Agent Basics — Personal Finance

Adapted from the DGF Agent Basics series — consumer-first guides for working with a personal AI agent. Pick only what you need.

> Pick only what you need. This skill is individual. This is one person's thoughts, offered as a pre-configured help, not a must. Take only the value you need from it, prune it to what fits you, and leave the rest. You do not have to use what the author thinks, and you do not have to take any other skill with it.

Summary: Set up your personal finances in a spreadsheet of your choice, with pay figured, rent and mortgage separate, subscriptions and cards tracked, handed over on your cadence. Your agent never pays or moves money. Optional.

Use this skill when the user wants their money set up in one place: receipts in a spreadsheet, rent and mortgage figures, spending and subscriptions tracked, pay figured, and credit card interest figured against their own finances. It is bookkeeping and education only. It is not financial advice, and it never moves money.

This skill stands alone. An agent that knows nothing else can follow it from the startup sequence below, then the personal finance method. This skill works on its own, with no other skill needed, and no knowledge of any other skill assumed.

Startup and how to use

Start by getting your own personal agent. Get your own personal agent and set it up. Bring your own accounts and logins. Use nothing that belongs to anyone else.

Tell your agent what you care about in plain words. Name your business, your work, your family, your hobbies, or any topic you want it to follow. Talking is the setup. You do not have to set up a system first.

Ask for the plan first, before any work runs. Say the task, then ask for the exact steps it will take, what it needs from you, and anything it cannot do. Wait for you to approve or correct the plan. Review the plan like a checklist and fix a wrong step or add a missing step before work starts.

Check that your agent understood you, before it runs. Ask it to show back what it thinks you mean and what output it will give you. Correct its repeat back right there when it does not match what you pictured.

Work in small single steps. Count the steps first. Give one step, check it, then give the next step. A ten step run is a huge run for an agent, so break it down and keep each step to exactly one thing.

Show it once, then save it by name. This is how you create a new task or a new skill. Take over the browser and do the task once yourself while your agent pauses. You drive alone and your agent does not watch your clicks. There is no record button to press. After you hand control back, tell your agent the steps in chat and tell it to save them by name, such as save this as Fun Things. Later, say pull up Fun Things and it picks up where you left off.

Correct it in small plain words when it does it wrong. Do not start over. Say what to change and say to remember that correction. That preference sticks and it gets better for you specifically over time.

Let it keep learning your interests every day. Your Feed looks like a newspaper with articles and topics related to what you told it you care about, updated daily. Your Ideas look like a lightbulb with suggestions for things you might like. It is not mind reading. It learns from what you actually talk about.

Use easy first and deep only when you want it. Never require a deep setup to use a basic task. Keep the wording in plain benefits and do not lead with virtual machine or VM. Say it has its own browser and workspace built in, you do not have to set anything up, it keeps your logins safe, and it saves and remembers your stuff.

Setup: spreadsheet of their choice, connected how they want

Ask which spreadsheet the user wants, before building anything. Offer Google Sheets, Excel as a file, Google Docs for a written summary, or Airtable, and let the user pick. Do not pick for them, and do not limit them to a list.

Offer the easy connected route as well, in the same message. Google Sheets is the connected spreadsheet route, and a linked bank or card account can be read through a finance connector where the user has connected one. Check the connection before promising that route, and if it is not connected, share its connect link and do not commit until it is complete and healthy. Airtable and Excel have no spreadsheet connector listed here, so for those, build the file or work in the app through its own site, and say that plainly instead of claiming a connection that does not exist.

Ask how they want it connected. Ask whether they want to upload receipts and statements themselves, connect a bank or card account for reading transactions, or both. The user brings their own accounts and logins for every connection. No account from anyone else carries over.

Never ask for a bank login, card number, or full account number in chat. Tell the user to load logins through the secure sign-in your agent shows them, or through the connector's own connect flow. If a login was not loaded securely, work only from figures and receipts the user provides, and do not look inside that account.

Never move money, pay a bill, or change a subscription from this skill. Setting up a tracker and handing over a report is not a payment. The user reviews and pays themselves.

Inputs: what the user provides, and what trackers they provide

Ask for pay first, so pay can be figured. Ask for gross pay, pay frequency, deductions, and net pay per period, plus any other income. Figure pay as a monthly figure by converting the period the user actually gets paid, and show the conversion in plain words so they can check it.

Ask for fixed monthly figures next. Ask for rent or mortgage payment, plus taxes, insurance, and any other fixed housing cost they count in that figure. Keep rent and mortgage as separate lines, never merged into one housing guess.

Ask for spending categories and trackers. Ask what categories they want, such as food, transport, housing, subscriptions, and debt, and what trackers they already use or want your agent to build. Use the trackers they provide. Do not invent a tracker they did not ask for, and do not invent spending they did not report.

