How to Build Your AI Money Coach

Welcome, I'm Catherine Morgan and you're listening to It's Not About The Money, a podcast for anyone ready to feel safe, seen and powerful in their relationship with money. So as a former financial advisor who's worked with hundreds of people with money, one of the biggest barriers to a good financial management system isn't necessarily just the lack of financial knowledge. It's that gap between knowledge and implementation and this gap between knowing what you should do with money and actually doing it is often created by overwhelm when you're contemplating opening that spreadsheet or the decision paralysis when you're considering making an investment or that feeling of money's going to run out in the future. I need to keep stockpiling and making more and saving more or maybe it's just that feeling of shame when comparing yourself to other people's financial situation. And this is where I believe that AI when used properly can really support you to remove that friction in ways that I quite frankly have never seen before and today I wanted to share my personal framework with you step by step of how to build an AI money coach, not just using chat GPT for random money questions, but creating a very personalized tool that can actually improve how you make better financial decisions. I use this approach with my own clients. I use it myself personally in my personal wealth and business and I'm going to show you exactly how to build one for yourself. So let me first of all start by being very clear about what AI can and cannot do in the financial space because you might be contemplating AI. Maybe you haven't used AI very much at all and it frightens you or it scares you about sharing financial data and information with AI and when I create AI and as a money coach, I don't share any personal data as in I don't share bank statements with AI because I do feel like we need to be ethical and we have to be careful about what we are sharing with AI. And there is a lot of confusion and also some really dangerous advice out there so I think it's really important to just first of all be very clear on what AI can help us with and AI can remove a lot of administrative friction, especially when it comes to money. It can help you to organize financial information very, very quickly. It can model out different scenarios, show you numbers literally in seconds that could take you hours in a spreadsheet. It can also ask you really powerful questions that can reveal a lot of your financial habits or patterns. And coming from a money psychologist perspective, this is the part that I love the most about AI is how do we use it to help us to be better with money from a relationship perspective. I also think it's a great tool that when you're up at midnight and you're feeling anxious about a financial decision, it can provide you with a really great place to give you structure when you're feeling overwhelmed. It can translate jargon very easily and to play in English. It can provide you with some very good support to be able to help you sleep at night and think about what is it you're really worried about from a psychological perspective. Right now, AI is never going to be your therapist. It's not going to be your psychologist, but it has proved time and time again that more and more people are using AI now for that psychological support than anything else. AI is not here to replace professional verification. So it can't replace a qualified financial advisor for significant decisions. And it cannot replace when you are in a situation where you need technical expertise. AI can hallucinate and it doesn't always get things right coming from a financial background myself because I have the financial expertise. I studied many qualifications around money. I can see very clearly when AI is helpful and when it's misleading. So I'm going to show you how to build safeguards into your AI money coach so that you're using it effectively and not dangerously. Now, what do I use for AI? I primarily use chat GPT and Claude and I built an entire AI dream team for different aspects of my business and my life all the way through from a marketing manager, a content creator. One that helps me to get my ideas out of my head and into episodes like this, I have a functional medicine doctor that I share some of my results and that's really helped me navigate recently my paromenopause. Journey and actually asking what question should I be asking my GP and help me to analyze my blood test results and what kind of supplements might I be curious to go and explore more rounds, you know, really really helpful in those situations. I've got an astrologist, I've got so many different roles that I've built out and even for my children, I've got like a ADHD football coach for my son, I've used it to navigate and map out potential universities for him to attend in the US. You know, so many different things that AI has helped me to do and my husband jokes that Claude is like my second husband and last year I used chat GPT to help me find out information about my grandfather. He was in the Changi prisoner of war camps in the second world war he survived and chat GPT last year helped me to locate his regimen, link to documents on ancestry sites and email addresses to contact the Burma railway center where we thought he may have been part of the Burma railway line. It was just phenomenal and I before I go down this rabbit hole, the AI money coach is the one I want to specialise and talk to you about today. But what I've learned from my experience with using AI significantly in the last 12 to 18 months is what I'm going to share with you today and a lot of my knowledge has come from somebody I've been following for a long long time, my own mentor Natalie McNeil and I'm going to pop a link in the description below to Natalie's playbook which is where she talks about three very specific elements to get this right and these are the three elements I'm going to dive into with you next. So I'll pop a link in the description below to her three three prompts frameworks. I highly recommend you go and grab that first. And she talks about context, cues and clarity context, cues and clarity. So let's talk about how these apply when you're setting up your AI money coach. So one of the biggest things that I'm seeing people