How to Upgrade Your Finances with A.I.

Published Jan 29, 2025, 8:05 AM

Have you ever wondered how A.I. could help you manage your finances? Or how ChatGPT could help you create and follow a budget? To break down the surprising ways we can use AI for financial planning, Danielle and Simone are joined by Melissa Jean-Baptiste, a.k.a “the Beyoncé of Personal Finance.” She’s the founder of the financial literacy blog “Millennial in Debt” and the author of “So...This Is Why I'm Broke,”  and she shares how to use A.I. to pay off debt, plan your vacation on a budget, and more.

Hello Sunshine.

Hey fam Today, on the bright side, your financial planning just got an upgrade. Okay, Sis, we're talking AI and the groundbreaking new ways you can utilize technology for financial planning, get yourself out of debt, plan for that dream vacation, and learn the surprising ways that we can lean on AI for budgeting. It's Wednesday, January twenty ninth. I'm Simone Boyce.

I'm Danielle Robe and this is the bright side from Hello Sunshine.

Okay, Danielle. It feels like AI is one of those things that we just cannot escape right now. It's ever present, It's in our Google searches, it's popping up in Instagram features. And today we're talking about how we can use AI for financial planning, which I think is pretty cool.

Simone, I'm so obsessed.

I can't stop thinking about what AI is going to change in our world, and we're already experiencing some of it. As you said, in terms of financial planning, people are really utilizing this as a tool. According to a study by Experience, nearly half of consumers said that they have or are considering using AI for financial management help, and ninety six percent of people who used it said they had a positive experience.

I'm into this. Is this something you would ever use?

Yeah? Absolutely. I think the future for AI and financial planning is very bright. Like I do see a future in which AI replaces brokers, which obviously that is there is an unfortunate downside to that. We're losing you know, human labor. But I don't know. Is AI going to become smarter than the market one day? I mean, imagine how that's going to upend the power dynamic in this world?

And can you trust it? I feel like we're going to get into all that today, but I'm open.

I feel the same way about AI as they do about space, like I'm scared of it, but I'm open.

I think that's such a great sentiment because when I think back in history about all of the times that have been these like monumental shifts in technology, the first reaction is to fear it. Like everybody felt that way about TV, about radio, about microwaves, And here we are utilizing all that stuff smartphones even right.

AI is just the next frontier.

Right and we've all seen the research on how early adopters wind up becoming much more successful. You know, the people who remain open and are willing to learn the new technology. There are just numerous benefits, that's for sure.

We have to remain open. Well, we're going to get into so much of this today. Joining us to break it all down is Melissa Jean Baptiste. She's the founder of the financial literacy blog Millennial in Debt and the author of the personal Finance book So this is why I'm Broke.

I love that title.

She teaches millennials and gen z how to increase their income, how to build generational wealth, how to gain financial and what I really appreciate is that she's talking about this from a personal place.

She has experience in this.

Well, yeah, I mean I was fascinated to learn that a few years ago Melissa paid off one hundred and two thousand dollars in student loan debt and purchased her first home within thirty days of that milestone. She was actually a teacher at the time and started selling her lesson plans on the side as a side hustle, and then that extra income facilitated all of her other financial goals. Like that story is just mind blowing to me.

It really is.

Well, without further ado, we're excited to welcome the self proclaimed Beyonce of personal finance, Melissa Jean Baptiste. She's here to help us with our bills. Bills, bills, Melissa, welcome to the bright Side.

Thank you, Dane. That was a fantastic intro.

I love, I love the little nods of Beyonce Disney's child.

We had to we couldn't resist.

We have to start by asking you about your journey because you heard it out like so many Americans in debt from student loans. But we mentioned that you actually paid off over one hundred thousand dollars in student loans and bought a house all on a teacher's salary, which is just mind blowing. How did you make that happen?

Don't tell me coupons, Melissa, No, I can't handle that.

And don't tell me you skipped on seven dollars lattes. No.

