Taki Wong, a 27-year-old co-founder of an Ontario-based tech firm, spends his days building AI tools for busy professionals. When it comes to managing his own money, he also puts AI tools to a personal test. “I feel like I have a mini personal financial adviser at my side 24-7,” he says of Google’s Gemini AI model, which he uses to track spending and hold himself accountable.
“Every month I have a reconciliation where I go in and input all the expenses from my credit card and things that I’m spending money on,” he says. “It’s able to say, ‘Maybe you’re eating Chipotle too much’ or ‘Maybe you’re going out to these restaurants too much,’ and it calculates my savings rates and investments from there.” He credits Gemini with helping him cut the amount he spent eating out from $600 per month to $200, and his TV subscriptions from $300 to just $50.
As grateful as Wong is to have AI tools that enable him to manage his money with ease, he’s still cautious about what personal data he shares. “I don’t connect any bank accounts or anything with it,” he says. “I just provide like the actual like numbers themselves; like the actual expenses.”
Jordan Edwards, host of “#Clockedin,” a personal development podcast, says that although AI is a great tool, we should use it with caution. “It will give you an answer to everything, but you have to vet if that answer is correct or not,” he says. His advice: Consult people you trust. “Not just your parents,” he says, “but people who are actually qualified who you think have really good money habits.”
