AI is powerful enough to analyze your finances in seconds and find things you’d probably miss It can also end up with enough information to know every aspect of your financial life. So, how do you get the benefits without giving away more than you’re comfortable with? The best way to use AI with your money when you’re concerned about privacy is to not use AI with your money. (there are a lot of great tools available) Here’s the second best way, or at least how I do it. Please tell me if you see any holes or mistakes! This is a work in progress, I’m learning as I go with this too, thank you! Table of ContentsWhat Are We Afraid Of?How To Limit Data Being SavedBuild a Local LLMUse Temporary ChatsBe Careful With QuestionsTurn Off TrainingHow to Sanitize Your Statements & DataDownload Transactions Only (Credit Cards, Bank)Download Quicken File (Brokers)Manually Scrub Personal InformationDon’t Upload TheseIs It Worth The Hassle?Is This Better Than Apps? What Are We Afraid Of? Let’s say I stick all my statements into ChatGPT, what am I afraid will happen? They would store my information somewhere forever and I won’t be able to remove it. They will use it to train a model It might get leaked in a breach later on All legitimate concerns and, let’s be honest, we can never be sure but here’s what we can do to protect ourselves. How To Limit Data Being Saved Build a Local LLM This is the ultimate privacy protection because a local LLM operates on your hardware and your data never leaves. This is, however, also out of my area of expertise. I’ve read about it and even had ChatGPT educate me on it but it requires hardware capability that I don’t have or wish to buy. But if you did have the hardware and the inclination, you can build one and ChatGPT can teach you. Use Temporary Chats Temporary chats are like incognito mode for your browser, nothing gets saved to your history. In the case of ChatGPT, it won’t remember them and it won’t be used to train models. They will get saved for up to 30 days for “safety and abuse monitoring.” 🚨 For a period of time in 2025, Open AI kept deleted and temporary chats from mid-May to September due to a court order because of a NYT copyright lawsuit. They’ve since been deleted and temporary chats follow their published policy but know that a court order can force preservation. Other models follow roughly the same rules for their version of incognito chats. If you don’t use temporary chats, your documents may not include your personal information but ChatGPT will associate them with you. Unless you turn off memory, it’ll know your spending and likely reference it later since it adds to context. I’m not sure if this bothers me yet. NOTE: If you use temporary chat and want to make it permanent, there’s no mechanism for doing