I did skip out on a lot of things, but it wasn't that that helped me reach the end goal, which I think is a lot of the miscommunication and the finance. We're all like, yeah, just don't buy coffee and you could buy a million dollar house.

That's that's not true.

So it took a lot of discipline and also a lot of really sitting down with myself.

And what even led.

Me to start this during and paying down my debt is I tried to buy a house.

I live in New York.

I tried to buy a house at twenty five years old. I had no savings account. I didn't know anything about anything regarding money. And the real estate agent was just like, maybe you need to call your loan provider because there's nothing we could do for you here, Like, you're just not going to get approved for a mortgage that's big enough to buy anything besides like a Barbie house in New York. And so when I called my loan provider, they were just like, oh, you owe eighty thousand, and that was strange because.

I had only board fifty.

And that's when they really started explaining, you're on an interest only payment plan. You you know, even paying these payments, but it hasn't been going to the principle. And I'm just like, I don't I don't know any of these terms mean. I just you sent me a bill. I paid the bill, Like what are we talking about? And so that moment, that conversation is really what made me sit down and look at my numbers calculate my net worth, which was in the negatives. And in that moment, I looked at all of my spending. I looked at my budget, which was terrible. I looked at my debt, I looked at my income, and I came up with a plan where I would essentially side hustle and figure out how much I needed to make every single year to pay down this principle, pay down this amount that my monthly payment was just not doing. And so I ended up selling my lesson plans in unit plans and making an additional ten thousand dollars a year that I would put towards my student loans.

I'm really curious about, like how you sold the lesson plans.

Yeah, So initially I started off, like I said, doing any side hustle that would make me a little bit of extra money. I was walking dogs, I was tutoring, and I'm like, listen, I'm already spending forty fifty hours making lesson plans and unit plans. And I started doing some research. And there's this platform called Teachers Pay Teachers, where it's literally built for educators to sell really great things that they've created and you can purchase from other educators who've actually taught and used these materials themselves.

So that's how I ended up there.

Melissa, what were some of the mistakes that you were making before you were getting your finances on track?

So I really was a mind that if I pay all my bills, or if I can pay all my bills, that I know how to operate money.

So I wasn't.

Saving, I wasn't budgeting, I wasn't planning, and I would literally be like, Okay, I have this money, I'm going to spend it.

I'm getting another paycheck.

In two weeks, without ever really thinking like, hey, maybe you can invest this money, or maybe you could put it towards saving. You want to travel, but you don't want to take on more debt. Maybe create a sinking fund for you to travel in the next six months or the next year. I was literally getting a paycheck and spending it on anything and everything, just because like, oh, yeah, I paid my bills. And it wasn't until besides that that conversation with the real estate agent. I overdrafted my account for a pair of coach speakers.

And I was just like, oh, girl, you.

Maybe you need a plan if you're going to be I're embarrassing yourself like this.

So I was just a big spender, very big consumer.

It's not embarrassing.

It's really like if you don't grow up learning this stuff, it's really hard to find digestible information later on.

It that's confusing.

I had not a similar experience to you, but a different experience where I realized, like I got to get my shit together.

We all have that moment, Yes, I think.

So I know that you also use chat GPT to facilitate your side hustles. How do you do that?

So you can do one of two ways.

One you could do the quiz route, where you can say chat GBT create a side hustle quiz that will help me figure out what my skill sets are or what I might be interested in. But if you already know the skills that you're really good at, like for myself, I was an educator, so I might type in give me side hustles that are really great for people in education, and then you know, it gives me a list.

Or I can say, give me side hustles that I can do.

Remote remotely for experience with education, and it'll give me different options. So whatever your skill set is that is where you want to lean into for side hustling, because a lot of times online you'll hear just like.

You could do Uber eats and all of that is like, well, maybe I don't want to.

Go outside, right, so maybe I want some side hustles I could do inside. But I don't know they even exist, Like a lot of people don't even know that they can sell their lesson plans and unit plans and adding that into AI and really getting specific into what you do, well, that.

Is going to give you options that you might not have even known about.