do wrong with AI is that they just will go into chat GPT and I'll just go, should I invest in this or how do I save more money. And AI will give them a very generic advice because it's got no context about your actual situation. So my work as a financial advisor, when I was a regulated advisor, the first thing I would do with any client is to gather comprehensive information about their financial situation. Their income sources, their expenses, their lifestyle, any debts they had, their goals, their dreams, how they felt about risk, the time horizons that they were working towards. So without giving any context to AI, any advice that you ask it for is going to be meaningless. So the framework that is going to support you number one in this is to give AI your complete context. So that doesn't mean sharing your passwords downloading your bank statements. This is when you're building an AI money coach, you need to provide the same level of detail that you might give to an advisor. So that AI can use that to provide you with personalized information. Now you might be worried about where is this going to be shared. And that's probably another whole episode. There are very specific settings that you can create in the back of your AI projects, whether you're using element platforms like Claude or chat GPT, where that data is only kept within the project and it's not shared externally to the worldwide web. So I would highly recommend that you go and have a look at those settings. And when you provide financial information, again, I'm not asking you to upload personal statements or passports or bank statements. These are things I want you to think about sharing with AI. The first one is your income structure. So just be really specific about your income sources. So let AI know are you employed or self employed do have multiple income streams. Are you on a fixed salary or variable income. So for example, in my situation, I would give a context to my AI project on Claude or AI chat GPT, for example, to say something like I run two businesses, a financial coaching business in the UK. And my personal branding business where I live in Jersey in the Channel Islands, I draw X amount per month as a director. I have variable profits, depending on program launches and one to one capacity. So that kind of level of specificity really matters. It means that when I ask AI about cash flow planning, it understands that I need to account for variable income, not just creating a fixed salary budget. So here's the first question I want you to ask yourself here. If you were setting a. across from a financial advisor, what would you need to tell them about money flowing in and out of your life? That's the first question I want you to just contemplate. The second area around this is financial goals. So don't tell AI, I want to save more money. Be specific, tell it, my goal is to draw 50,000 in profit this year to fund a family holiday around New Zealand and renovate my house. And then break that down, you know, that this breaks down to, what's that roughly, 4,400 a month above my current drawings. So specific numbers, specific time frames, this is how financial advisors work. And this is how you should work with AI, with your money coach. The third area to then give context to is your current financial obligations. So what are your fixed expenses? What are the expenses coming out of your account every single month? What are your variable costs? What are your debt obligations? If you're self-employed, what does that look like? I use the profit first framework in my business. So I tell AI, my target allocation percentages are 40% expenses, 20% var, 15% tax, and then 25% across profit and team costs. And so I'm giving AI context about my lifestyle, my income, my outgoing and any frameworks that I might follow. If you are an avid budgeter or you follow maybe the fire movement around finances, or maybe you're coming up to retirement and you're going to have some changes coming up to your income, then let AI know about that. You don't have to give them personal data, but you can tell them what is present for you right now in your financial situation. So now AI understands your financial structure. So when I ask about hiring someone in my money coach, AI project area, it can factor in those specific aspects. And it might, for example, help me to make decisions based on how that might affect my profit first allocations as an example. The next part to this in terms of context, then, is your decision-making patterns. So this is where you can be really honest about your financial behaviors, not from a place of judgment, but for accuracy. So as somebody with ADHD, I know that my patterns typically when I'm dysregulated are impulsivity. So it does feel naturally safer for me to spend that it does to save. I do naturally make quick decisions and often when I'm feeling behind or a lack of worthiness, then I compare myself to other people. So telling AI this means that it can build in protective friction. So when I'm considering a £3,000 investment on a course, for example, AI knows to slow me down and it can ask me questions like, are you making this decision because it serves your plan or because you're comparing yourself to other people? It's really clever like that. And in my professional capacity, what I've learned a lot is that people's financial behavior patterns matter more than the knowledge that they have. So someone who can understand compound interest perfectly and still avoid investing because they're fearful. And so AI can't replace necessarily the deep therapeutic work that might be required, but it can create decision making structures that can work with your patterns rather than against them. So practical application step one is I want you to create a document, a Google document or a Word document and call it your financial context profile and include all of those points I've just shared with you. So your income structures, the sources, amounts, frequency, your business model, if that's applicable, your financial goals with very specific timeframes, if you have them, current obligations, your expenses, debts, tax, those kind of aspects, the decision making patterns, so where you struggle and what guidance you need. So do you need to AI to support you to pause before making decisions to visualize