing out on?

Well, you're missing out, most fundamentally, you're missing out on that human connection, Right? And I say I go to an LLM with my question, and I'm going to give it a ton of context. I put it in, it gives me a good answer, right? Or I go to a financial advisor with many years of experience who reads me, right, and knows things about me that I wouldn't think are relevant. And there's an intuitive interaction that happens between two humans, right? Multiple humans. That is essential. I mean, I don't know if it'll ever be able to replace that because we get information about people through body language. We get information about people. And I know in my own consultations, somebody will come to me with a very simple question, right? Should I incorporate whatever. It might take the whole hour just to talk about their situation, ask some questions.

I love your example of if you were to just ask a chatbot, should I incorporate? The chatbot's going to say, yes. Incorporating can provide you great tax benefits and protection of assets. It's just going to tell you, yes, it's not going to come back and say, well wait, let's think about some of this. Maybe your tax return last year, maybe it wouldn't be favorable to do it yet. Maybe we should wait another year. It just doesn't know all that right out the gate or those questions to ask. It's just going to be a yes man and tell you yes and to relate it to your personal finances. With that point I brought up earlier about should I invest money? It's going to say yes. Investing money can be a great way to grow savings, tax deferred. It's always going to say yes and give you some good reasons. It's not going to really dig when you just ask it those baseline questions. If you were to kind of to me and ask your money questions, I would probably say, well, what does your debt situation look like? Are you struggling with student loans? Do you need to pay those off first? What does your workplace retirement account look like? Because the chatbot has no idea that you have a 401k with a phenomenal match. It's going to tell you yes. It's not going to say no. Wait a second. We should probably go in a little bit more detail. And another one that I thought of is things like family history or cultural backgrounds that may relate to real money scripts that you have. Like maybe you're terrified to invest because you've seen your parents go through the Great Depression or the Great Recession a couple of years ago. Like you're terrified to invest and the chatbot has no idea that that is an impact on your behavioral decision making. But a financial planner who's worked with a lot of people your age knows that can be a common stumbling block for people and you don't even realize it yourself. So how are you going to tell the chatbot that I have this big block because of the Great Recession about investing.

So.

So I love that one. That's a huge reason to have human face to face money talks in and, and exactly.

And I was. As you were talking but you brought it up and you said it perfectly. But it's. You get a sense. So I talk a lot about limiting money beliefs. Right. And. But that only comes through in your conversation. You don't know, as you said, you don't know that you have your money decisions are deeply tied into the sum of your experiences. Who you, you are, your personality. Am I good at this? Do I need accountability? There's all of these things that again, a good personal financial advisor or just a money person that you talk to will be able to capture that in A. And AI will give you a 20 page plan. It'll be perfect in every way. But you'll just be like two months. You'll be like, yeah, I'm not gonna. It hasn't really captured the thing that is preventing you from doing it in the first place.

Yep.

Yeah.

You weren't able to sit down with another human and have a real conversation about how investing right now is difficult because we don't know what's going to happen. But if you do this instead and they're able to educate and empathize with you like you mentioned, that's a trait that's missing. Or they're able to say, yeah, maybe we shouldn't invest right now. Like, imagine that. Because maybe it is a bad idea because it's so emotionally charged that doing it this moment or would just make you fall away from the plan. We need to make baby steps into it. And that's something that a human can deliver that technology really can't.

Yeah, totally agreed.

I want to talk a little bit more about other forms of technology. There's automation, there's apps, there's all these other sorts of things. And I mentioned earlier in the episode that privacy concerns are certainly a thing. I wouldn't want to go giving ChatGPT or whoever all of my bank account logins. Right. I know there's a. There's a agentic AI browser coming out right now from. I believe it's perplexity. Their browser can do things for you. It's really cool if you watch some YouTube videos about it, create a PDF of a bunch of different YouTube video tabs that they had open so that they didn't have to watch them themselves. That just kind of did the research for them and moved through all the tabs. It listened to the transcripts and wrote this big document. And the person on the video said, the one thing I haven't done is logged into a bank account account with this app yet, because who knows what it would do? Like maybe it could get nefarious. Right. Like that could be a little bit of a scary use case where you tell it in that chatbot browser, say, can you manage my money to tax loss, harvest my stocks? That would be appropriate under these circumstances. And then transfer the cash to this account. And what if it transfers the cash to its own account that it has deep in the LLM or. Or someone else's account number is in the LLM so it just transposes it and crosses wires. That's like a scary apocalyptic type of thing happening. How can people use technology without giving all this info to their chatbots to avoid that nightmare scenario that I just outlined. How can we still use technology with our money?