We've got to take a quick break, but we'll be right back to our conversation with Melissa Jean Baptiste, So stay with us and we're back. So I'm skeptical, Melissa, I gotta be honest because because I have not been privy to AI platforms that I would feel comfortable in trusting with my financial situation or even with my investing decisions. But I know that we're there already and these resources are only going to become more available to us in the near future. So what are some of the ways that you would suggest use AI to get a better handle on our finances?

Yes, I completely understand I was there, But I think at no matter whichever you know space you are with AI, whether you really trust it and you love it and you want to figure out how to navigate, or you're just trying to like maybe dip your toe in and see, like I don't know yet. There are tools in so many different ways for you to kind of figure out a financial plan on whatever goal it is that you're trying to achieve. So, for example, if we're using CHADGBT, which is the one that we all know. If we're using CHADGBT, you can use it to ask questions about things that you might not understand. So you can use it strictly as for definitions, right, I can ask and say like, oh, I really want to understand these five investing terms. Can you break this down like if you were talking to a tenth grader, break this down if you were talking to a twenty five year old, And if there are things that the output comes out you're like, I still don't understand.

You could absolutely use it as a learning tool.

So I'll give you a hypothetical like, yeah, top of this here, one of my goals is to god a really comprehensive budget together so that my husband and I can just get a handle on our spending. Where would you recommend I go to create a budget? Is there an AI option out there for me?

There are a couple of different tools, so come. Filent money and monarch money are really great as like little assistant tools. You do typically have to connect your accounts and if you're like not, you know, comfortable connecting the accounts, you can input and estimate. The only thing is with like, we estimate a lot when it comes to finances, so you want to try to get as close as possible to your accurate numbers and then create that like, hey, you know I bring in five thousand dollars a month, I want to save five hundred dollars.

These are my expenses, these are my goals. What do I need to do?

And it'll create this plan and create this budget for you. And then as you're navigating the month, so as you're spending, as you're doing all that, it'll tell you like, hey, you're eighty percent to your grocery budget. You might not want to spend another two hundred dollars at target. You might want to reel it in this week. If we want to stay on target. So that's what I really like is that it gives you the plan and it also gives you the reminders like, oh, you're you're.

Not following the plan, so let's let's change it up here.

And then when it comes to investing, are you looking to AI for suggestions as to how to invest so.

That you want to be really careful.

I do love using AI to learn more about investing, and you can use AI to learn about historical performances, but I wouldn't necessarily not at this juncture, just because the stock market can change so quickly and so many things that's really hard to suggest like, yeah, you should do this because it'll definitely happen.

We don't know them. Even AI doesn't know that.

But if you want to look at historical performances or understand like how the stock market works as a whole, I would absolutely suggest using AI just to get that knowledge, but also double checking. I always saying like, Okay, I got this information on Chad GBT, let me go to Google and see some other Let me look at you know, Yahoo finance, or let me look at business insider to make sure that that information is accurate before I go and dive in and start doing things. I always want to double check, especially when it comes to money.

Do you see AI as a replacement for a financial advisor or do you see it more as a support tool?

Definitely not.

So to become a financial advisor is extremely difficult. And I respect financial advisors and tax advisors because they have to go through so much training and they have to know exactly what they should say and what they shouldn't say because they take a percentage they do, and that's you also have to find a really good one. But you know, want to make sure that you are doing a thing that's best for your future self. So I still would always suggest, yes, use AI, and yes you can look at the outputs, but I would still go bring into a financial advisor and see, like, you know, are these suggestions really the best thing that twenty years in the future is going to be worth it for me in my retirement.

Is there a way to fact check AI?

Because like I've been using chat GPT a ton, but I saw this study actually that they took forty entrepreneurs out of Kenya and they were all using AI for a month. The people that knew how to use AI well increased their revenue by forty percent. The people who didn't know how to decipher what was good information versus what was bad and they just kind of went with it went down twenty percent, Like you really, and I don't know if we have enough self awareness nowadays to know if we're deciphering well or not right.