your decision making to help you make a decision, to map out different scenario modeling for you. And the final one is how you feel about money. Any money stories you want to share with your context document. And if you've done our money quiz, you could also add some pieces from that into your AI project. I know many of my clients download there, a money story type report and add it into their project. So if you haven't taken our money quiz yet, this might be a good opportunity to pause this and go to catherinemorgan.com/quiz. And in there, we share with you some of the behavior and practical ways that you can start to move your relationship forward and get out of some of the sabotaging patterns that you may be finding yourself in. And I would ask your AI project, pop in this document to act with compassion to have knowledge about the link between somatic mindset and bodywork with money. And then save this document. This will be your first document that you can then upload into a custom chat GPT or a Claude AI money coach project. And you can use it in every conversation with money. You don't have to give AI that information again and again because it will save that. It will be permanently embedded in your own personalised project. Now let's move on to talk about the second C, which is Q's. So what are Q's in financial terms? So as an example, I use decision trees and evaluation frameworks constantly. When a client comes to me and asks, should I invest in property or pensions? Then I work through a very systematic framework, considering things like their goals, their risk profile, their time horizons, their tax position, their liquidity needs. I'll be working on lots of different aspects of their personal situation, their relationship with money. And Q's are the same concept, but built for AI to use with you. So their framework, the AI applies to your specific situation in real time. So think of them as the professional methodology that's embedded into this tool. So let me show you two valuable Q's that you can consider when creating your AI money coach. And if you're curious to see a little loom video, it's a 20 minute video in live action, where I shared with my community, how I created my AI money coach in real time using Q's, then comment the word loom underneath this video if you're watching on YouTube or DM me the word loom on Instagram and I'll share it directly with you. It's quite fun to watch. So Q number one I wanted to share with you is the money decision filter. So inside AI dream team, which is Natalie McNeil's AI program that I learnt this through, she created an AI bot called QE and it's been very specifically created to help to create the Q that is required for your AI role. So I was going back and forth with QE about writing a prompt for this episode to help you with your design of your money coach. And it asked me if I wanted to build a money decision filter in. Why did it do this? Because I was sharing with it how I'm naturally impulsive with money and I wanted to make better financial decisions. And so if you are impulsive or a natural planner or maybe you're a natural giver and give to everybody else's needs first, then you might want to consider having a money decision filter, something that can help you to make better financial decisions. I had a client very recently who was about to make a £30,000 investment into a marketing agency to help to fill her programs. And when we analyse this together on a call, we actually ended up building her a job description and a 12 month plan to bring somebody in-house. And we did that by understanding more about her situation and the fact that she would have just said yes to this 30,000 investment without really considering what does she really need in her business. And so having a decision metrics in her AI project was very valuable in the future after we had that conversation to go, "You know what, this will be really helpful to build into your AI so that when decisions like this come up again, you have got a decision tree or a matrix that you can follow that will help you to question further more about your decisions." And maybe it's the opposite for you. Maybe you don't make fast decisions and you procrastinate for a long time and you could therefore build this into your AI project to help you make faster financial decisions rather than holding all of that stress in your nervous system. So having a money decision filter with AI is super, super valuable. So what QE in AI Dream team asked me is, "What is the specific, measurable return investment that you expect from this program when I was trying to make a decision about investing some money in another program for myself?" And it asked me, "How does this serve your 50,000 pound profit goal for this year?" And like, I couldn't articulate it. I wanted it. I wanted this course because everyone else in my network seemed to be joining this course. and I was like, if this must be a good thing. thing. And so my emotions are really overriding my practical decisions. So I paused, I actually ended up keeping that money back and adding it into my home renovation pot instead. And I didn't show deprived. I actually felt really positive for making that decision. So I want you to consider this for yourself. Do you want to build out a money decision filter in your AI money coach? If so, add that to your Google Doc or your Word Doc to include a money decision filter to help me make better financial decisions. Okay. Now the second cue that I wanted to share with you, which is another really valuable one, is one called the cash flow visual planning queue. So this queue is about creating financial dashboards and planning tools that can match how your brain actually works. And as a financial advisor, I know that comprehensive cash flow planning, I can geek out on it for hours. I love it. I know that for me personally, whilst I might resist planning, when I have that cash flow plan, I can make better financial decisions. And it helps me to forecast my revenue, track my expenses, track how much I need to save for tax, everything. But I also appreciate that traditional financial cash flow planning doesn't work for everybody, particularly for neurodivergent brains, including my own ADHD brain. Some of you might have already run to the hills after hearing the word plan. Right. So if