How to track your net worth with ChatGPT or Claude.

Updated 30 September 2026

What is AI good at in personal finance?

Modern assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude are very good at the tedious part of tracking money: reading documents. Give one a PDF statement, a broker CSV, a screenshot of a pension dashboard or a messy spreadsheet and it will pick out the account, the date, the holdings, the units and the balances, whatever the layout. It can also:

• Map unfamiliar column names ("Qty", "Number of units", "Holding") to what they mean.
• Tell a dividend from a sale, and a fee from a deposit, in a transaction list.
• Look up a ticker, or find a recent estimate of what a property is worth, with a source.
• Explain your numbers in plain language and answer follow-up questions.

Where does AI go wrong with money?

Language models generate plausible text. That's a different skill from bookkeeping, and three weaknesses matter:

• Arithmetic. Adding forty numbers, converting currencies or matching sales to purchase lots in its head, a model can drop a row or slip a digit, and the answer still looks confident.
• Memory. A chat is not a database. Conversations end, context windows fill up, and "memory" features store short notes, not a ledger. Next month the AI won't reliably know what you owned last month.
• Consistency. Ask the same question twice and you can get two methods: one answer includes the car, the other doesn't; one converts at today's rate, the other at last year's.

None of this means you shouldn't use AI. It means the AI shouldn't be the system of record.

What are the risks of pasting your numbers into a chat?

Pasting balances into a chat each month and asking "what's my net worth?" works for a rough one-off, but:

• There's no history, so you can't see a trend or what changed.
• Nothing checks the result. If a statement is misread, you won't know.
• Prices are whatever you pasted. Nothing updates them.
• Your financial details sit in chat history on the AI provider's side, under their retention settings.

How do AI connectors (MCP) work, in plain words?

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets an AI assistant use outside tools. You add a tool as a custom connector (Claude calls it that; in ChatGPT it lives under Apps & Connectors in developer mode), sign in once, and the assistant can call it during a conversation, the way a person might open another app to look something up.

For money tracking, that splits the work sensibly. The AI reads your statement and turns it into structured rows. The connector checks those rows, stores them, does the maths and hands back exact figures. When you later ask "how much is our net worth?", the AI asks the connector rather than guessing, and quotes the figures it returns.

How do you set it up, step by step?

Using Worthbase, a net worth and portfolio tracker built for this. It works with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code and other MCP clients.

1. Connect. In your AI app, add the connector https://worthbase.app/mcp and sign in. The setup page has the exact clicks for each app.
2. Describe your household. Tell the AI who's in it and your base currency. If assets are shared, say how ("the house is 50/50; the ISA is mine").
3. Hand over statements. Drop in a broker CSV, a PDF or a screenshot. The AI maps it and Worthbase returns a preview: new items, rows, duplicates, warnings and the change to net worth. Nothing is saved yet.
4. Approve. Say yes and the batch is committed. Every batch is audited and can be undone later.
5. Add the rest. Property values, pension balances, loans, cash. Listed shares, ETFs, crypto, gold and silver are then priced daily.
6. Ask questions. From then on, any conversation can ask about your finances, and a weekly email shows what moved.

What prompts work well?

Here's my Interactive Brokers activity statement for March. Record the trades and dividends.

What's our net worth today, and how has it changed since January?

Split that by person. How much of it is property?

How much would I realise if I sold half my VWRL, and which lots would it use?

Our home was valued at £640,000 by the bank last week. Update it.

What's my annualised return on the Schwab account since 2021?

Check my Coinbase balance against this screenshot and tell me if anything is off.

Set a goal: net worth of $1 million by 2032. Are we on pace?

Notice what these don't ask the AI to do: add things up. Every figure in the answer comes from Worthbase, which uses exact decimal arithmetic and converts currencies with historical rates stored on each row.

What about privacy?

Worth thinking through before you start:

• Your AI provider sees what you share. Statements you upload, and the figures a connector returns, are processed by your AI provider under their privacy terms and your account settings. Check whether your plan uses conversations for training and turn it off if you prefer.
• No bank or broker logins. Worthbase never asks for them. You choose which statements to share; there's no automatic feed.
• Nothing moves money. Worthbase keeps records. It can't make payments or place trades, so a confused AI can't do either through it.
• Documents are data, not instructions. Text inside an uploaded document shouldn't be able to tell the AI to do something. Worthbase returns document text as data and every write needs your confirmation first.
• You can leave. Export everything whenever you like.

More detail on the security page.

Questions