That's that is a really As a former teacher, I'm like, it's so important to understand fucked opinion and just pure fiction. So I do think you need to fact check and that could be as simple as doing a quick Google search minus AI so you can see like the human information. But I'm also really good on reading books, looking for people, financial advisors, looking for other financial influencers online, just to ask the question and see is it coming up with similar answers.

I know AI is.

Definitely like you know, I want it quick. I want to quick, so yeah, I'm getting this quick output, but I also want to make sure I'm not going to lose like million dollars in the future. So I highly suggest asking the questions and looking up in multiple spaces to see what results you're getting and see if they're actually accurate.

Are there any red flags? Like is there information you should not be sharing with AI.

I would just say, if you feel that you are not comfortable, and that's just with everything online, not comfortable connecting your accounts, use it more for research, Like I wanted to tell me, you know a compound interest calculator.

I am huge with that on AI.

Because I'm like, math is math, right, so you're you can't really go too far off with math. So there are a lot of times where I'll say, Okay, if I invest one hundred dollars for the next ten years, how much fold does equate to if compounded by seven percent, if compounded by eight percent, and so it will give me that output, and I'll be able to say, Okay, maybe I'll invest two fifty three fifty, but I'm not necessarily like connecting.

My four to one K to chat GBT.

So if you don't want to connect your accounts, just using it for research or math purposes is the safest way and the most like, the most impactful way to help you really navigate your findance.

We have to take another short break. We'll be right back with Melissa Jean Baptiste. And we're back with Melissa Jean Baptiste. Okay, I want to get practical for a minute, Can I ask you some nuts and bolts things? Yeah, can you use AI to boost your credit score? Are there any tools for that?

So there are not any ways where you can go to an AI tool and it will fix your credit Like, that's just not going to happen. Our credit has five things that it's you know that are going into it. And the two major aspects of sixty five percent of what makes up your credit score is on time payments and your credit utilization. So how much of your credit limit are you using and how often are you paying on time? And those are just two things that AI cannot do. You can set up a reminder and a like on an AI tool to say, hey, pay your bill on time, but there's nothing that an AI tool can do that will boost your credit score like that.

So just just don't do not say, somebody has ten thousand dollars of credit card debt. Is there a way to utilize AI to get a plan in place to pay it all off?

Absolutely, and that is one of the best ways and best tools to do so. So putting in all your information because a lot of times we're like, yeah, I have ten thousand dollars in debt.

I'm like, well, what's your interest rate? And we don't know. They're like, well, what's your your monthly payment? We don't know, what's your payoff date? We don't know.

So when you use an AI tool like chat GBT, you implement all those pieces of information.

You're not putting your account number or.

Anything, but you can say I have ten thousand dollars in credit card debt with a seven percent seven percent of dream, with.

A seventeen percent interest.

Rate, and a minimum monthly payment of.

Forty five dollars?

How long will it take for me to pay off with this plan? And then it'll tell you like, okay, if you pay the forty five dollars, you're gonna pay it off in like twenty years. And then you can ask it to say okay, and what if I want to pay this off in the next three years, what month payments do I need to make? And it will tell you you need to increase your payments by this amount, and then you can start working with your budget like okay, well, if I need to make an extra four hundred dollars to pay off this credit card, what are some side hustles that I could do to help supplement my income. So there you just do all these follow up questions to help you set up this plan for your budget to pay off this debt in a timely manner.

So it sounds like you can like list out all the questions that you would really ask a financial planner or a friend, like just things you're curious about.

Yes, as long as they're like historical research or BATH related. So again, I wouldn't say, like, hey, what what is the stock market going to do in ten years, because a lot of people will ask that because it's kind of cool to see what the AI output might be or what they think, but we simply don't know. And to make an investment decision based off of chat GBT telling me like this stock is going to go up in ten years, that's scary. I'm a very risk adverse investor, so I don't like to take huge risks because I want to retire early, so I don't want to do a lot of speculation. I like to use the historical performance as like an indicator, but I don't really typically say like I'm going to invest twenty thousand dollars in this new company and hope and hope it goes, well.

