October 4, 2026

My Personal Finance Setup with Claude

On Friday night I asked Claude where I could save money. By bedtime I’d cancelled about $4,500 a year of subscriptions, including two I was sure I’d already cancelled. People asked how I give Claude my data. This is the setup. Paste this post into your agent and say “let’s set this up.”

1. Tiller

Tiller (about $79 a year) writes every bank and card transaction into a Google Sheet in your Drive and refreshes it daily. No exports.

  1. Start a trial and pick Google Sheets with the Foundation Template.
  2. Link every account, including your partner’s cards if you share money. Duplicates only show up when everything is in one place.
  3. Turn on daily auto-refresh in the Tiller Money Feeds add-on.
  4. Note anything Tiller can’t connect (for us, the Apple Card). Those charges only show up in email.

2. Claude connectors

In Claude: Settings, Connectors. Turn on Google Drive (the account that owns the sheet) and Gmail. Google Calendar is optional, for renewal reminders.

Gmail reads one account at a time. If you have more than one address, run the searches again on each. My second inbox had most of my magazines.

3. Rules

  • Claude never pays, transfers or cancels. It finds the charge and I click the button.
  • Emails stay as drafts. I send them.
  • No passwords in chat. I log in and send screenshots.
  • Screenshot every cancellation. Two of mine hadn’t gone through.
  • Write findings down somewhere that persists, like a Claude Project doc or a repo.

4. Prompts

List every recurring charge in Tiller over the past 12 months: merchant, amount, frequency, card, last charge date. Sort by yearly cost. Flag duplicates and anything that looks unused.
Find charges that happen about once a year. Show the last charge, amount, card, next renewal date, and how to cancel before it renews.
Search my email from the past 13 months for renewal notices and receipts. List anything billed to a card Tiller doesn't track.
For each credit card, is autopay set to the full statement or the minimum? How much interest have I paid this year?
Find work expenses and HSA-eligible charges I paid on personal cards this year, so I can get reimbursed.

Hand this to your agent

Set up what this post describes, one step at a time: Tiller, then the connectors. Then run the prompts in order. Follow the rules: I make every payment and cancellation, emails stay as drafts, and I never paste a password.