So look, every has different levels of comfort. You and I are probably similar in how much we want to give to these apps and these agents. You have to assess your own level of comfort and you also have to assess the risk, right? So look what you said about these agentic AIs going in and taking actions on your behalf. There is a worst case scenario where you do lose all your money, right? Like that is an outcome of very. The percent. The risk of that is very low, but it is possible, especially given that they're untested. Right? So you want to assess your risk. I always want to look at worst case scenarios, outcomes and see what the possibility of this, of this happening is versus the benefits of allowing this to do it for me. And so we're in the situation with why are so many of us using these AI tools? And one of the biggest reasons is obviously just to save time, right? But there's a point in which saving time is. It comes with these risks. You want to make sure that the technology is absolutely tested, comes with guarantees and potentially they have access to your banking information, some kind of insurance, right. Or something in their terms and conditions, separate login something. I use QuickBooks Online, for example. I do use QuickBooks Online. I give it my login information for my bank and it downloads my. So you already do that decisions on my behalf. You're just simply downloading transactions. And that's a step that I have taken in that direction. Getting an agent to act on my behalf, though I would be skeptical certainly for a few years until it just becomes pervasive and everyone is doing it. But for now I'm okay, especially with my money. A because I really enjoy interacting with my money. I'm perfectly fine with spending a couple of extra hours a month just doing the login, downloading, transfers, or maybe giving access on a limited basis so people can just download my data. But that is, you know, beyond which I wouldn't necessarily go. So I think again, you have to evaluate your own sense of it. And there's ways in which you can do it on a hybrid basis. You don't have to give it all your data. You can give it whatever you're comfortable with, save a bunch of times.

But that perfectly speaks to a point I've been making on the podcast. You don't have to let AI manage your entire life. You can use it in a hybrid model. Like you just said, there's a great reference to all these different aggregator tools that have strict sign in requirements. They give you these terms of service, they're read only like these accounts can't move my money around. And honestly, if one of these aggregator tools help had some sort of AI chatbot, I'm sure they're thinking about it. But it is that one area that I think people will really push back on of giving all your financial information to a chatbot. I'm sure they're thinking about it. If you were to say Monarch Money or there's Empowers Personal Capital Dashboard, if there were to be some sort of chatbot that I could interact with on a read only basis on my transactions, I think that would be really cool. Like if you could say where am I spending the most money over the last six months? And where have you see the trends change? And it can say, well you went from spending a lot of money at Amazon and that went down but now you're spending a lot at Walmart. So they really, you didn't save any money because your Amazon went down because you didn't realize you were replacing it with Walmart. So those sort of things you would never catch on your own unless you were really nitty gritty into the data. I do think there's a phenomenal potential of a hybrid model like that. But I don't know if I would be willing to say here is transfer rights and essentially like you're a joint owner on my bank account now. There's no way I'd be willing to do that one yet.

Same with me. And, but, but the thing is in this hybrid model where it can glean insights, it's amazing. Save you money. Hundreds, if not thousands, but certainly hundreds of dollars a year. We all have all these subscriptions, right? Like I have a bunch of subscriptions but just having a review of that on a regular basis and you could even use like something like Chat GP for that. But ideally these budgeting apps, some of them are amazing. I've heard of Monarch. I think Rocket Money is one of them. There are a bunch of them and then there's just like I have used Notebook LLM. I don't know if you've used it at all.

That one actually won my wife a couple thousand dollars in scholarships because we took her previous scholarship essays, put them into this notebook LM and then gave them the prompts for the new scholarship she was trying to apply to because she's like, I don't want to rewrite all these essays. I've already written, written. We took all our essays and that reformed it using AI to draft one that worked for the new essay prompt and she won a couple scholarships over it. So that was fantastic.

That's amazing. I love NotebookLM. And the number one reason is because it's a closed system, all the responses you receive are only based on the data. From my understanding, these of the data you provided, it's not going outside of that. Unlike ChatGPT, which will just go wherever. Like, I think it's free, right? Notebook ll, at least one that I've been using. I really, really like that. And you could do that with your bank, your personal money. You could upload your bank statements, CSV files, or your tax returns and ask it to explain things specifically. So it's another great tool.

Yeah, I think it is a free tool. So there's always a little bit of a word of caution of are they using your data? Again, there's always these data concerns. Is Google just taking it? And sure, it's making a good tool, but is it using the data in the background to train other models? I don't know for sure. I don't know that I have a huge stance on that, but I always like to mention it because maybe you do and you want to look into that more. Veronica, this has been a fantastic conversation about one of my favorite topics, so thank you for coming on. I got two final questions for you here. The first one's going to be how can people contact with you? Or how can they connect with you online?

Okay, so I can be reached at montrealfinancial Ca. That is my website and all of my contact information is over there. Tons of resources, largely for Canadian small business owners, but lots of blog posts and articles. They can sign up for my newsletter, etc. And I also have a YouTube channel, Untreal Financial, where I talk about Canadian small businesses and QuickBooks online.