that's you, whether you're a planner or not, then this is something that your AI money coach can help you with. So here's what I built into this queue. I told my AI money coach, build in a maximum 12 month time horizons as my primary focus, have weekly check ins rather than daily tracking, because that's my sustainable rhythm. I'll talk more about that in a second. Create visual categorisation systems that make sense at a glance, because sometimes my brain just like just give me the high level. I don't need the detail. And I really like to follow the fridge freezer ladder method overall with my personal finances. So the fridge method is where I think about things that are going in and out of my account very quickly, a bit like your eggs and your pint of milk. Then I have medium term, which is my sort of six months out goals in the ladder, which might be your baked beans, tins or your herbs and spices. You don't get them out every day, but you might need to have access to them within a fairly short period of time. And then my freezer is like my longer term reserves. Money that I'm tucking away for the future. I still want to have access to them, but I've tucked them away. And traditional financial planning talks about emergency funds and long term savings, language that actually doesn't speak to me and can actually trigger a lot of anxiety. So the fridge ladder freezer method for me is the language that makes me feel joyful and motivated. So I want you to add to your Google Doc or your Word doc. What is the type of language that you want to follow? What might be some of the frameworks that you feel inspired to use? Right? Maybe you do love a detailed budget planner. Let your money coach know that. Maybe you hate the word planning and goals and you prefer intention and you prefer rituals and you don't like budget planners and you just like the higher level detail. Okay? So those are some of the things I want you to build into this particular queue. And also think about the format that it's presenting it to you in. Do you want it color coded? For example, do you want it visual? Do you want it to work with your notion board or your assign board or trullo board? Do you want it to just be in a very simple Google sheet for you? So think about those aspects as well. And one of the rituals that I have fed information to my AI money coach project is my Monday money dates. So I've encoded my entire financial review ritual into my queue. For example, I want it to check in on my nervous system regulation and why feeling calm enough to review my numbers. I give it information about the key metrics that I like to track personally in my finances and in my weekly money dates. I ask it to review my intentions for the week. I let it know that I journal and draw tarot and quite spiritual when it comes to my relationship with money. So when I say help me with my Monday money dates, it will walk me through each of my steps very systematically. So ask yourself, do you have any rituals, routines that you use with money? When you think about looking at your numbers, what is the feeling that comes up? And what would need to be different for that feeling to shift? So how do I think about those in the context of your AI money coach? And as I mentioned earlier, I've recorded this little loom video that shows you exactly how I did this in real time. So I'll pop a link to that in the notes below. Now let's move on to the third C, which is clarity, the final C in the three C's framework. So you've given AI context, you've created your cues. Now we need to establish some parameters around what AI should and shouldn't do. And as a financial professional, I'm very particular about this because there are ethical boundaries with AI that I really believe we can be aware of and we can influence how AI is evolving by being ethical in the way that we are connecting and collaborating with AI. So you want to give AI a role. So when you're opening up a custom GPT or Claude, you want to give it a role. So something like this, so you're going to go into AI, click on custom GPT if you're in chat GPT or if you're in Claude, click on create project and you want to give it a role. So this would be my description. I would be adding in right now. You are my AI money coach, a thinking partner who helps me apply professional financial decision making frameworks to my specific situation. You help me to organize information, model scenarios and ask powerful questions that reveal my patterns. You're trained as a somatic financial coach. And at this point, I would also be uploading information about my own certification program that I teach with my students and you're able to support me in making informed decisions from all parts of me. You do not make decisions for me. You encourage me just for me to make my own decisions. Then I'm going to add a little bit in about tone and approach. So be direct and practical, not fluffy. On our my neurodivergence, use clear structure, visual concepts and actionable steps. That's what motivates me. I acknowledge both sides of me, the impulses side and the strategic business side without judgment. Celebrate me and my financial milestones. Celebrate my risk-taking nature was also supporting strategic evaluation, ask powerful questions that help me see my own patterns. Then I give it information about some of the output preferences. So support me in building a loving relationship with money and worthiness. Use bullet points and clear structure offer visual planning suggestions where relevant, break big goals into smaller milestones, provide specific actionable next steps and include reflection questions so I can journal to deepen my awareness with myself. Take time with your decisions. Take a breath. Right. And that would be my instruction to my AI money coach. Feel free to steal that. Rewind this and copy that down for yourself and make some changes for your own situation. And once you have these details clear, you can then ask AI to be specific and directive. Instead of vague questions like how should I invest my money? You know, you could ask it based on my goals, based on what I've told you. Help me model three different scenarios that I am currently considering. You know, and the difference in the outcomes that you will have is phenomenal. And I would love to hear from you. Once you've done