Ask for subscriptions, one by one. Ask for name, amount, billing period, renewal date, and payment method by name only. Build a subscription tracker that totals the monthly cost, flags renewals coming up, and flags duplicates, such as two services doing the same job.

Ask for credit cards, one by one, with only what the interest math needs. Ask for card name only, current balance, annual percentage rate, minimum payment, and due date. Do not ask for the full card number, and never store one.

Ask for receipts in whatever form the user has them: photos, files, uploads, or a list. Record each receipt with date, merchant, category, amount, and payment method by name only. Check each receipt against the spreadsheet total, and flag duplicates and receipts that do not match a known category.

Figure it: pay, spending, subscriptions, and credit card interest

Figure pay against spending in the same period. Show income for the period, fixed costs for the period, variable spending for the period, subscription total for the period, and what is left, in that order. Use the same period for every line, and say which period it is.

Figure subscriptions as a monthly total, even when some bill yearly. Convert a yearly subscription to its monthly equivalent and show the conversion, so the monthly picture is honest.

Figure credit card interest in plain words, as an estimate, never as a bank statement. For each card, show balance, annual percentage rate, estimated monthly interest as balance times annual rate divided by twelve, minimum payment, and how much of that minimum is interest versus principal. State plainly that the real interest depends on daily balances, grace period, fees, and new charges, so the bank's figure can differ, and the user should check their statement.

Figure cards against each other, not in isolation. Show which card costs the most interest per month, which card has the highest rate, and what happens to the monthly interest total if a balance is paid down by an amount the user names. Do not tell the user which card to pay first as advice. Show the numbers for each choice, such as highest rate first versus smallest balance first, and let the user decide.

Flag what needs attention, in plain words. Flag spending over income, a subscription total that grew, a card near its limit, a renewal coming up, and a receipt that does not match its category. A flag is information, not a judgment.

Hand it over: weekly, monthly, or daily, as the user asks

Ask how often they want the report handed over: daily, weekly, monthly, or only when they ask for it. Record that cadence and use it. Do not change the cadence without the user saying so.

Hand over the same shape every time, so the user can compare periods. Include the spreadsheet link or file, the period covered, income, fixed costs, spending by category, subscription total, credit card balances and estimated interest, what is left, and flags for the period.

Deliver the spreadsheet and the report in the same message that says the setup is done, with a link or an attachment for each file. A file saved on your agent's machine has not reached anyone yet.

Keep the spreadsheet as the source of truth. When a figure in a report and a figure in the spreadsheet disagree, fix the spreadsheet first, then reissue the report, and say what changed.

Save the setup by name when the user wants to repeat it, such as save this as My Monthly Money, so the next period starts from the same spreadsheet and trackers, not from scratch.

Diverse, not concrete: let the user prune

Do not make this skill concrete, narrow, or one size fits all. Present a diverse set of options first, across price, style, risk, format, and approach, so different people can see themselves in it.

Let the user prune. Ask what to cut, what to keep, and what to change, and then narrow to what they kept. Pruning is the user's job, not your agent's guess. Do not prune for them before they have seen the options.

Do not lock a single choice early. Offer at least two or three meaningfully different options at each decision point, with the trade for each, unless the user already locked that choice themselves.

Keep options that do not fit one person, because they may fit another person using the same skill. A skill that only works for one kind of person is too concrete to reuse.

When the user prunes, save the pruned version by name when they want to repeat it, so their version starts from what they kept, not from the full diverse set again.

Present the result

Lead with the bottom line in plain words: what came in, what went out, what is left, and what needs attention this period.

State what you could not verify. State when a receipt was unclear, a balance was not checked against a statement, an interest figure is an estimate, or a period is incomplete.

Stop after a denial. Do not re-pitch a tracker, a category, or a card payoff order the user rejected, in new words.

Available connectors

[Google Sheets](/opt/hatch/connectors/google_sheets/CONNECTOR.md) for creating, reading, and editing spreadsheets.

[Google Docs](/opt/hatch/connectors/google_docs/CONNECTOR.md) for a written summary document.

[Google Drive](/opt/hatch/connectors/google_drive/CONNECTOR.md) for finding, uploading, and organizing files and receipts.

[Finances (Plaid)](/opt/hatch/connectors/plaid/CONNECTOR.md) for reading linked bank, card, loan, and investment accounts, including balances, transactions, spending, recurring bills, and subscriptions.

Use your agent's connector and skill search, if it has one, to find other connectors and related skills.

If nothing here fits, look on the web for a maintained API or MCP server and set it up with your agent's custom connector setup, if it has one, or build a custom connector.