Cool. That's fantastic. And of course, links are always in the show notes, so you don't have to memorize everything that our guests say. You can find her link in the show notes. The final question I got for you here is what's one thing you wish you would have known sooner about the power of technology when it comes to managing your money?

Okay, so that's a great question. And I tend to be technologically interested, let's put it that way. So I'm always sort of trying to keep on top of things, but I'm careful. And so I think in Terms of the pattern power of technology is tremendous to just make your life so much easier. In some ways, I think it's really important to not over rely on these tools. I started in the beginning and I'm starting to try because I feel a little bit of that brain rot setting in where I'm just like, oh, I'm just gonna go ask chatgpt this question, or I'm going to. Instead, what I'm trying to do is bring that back to myself and use more. Do what I used to do, which is I would write a blog post from scratch, right? And so I'm trying to do more of that, or maybe I'll just get a little bit of help and then do more of the writing. Because again, it's something that really, you need to make sure that you're not outsourcing all of your agency. You're keeping some of that within yourself to maintain your creativity, to maintain your personality. Like all of that is really important.

That's fantastic. That's such a great way to put it too, because we've been talking about technology this whole time and someone's probably listening saying, yeah, I love it. I'm gonna go use NotebookLM, ChatGPT and Claude. They're all gonna talk to each other and make my decisions for me. But that's such a fantastic idea to put the brakes on. Take a deep breath, have a little bit of your own creativity still in your decision making. Veronica, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you. Thank you, Skyler. I agree. It's so much fun and it is one of my favorite topics. It's so endlessly interesting.

Thank you so much, Toronica, for coming on. That was a fantastic interview. That was a fun one. I really enjoyed talking about AI and money. Really two intersecting elements in my life that I enjoy outside of the podcast is money and technology. So this was a great crossover episode for me and, and I hope you enjoyed this one. Now, let's wrap it up here with the last money talking point that we didn't get to. We kind of touched on this one here and there throughout the conversation and throughout today's money talk. But I want to address this one directly. Will the future of money management be humanless? What do you think? If you're on Spotify, jump into the app, leave a comment. I don't think it's possible. I don't see how it would be possible. People need to be involved because people are the ones who are impacted by these money behavioral Emotional and just overall financial decisions. There is so much more than just math to our finances. And I've had a couple episodes on my show talking about how money is more than just math. And I love to say if money was just math, these computers that we have in our pockets or the supercomputers out there, they would be able to figure out the exact right way for us to manage our money. Because if it was just math, a computer can do math very quickly and very easily. It is so much more than just math. You have to talk to real people to get into the details. There's been some changes in my wife and I's financial life with me not having a regular W2 day job right now that we're working through. And there's some struggles going on in our budget meetings and things like that. And if money was just math, it would be easy to figure out. We can figure out the math. I can do the math. We have to decide between three potential decision paths, which way we're going to make the math work and it's going to work out each way. But each one has different emotional and behavioral ramifications in our mind. Do we pay things down now so that our cash flow going forward is higher? Do we use up all of our cash flow in the future? How do we want to approach it? We wouldn't even have to bother with money if it was just math. It would be so easy. So I'll get off my soapbox now. I think it would be impossible for the future of money management to be humanless. And that is a wrap. On today's episode, we dove into the world of AI and money. Basically the financial equivalent to mixing peanut butter and jelly, or in some cases oil and water. It may not always mix. We kicked off things by exploring how AI can be our trusty sidekick in money management from crunching numbers faster than a caffeinated accountant. We then weighed the pros and cons of chatting with robots versus real human money talks. And it turns out while AI can give you financial advice without judgment, it might miss that human touch that is needed. Like it's not going to provide you a virtual shoulder to cry on because your stocks are struggling or you're having a tough budget meeting. Nothing beats a face to face money talk where you can actually feel the emotion behind these decisions and understand the body language that goes into these money talks. As much as we'd love to hand everything over to the robot so that we can just watch TV guilt free, money isn't about the numbers. It's about emotions, goals, and sometimes you just need to vent to someone who's been in a similar situation. So remember, while AI can be a fantastic tool in your toolbox, it's the human touch that truly, truly makes sense. Pun intended, but thank you for listening to today's episode. The best way to stay up to date and connected with all things Money Talk is to subscribe to the podcast. Head over to MoneyTalk show and submit your name and email on the homepage to sign up for my email list and use the contact page to send me that question. Burning a hole in your mind for episode 200. If you're looking to get started with budgeting, use the link in the show notes to sign up for my Budget Coach. I'm a coach over there on the platform and I'd love to work with you and help you with your budgeting. And remember, the best way to learn from today's episode. It's to go and have a money talk about today's topic with a fellow money buddy. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Money Talk. I'm your host, Skyler Fleming. Have a great week.

Thank you for listening to Money Talk. This show is provided for informational and entertainment purposes and may not be specific to your unique situation. Please be sure to do additional research before making any financial decisions.