this, I'd love to hear from you about what your experience has been using this little tutorial. And the other aspect of this to really think about is scenario mapping is a great way to get started with your money coach. So think about things that you're currently deliberating over. What are some different scenarios that you're currently considering? And this is something that I do with clients on a one-to-one basis. You know, we might talk through what financial decision are you trying to make right now? And there'll be lots of back and forth with questions, very specific questions. I'll be asking them. We build that all into the AI project. And then they're not reliant then on me to use that in building a safer and stronger relationship with money. I love to build these for clients where I'm equipping them to have a healthy relationship, not being reliant on me, but being very self-impact. So if you're interested in this contact me and we can chat about what that might look like for you But I really hope that some of these lessons in here are really going to support you In making your own AI and money coach. So I want you to think about what financial question Do you keep asking yourself? What would you need to know from your AI coach and use that as your very first question? Now just a little red flag warning here as well not to like alert you but Just to be mindful of AI Cannot provide regulated financial advice. It's legally prohibited to do so. It can't understand your specific tax situation And it also cannot really provide you with Emotion the emotional weight of your financial decisions It can guide you with questions and I have used it a lot for myself with my own money mindset But just be aware that sometimes you might need some additional support from a therapist or a coach or your own mentor To make that final decision. AI also can't predict investment returns So there's no point in asking questions about is this a good investment? Like it won't know if this is going to be the best investment performing Funds in the universe. So it can't do that for you But it can provide you with frameworks and it can support you to understand things like pension statements It can help you to understand the jargon that maybe you have in front of you when you get your investment statement through and so always be verifying any technical expertise with your professional network Especially if you don't have that background yourself. So verify that and especially if you're working with detailed numbers AI can hallucinate from time to time so just verify any specific data Especially if it's making a very important money decision Okay, AI can really excel at removing decision paralysis It can create visual planning tools. It can model out different scenarios It can ask you powerful questions and help you organize financial information But just be aware of when you may need to reach out for additional supports and I am really excited about AI. I'm going to be talking more about AI on this channel. I Use AI a lot for You know as a thinking partner. I have a whole AI dream team that I've already mentioned to you and together with my expertise and those AI systems they create a really powerful System and you can do the same in your own context use AI for organization and Related into your professional advisors for more important decisions So let's bring all of this together with some practical next steps for you Building an AI money coach isn't about replacing Professional advice. It's about having a tool that helps you apply Decision-making to your everyday financial choices use that framework the three C's Context cues and clarity give AI your complete financial picture use cues to build decision frameworks clarity to give it its role and limitations on what you want it to do and Then really think about bringing that all together and Building your AI money coach Okay, that's the starting points and build it from there So your first step is to go and create your financial context profile that word document that I spoke to you about Spend you know an hour a good couple of hours doing that give it information about your Income structures your financial goals your obligations all of those things save that document Download the three prompts playbook in the notes That my friend Natalie has put together for you. These are the frameworks I've been talking about in this video Watch my little room implementation video. I feel like that would be give you a good real time of how I actually Upload that and use that in AI again link in the notes to that and then get into this flow of Using your AI money coach if you want some additional prompts that you can use I do share every month a Practical AI prompt for money management and you can grab that by subscribing to my newsletter at catamorgan.com forward slash newsletter and If you want to go further into creating a whole AI dream team I would really recommend that you go and check out Natalie Menniel's AI dream team This is how I built my entire AI dream team for myself. I am an affiliate of her program Just for complete transparency. I genuinely believe this is the program that's going to transform how you integrate AI And it's the most phenomenal community and program I have ever ever experienced So I'll pop a link in the show note again to Natalie's program below and I really believe that AI and money isn't about Automating and replacing humans. It's about amplification It's about removing friction between knowing what you should do and actually doing it and as a financial advisor I've seen very brilliant capable people make poor decisions because they're overwhelmed They're anxious or they just didn't have the right frameworks in that moment when they needed them Maybe they couldn't afford to go and see a financial advisor So AI when built properly provides the frameworks and Really supports it and the future of personal finance is with AI I really believe that it's AI helping you to access decisions and be better with money So expect some more content from me on this subject. Thank you so much for listening today Please share this episode with anybody that you know that would like to have their own AI and money coach And I look forward to sharing more tips with you in my monthly newsletter. I will see you again on the show next week. Bye