How I Used AI to Save for a Vacation

1 week ago 6

The holiday season is approaching faster than we're ready for it. Come Christmas, I'll be ready to take a break and travel. This year, I'm going to Montreal and Québec City.

I started planning for a holiday vacation in September, so I had two to three months to save for it. No matter your time frame, however, you can turn to artificial intelligence for savings advice for your next vacation.

I chose to use ChatGPT to help budget for this vacation, given my generally good experiences with it as an AI "coach" in other parts of life. (Though not great as a complex financial advice tool, it's better for simpler, more general advice.)

If you're using ChatGPT to help plan your vacation, you could also ask questions beyond finances -- like where to go, when to travel and how to find the best deals and affordable options for your budget.

AI, it's adventure time.

Prep your prompt

For ChatGPT to give good savings recommendations, you need to feed it as much context as possible, including your goals, dates and clear parameters. Specifically, you should share the destination, trip length, desired budget and some info on your current financial situation.

If you have a financial tracking app, you can download the past three months of your spending activity and upload it into ChatGPT. If you don't, then this could be a good time to start a personal budget.

Here are some budgeting apps to consider, CNET's expert tips on savings and advice on how to stick to your saving goals, as well as some mistakes to avoid when you're saving money.

Alternatively, though it requires more manual labor than using a budgeting app, you could upload the past 30 days of your financial activity into a spreadsheet and group it into categories.

Just always be wary of sharing sensitive personal or financial information with AI tools due to security risks. To avoid ChatGPT knowing too much financial information about me, I'm using estimates for this example.

Prompt #1: "I'm planning a vacation to Montreal and Québec City in December. I want to go for the week between Christmas and New Year's (December 26 – January 2). I want to surprise my wife with the gift for her birthday. I expect the trip will cost approximately $3,000. I want to book in November, so I have two months to save.

Here are some ballpark numbers: I earn $70,000 per year after tax. My monthly take-home pay is approximately $5,830. I aim to put aside 30% of my income for long-term saving and investing, which comes to $1,750, leaving $4,080.

My monthly expenses include:

Rent: $1,315
Groceries: $600
Dining out/ordering in: $400
Phone: $125
Gym: $33
Yoga classes: $80
Subscriptions: $32

Let's allow a buffer of $300 per month for miscellaneous expenses (toiletries, clothes, gifts, Amazon etc.) and spontaneous events, and I'm left with $1,200 per month. Can you help me save more money in the next two months?"

Make sure you also include your minimum monthly payment for your credit card and any other debt you need to pay down.

ChatGPT gave me several strategies to save, including ordering in and dining out less, reducing grocery spending, pausing my yoga classes while saving for this goal, cutting my subscriptions temporarily and limiting spontaneous purchases. Here's some of what it suggested:

A screenshot of an AI-generated list of ways to save money

Be sure to double check all of ChatGPT's numbers because it's frequently wrong. Choose ChatGPT as a first step, but don't rely on it for financial advice.

Get more granular

You can get even more granular advice by uploading your restaurant and UberEats receipts to see where you can save on ordering in or asking ChatGPT what types of meals you're spending the most money on (and try to make them yourself at home instead).

Once your vacation is over, you could also save all the receipts from the trip, load them into ChatGPT and spot spending trends to factor into future trips.

Ask for travel tips

I also wanted to know if ChatGPT had any handy tips for traveling to Montreal/Québec City during the holidays. The advice was pretty generic, such as booking early and avoiding tourist traps, but it did suggest checking out Passeport MTL for discounted attractions.

I continued to prod to see what ChatGPT could provide non-locals, and it gave me ideas like the cheapest neighborhoods and restaurants to dine in, the BYOB spots to avoid alcohol markups and to drink tap water in Québec City, given the excellent water quality.

AI won't give you all the answers, but it will inspire ideas on savings -- both before you leave and while you're on vacation. You could even download the ChatGPT app to answer your money and Montreal questions while on the go.

Just remember that whatever info you put into ChatGPT won't necessarily remain confidential. It will be used to train the AI model, so it provides better answers in the future, unless you disable your chat history (though OpenAI still saves it for 30 days). Reputable budgeting apps have a lot more security and may provide better answers than AI at this point.

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