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Systems·4 min read·

Give Every Dollar a Job Before the Month Starts, With Claude

Build a monthly money system from your real numbers instead of a rule someone invented.

Your money has no instructions, so it improvises. Pay lands. Bills come out. You spend on the things in front of you. Whatever survives to the 28th is called savings, and how much survives is decided mostly by whether anything went wrong that month.

That's not a budget. That's your money freelancing. And the cost isn't the money you waste, it's that you can never answer a simple question: can I afford this? You genuinely don't know, so you either say no to things you could have had, or yes to things you couldn't, and both feel bad afterwards.

The famous 50/30/20 rule won't save you either. It was designed for an average that doesn't exist. It has no opinion about your rent, your HECS, your car that's going to need tyres in March, or the wedding in Perth you already said yes to.

What's inside

  • Every dollar of your income assigned to a job before the month starts.
  • Sinking funds for the irregular costs that currently wreck you, calculated from real annual amounts.
  • A 10-minute monthly reset so the system survives contact with real life.
  • This is the only money system I've kept for more than 3 months, mostly because the March tyres stopped being a surprise.

The prompt

Open a new Claude chat, paste this in, and answer the questions as they come. Have last month's real spending in front of you before you start.

The zero-based money plan prompt
You are a systems designer helping me build a zero-based monthly money plan. Zero-based means every dollar of my income is assigned a job before the month begins, and the plan balances to exactly zero.

You are not a financial adviser. Do not recommend products or platforms. Do not tell me my spending is bad. You are building a structure that matches how I actually live.

STEP 1 - GATHER
Ask me these ONE AT A TIME and wait for each answer:
1. My take-home pay, and how often it lands.
2. Any other income, and how reliable it is.
3. Fixed monthly commitments: rent or mortgage, utilities, subscriptions, insurance, debt repayments, transport.
4. Irregular costs across a whole year: car registration and service, holidays, Christmas, birthdays, health, professional fees, anything over $200 that hits once or twice a year. Push me for the annual figure, not the monthly one.
5. My current savings goals and any deadlines attached to them.
6. What I spend on food, going out and personal things in a typical month. If I don't know, ask me for last month's number from my banking app rather than letting me guess.

STEP 2 - BUILD
Produce a table with these columns: Category, Job (what this money is for in plain words), Monthly amount, Type (fixed / sinking fund / flexible / future).

Rules for the build:
- Every sinking fund is the annual cost divided by 12. Show both numbers so I can see what I'd otherwise have been ambushed by.
- The bottom line must equal my income exactly. If it doesn't balance, show me the shortfall and stop.
- Name the flexible categories by what they mean to me, not by accounting labels.

STEP 3 - RECONCILE
If the plan doesn't balance, do not quietly shrink my spending to make it fit. Show me the gap as a number, then give me 3 different ways to close it with the trade-off spelled out for each. I choose. You don't.

STEP 4 - MAKE IT RUN
Give me:
- The bank account structure this needs, described generically, with what each account holds and why.
- A 10-minute monthly reset checklist: what I check, in what order, and the one number that tells me whether last month worked.
- The 3 categories most likely to blow out for someone with my numbers, and an early warning sign for each.

Finish by asking me which single category I'm least confident I estimated correctly.

What just happened: instead of a generic percentage split, you now have a plan built from your actual rent, your actual irregular costs, and your actual life — one that balances to zero and tells you exactly what each dollar is for.

How to use it

  1. 1Get last month's real spending in front of you before you start. Guessed inputs give you a plan that collapses in week 2.
  2. 2Do STEP 3 properly. The whole point is that you make the trade-off, not the model.
  3. 3Run the 10-minute reset on the same day every month. Payday works. Put it in your calendar now.

Make it yours: ask it to rebuild the plan for irregular income by basing everything on your lowest month of the last 6, and treating anything above that as a bonus with its own job.

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