Hey — it’s Jeffrey, back again!
Budgeting sucks… until it doesn’t.
Most budgeting tools make you decide everything upfront — categories, percentages, savings goals. If you don’t already have a system, it’s paralyzing.
So this week, I asked ChatGPT to just build me one. From scratch. In Google Sheets.
All I gave it was:
My monthly income
A rough idea of my savings goal
A few categories I care about (groceries, travel, dining out)
Within seconds, it gave me a working spreadsheet with formulas, custom categories, and pre-set spending targets.
I even asked it how to tweak the categories, and it walked me through that too.
Here’s how to try it yourself.
📬 Table of Contents:
In today’s Money Meets AI edition, we look at:
🤖 Chat GPT Prompt: Build a Google Sheets budget for you
📱 Monarch Money: Collaborative, visual budgeting
📊 Copilot: iOS-only, AI-categorized expense tracking
🛠️ Other tools to check out
🔁 What to do next
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THIS WEEK’S TESTED TOOLS
🔧 ChatGPT Prompt: “Build a Conscious Spending Budget in Sheets”
Best for: Customizing a spreadsheet budget
I asked ChatGPT to help me build a smarter monthly budget — one that actually reflects how I want to spend my money, not just track where it’s going.
So I gave it this prompt:
“Can you create a Google Sheets budget template for someone making $5,000/month with a goal to save $500/month? Please suggest some common categories of spending for me to include.”
ChatGPT responded with a budget based on Ramit Sethi’s Conscious Spending Plan, dividing expenses into:
Fixed Costs like rent, utilities, insurance, and debt payments
Investments including Roth IRA and 401(k) contributions
Savings for emergencies, vacations, or sinking funds
Guilt-Free Spending on groceries, dining out, travel, entertainment, etc.
💡 Bonus: I also asked for a working version in Excel, which I then uploaded to Google Sheets, and it delivered a downloadable template with:
Editable spending categories
Built-in formulas that update totals
% of income spent in each category
Optional add-ons like summary tables and visual comparisons to your spending goals
Here’s how my budget looked in the end:
Being able to tweak the categories in seconds made it feel way less rigid than most budget templates.
If you would like to use this exact budget, you can view it here in Google Sheets.
📱 App #1: Monarch Money
Best for: Visual-first budgeting
Monarch is one of the cleanest, most customizable budgeting apps I’ve used. It connects to your bank accounts, helps you set goals, and lets you share your budget with a partner or spouse.
It’s not 100% AI-driven, but it’s intuitive and makes tracking feel less painful.
I also really liked how there are multiple budget options, with the Flex budget being the recommended one. Most people quit budgeting because it’s too complicated and there are too many categories to manage.
The Flex budget helps avoid this issue by having fewer numbers and categories to focus on.
I linked my accounts, and Monarch automatically categorized my spending. It did a fairly good job, though not perfectly, so some adjustments were needed.
I actually prefer it this way, as a fully automated budget would mean I check it less often and likely don’t stick to it as well as one I have to review every few days.
Overall, I found Monarch very intuitive and easy to use.
📱 iOS, Android, Web
⭐ 4.9 (46K reviews) on Apple | ⭐ 4.8 (11K reviews) on Google
💵 $14.99/month or $99/year after free 7-day trial
📊 App #2: Copilot
Best for: iPhone users who want to really dig into their budget
Copilot utilizes AI to learn your spending patterns and automatically categorize your transactions. It feels like a cross between YNAB and ChatGPT — but designed for individuals who prefer minimal setup and a clean user experience.
At startup, it allows you to import Mint data if you have it. I haven’t used Mint for a looooong time, so I opted to connect one of my credit card accounts.
It also offers a daily “money snapshot” that keeps you on track without digging into spreadsheets.
It was also easy to select the categories I wanted to track and budget for, and its AI categorizes those. The AI categorization wasn’t perfect, as expected, so I had to manually adjust a few entries.
Overall, Copilot appears to have more features than Monarch, although not everyone will need them.
📱 iOS only
⭐ 4.8 (20K+ reviews) on Apple
💵 Subscription pricing after 30-day free trial
What Didn’t Work So Well
Each week, I try many tactics, and some don't work out well. I mostly want to focus on things that do work because that's probably most helpful for you.
Challenges this week:
ChatGPT didn’t build a great spreadsheet budget, at least not without a more back and forth than I hoped. ChatGPT didn’t always understand what I was asking right away, and its spreadsheet execution was lackluster
I also had issues with importing working formulas into Google Sheets from ChatGPT. The best way I found to do this was to download to .xlsx format rather than .csv.
ChatGPT also budgeted more than the $5,000 I specified. These kinds of mistakes happen with AI, so you always need to double check the output.
🛠️ Other Tools to Check Out
Other tools I came across but didn’t do a deep dive into for this newsletter:
YNAB (You Need a Budget) – I’ve been using YNAB for 10+ years. Still one of the best for zero-based budgeting and goal tracking.
Tiller – Syncs bank data into Google Sheets with pre-built templates
Lunch Money – Clean UX, great for freelancers and digital nomads.
What to Do Now
🧠 Try the ChatGPT prompt and paste the table into Google Sheets
🛠️ Customize your categories based on your goals
📲 Pick one of the apps if you want a more automated experience
📅 Bonus: Ask ChatGPT to create a 3-month budget forecast based on your inputs
PS—I’d love to hear your other feedback or suggestions. Just hit reply — I read every email!
How did you like today's newsletter?
One quick note: This newsletter is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. I’m not a financial advisor — just someone sharing ideas and tools I’ve found useful. Use what works for you, skip what doesn’t, and always do your own research before making financial decisions and using the tools shared in this newsletter.