A good friend of mine is brilliant at her job. Senior. Well paid. Genuinely sharp.

And last year she realised she had no idea where her money was going.

She wasn't spending recklessly. She wasn't in debt. She just had this quiet, persistent feeling that her income and her life weren't quite adding up. And she had never had anyone properly sit down with her and look at it.

That conversation normally costs hundreds an hour.

I spent 17 years in corporate finance. I have sat across the table from people running serious operations, people earning serious money, and I can tell you that most of them had never had that conversation either.

This week I want to give it to you. For free.

Step 1. Download 12 months of bank statements as PDFs.

Most UK banks let you do this in one click from the statements section of online banking. Download the lot.

Step 2. Redact before you upload anything.

Black out your account number, sort code, full name and address. Screenshot each page and mark those sections out, or use a free PDF redaction tool.

You want the transactions. Nothing else goes near AI.

Step 3. Open claude.ai (free). Create a project. Call it Money. Drag the PDFs in.

Then send this exact prompt:

"These are my bank statements for the last 12 months. Categorise every transaction into clear groups: housing, groceries, transport, eating out, subscriptions, the usual ones. Then tell me 5 things. 1: total monthly spending and how it changed across the year. 2: every recurring subscription you can find, including the ones I have probably forgotten about. 3: the categories where my spending grew the most month on month. 4: anything duplicated, suspicious, or where a direct debit has crept up without me noticing. 5: the top 3 patterns in my spending that I probably cannot see myself. Be specific. Use real numbers."

Give it a couple of minutes. It is reading hundreds of lines.

Step 4. Read what comes back slowly.

The forgotten subscription is always in there. The streaming service you cancelled in your head 3 years ago. The trial that quietly became a full annual fee. I have watched people find £600 a year sitting in subscriptions they had genuinely stopped thinking about.

Then the patterns. The food shop that crept up 30% while you were not looking. The months that cost twice what you thought they did.

Nobody reads 12 months of transactions line by line. Claude does. That is the point.

Step 5. Put those numbers into a proper budget.

Not a generic one. One built specifically for UK households, with real percentages based on how UK tax, housing and living costs actually work. The AI prompt is already written into the file, engineered to stop Claude from giving you lazy, generic answers and force it into a ranked, specific, honest analysis.

The gaps in pounds. The biggest leaks. The one change to make this month.

Just reply to this email with the word SPREADSHEET, and I will send it straight to your inbox.

One important note before you start.

AI is not a regulated financial adviser. For the big decisions, pensions, mortgages, and investments, you still need an FCA-regulated professional.

What this does is the prep. So when you have those bigger conversations, you already know what your money is actually doing.

2 Sunday mornings. Completely different relationship with your finances.

Not to teach you about AI in the abstract. Not to give you 50 tools you will forget by next month. To help you build a working system around it that applies to your actual job, your actual week, and the actual tasks that are eating your time.

We work on finances, yes. But also hiring, legal documents, health, research, client work, and the daily decisions, most professionals are still doing it the slow way.

The next cohort starts 14 May 2026.

If that is what you need, reply to this email, and I will send you the details. Or take a look at configurai.com.

And if now is not the moment, that is fine. But I would pay attention to how quickly this gap between people who know how to use AI properly and people who do not is opening up. The people who wait for certainty tend to arrive after the advantage has already gone.

Then our first live call is on 20 May, with two sessions so people can join at a time that actually works:

It’s small on purpose because I work with people on their actual role, their actual week, and the actual tasks that are wasting their time.

By the end, the goal is simple: Not that you “know about AI.” But that you’ve built a working system around it that genuinely helps you think better, work faster, and stop feeling behind.

If that sounds like what you need, just reply to this email, and I’ll send you the details.

Or you can have a look here: configurai.com

See you next week with more ways to use AI without losing your mind (or your credibility).

Orgesa Meli

P.S. If this saved you from a future hallucination disaster, forward it to someone who's using ChatGPT/Claude for proposals, reports, or client work. They'll thank you later. Subscribe to my community here.