Wait, so do you use AI to customize risk tolerance or market trends for your investments?

Personally, you can do that.

I already know, like since I started with my four one K way younger, I already knew.

That I was very risk adverse.

I just don't like to take risks with money in general, And that's okay, Like everyone's risk tolerance is very different, but you can have it.

You can create a risk profile quiz for yourself.

And answer the questions because it'll ask you, like, you know, how likely are you to invest in a new company, and it'll give you like a scale, and then by the time you finish.

Answering and input your answers, it'll tell you it'll help you gauge almost.

Kind of like a robo advisor, like, oh, you have a very low risk tolerance, maybe this is how you want to set up your portfolio, or you have a it's very high risk tolerance, baby, this is how you want to set up your portfolio. And I would still go to an advisor and say, like, these are the suggestions, this is my risk profile, how do we think this could play out? And then just really like lean in that way same thing for side hustles. If you're like I have no idea what side hustle i'd be good at or what to do, you can have them create a side hustle based off like your skill set, based off things you're interested in.

It'll create a.

Quiz, you'll answer it and figure out what you might want to try to start building a new stream of income.

So, in terms of saving, Melissa, what's an example of an AI prompt that will help us save more this year? Oh?

I love that I create saving prompts for myself all the time. Like one of the most recent ones I did, which is so funny. I was just like, how can I prepare, Like how can I save for the next Beyonce a like surprise drop or the next tour? And what it did, which was so cool, was it looked at the average prices of like the Renaissance tour and told me, you know, if you have twelve weeks and you want to save two thousand dollars, this is how much you need to save weekly, daily or monthly. If you want to save for a specific thing that you know, like a date or a timeline, and you have a specific number, you can want to chat, GBT or any AI tool that you like to use, and ask it to create a savings plan for you with the total amount you need to save and the amount of time that you need to save it by. And if you want it to get really specific, you can start inserting your budget numbers. Right, so you can say, I bring home five thousand dollars a month, these are my expenses, and I want to save three thousand dollars in the next seven months. What is a savings plan that I could follow and it will spit that out for you, and now I can automate that savings using whatever bank that I use.

Amazing. That's a great tip. And you can also use it to help you plan a vacation that's budget friendly, right, Like, give me an example of a prompt that you would use for that task.

Two years ago, my girlfriends and I were going to Miami. We were saying in this specific area, saying at this specific hotel, and we input it all of that where we were staying, and we said, give us five to seven activities that we can do within the fifty.

To one hundred dollars range.

And you get to Yeah, even if it's not for vacation if you want to go on a date with your partner, but you tell them like the location and the price limit, and it'll give you spit out ideas of things you can do.

That are in that near area or wherever you might be going to.

Amazing.

I love that.

That's because sometimes I'm like, I don't know what I want to do, just telp me where should I go?

Also great for group trips that can get so unwieldy in terms of splitting costs, so correct.

Yeah, you can do it for restaurants too, which is another one because if we're like, you're gonna split for dinner, I need to know if we're going to like the Yelp restaurants with the.

Four four dollars signs or a two dollars sign, Like, let's get a list going for me.

I just see where we could potentially go to.

Totally Melissa, thanks so much for joining us on the bright side, Thank you for having me.

Melissa Jean Baptiste is the founder of the financial literacy blog Millennial in Debt and the author of the personal finance book So This is Why I'm Broke.

That's it for today's show. Tomorrow, we have another edition of shelf Life in store. Kate Fagan joins us to talk about her debut fiction novel and the January pick for Reese's Book Club, The Three Lives of Kate.

K Join the conversation using hashtag the bright Side and connect with us on social media at Hello Sunshine on Instagram and at The bright Side Pod on TikTok oh, and feel free to tag us at Simone Boyce and at Danielle Robe.

Listen and follow The bright Side on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

See you tomorrow, folks, Keep looking on the bright side.

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