Budgets are one of the most opaque things in American life; it's easy to get into a habit with today's subscription and gig economy to get lost in small transactions that pile up until you find yourself in a financial hole that is complex to untangle. Subscriptions these days are largely managed over email, which makes tracing and cancelling them more difficult. Amazon Prime is probably one of the worst offenders because it wraps so many subscriptions of varying prices under multiple opaque Amazon Prime transactions.
Twice a year I meet with my financial planner and we discuss budgets among other things. For years that is where I gained insight into my spending. I'd operate by setting a total monthly spend and as long as I didn't pass that threshold I didn't mind my budget. The reason is that min-maxxing your budget can be a constant activity that invites a lot of pain and very little reward; some of those creature comfort expenditures probably go a long way in your day-to-day happiness. That said, a lot of people turn to min-maxxing because it gives them some amount of reassurance and gives them a sense of financial control. Regardless, this is 2026 and the economy is in the pits for most of us so I wanted a better idea of how things are going.
It turns out this was a little trickier than I thought because, surprise, everyone wants a subscription for doing this very thing.
SimpleFIN
SimpleFIN is exactly what it sounds like: it's a dead simple, $15/yr service that you connect to via token and it connects to your banks and credit cards through OAuth. From there you can query about 45 days worth of data from them. 45 days worth of data isn't valuable on its own, what we really want is to understand trends because often enough budgets are "lumpy" in their allocation. Few expenditures are flat month-to-month. Instead, averages and p90s across a year are what will prepare you for normal and worst case scenarios.
Actual Budget
That's where Actual Budget comes in. It's a piece of free software that you host yourself. You could accomplish this through a variety of methods that all fall under "home labbing", but that bit is out of scope for this article. Actual Budget connects to SimpleFIN and synchronizes your transactions, allowing you to categorize and tag them. It also has a nice, visually appealing reporting interface that helps you understand your budget across four months.
The superpower
The superpower was wiring all of this up to Claude Desktop so that I could discuss my budget with Claude. Now, when I'm thinking about big purchases Claude can query the Actual Budget API through an MCP server. It can not only automate categorization, tagging, and rule creation, but now Claude can holistically understand my money movement.
This is, frankly, no substitute for a financial planner. Mine offers a variety of services beyond what Claude can do or even advise on (legally speaking), but it does make conversations that I used to pick up the phone and have with my financial advisor much more simple. Instead, by the time I call her I have a pretty clear picture of the situation and usually a goal in mind.