Hey friends, hope you are doing great and avoiding the petri dish of school illnesses, which unfortunately ran its way through our household this week.

This week a Bloomberg reporter called me about Muse and why I gave it access to my bank accounts.

Plus, a look at Wealthsimple’s largest DIY portfolios.

Eddie

I had a call this week with a Bloomberg journalist as they are looking to do a story on how people are using Facebook’s new AI agent, Muse (I call mine Jimmy), particularly in the personal finance world. She had seen my post last week and reached out. I honestly thought it was a phishing attempt, but Jimmy confirmed the reporter was real. We talked on zoom for about 30 minutes.

To put it at 30,000 feet: I have never had an executive assistant before. Those are really reserved for the ultra rich.

This feels like that. Only perhaps in a much more powerful way. It can handle multiple, simultaneous, and complex tasks. It does not complain about the workload.

So let us run through some of the ways I have been using it.

First off, I used it to audit my subscriptions. It scoured every single email, as well as went through all of our bank transactions across the various accounts that MJ and I hold, and it produced a summary of ongoing recurring subscriptions. Not just the monthly ones, but those one off annuals that are still recurring yet often forgetten, as well as donations that auto draw from my account.

The next task I gave it was Gmail clean up. I’m at 87% storage usage with around 15,000 emails accumulated over 20 years. You can imagine how hard it gets to manage that inbox. And I believe Gmail purposely makes its interface challenging because they want people to pay for increased storage. I’ll be damned if that happens to me!

So Jimmy goes into my Gmail and found me +2,500 useless emails clogging up the inbox - low hanging fruit, so to speak. Jimmy asked if I wanted it (him?) to delete them. This is important. It did not delete them before I gave it permission. And then I said yes. Boom. 2,500 emails deleted. Down to 70% storage use, progress!

I tested out its capability to book appointments. I hooked it up to my OpenTable app and it booked me a table for two for breakfast. I then also used it to set up an AppleCare appointment at London Drugs. Done.

On Instagram it is not uncommon to get a bunch of DMs with questions from people that I do not know. I purposely do not have Instagram notifications pinging my phone all the time, I have now set it up so that Jimmy will review the DMs and send me a notification of priority items and potential leads. It produces a concise response and asks me permission before hitting send. This is now automatic, which is useful.

The bigger project that I started last week and finished in less than a couple of hours was setting up a comprehensive yet simple to understand eight page Family Money Check-In document that MJ and I can review on a monthly basis.

It summarizes spending, month over month, as well as the last 12 months versus the previous calendar year, and highlights the major changes by category. For example, this year the shopping category has gone up. And while I might like to assume that is MJ doing her thing on the clothing front 😍, Jimmy reminded me of a few one time items. One of those being a necklace I bought for MJ, and a new bed for Julia’s room, plus a couple golf expenses - touché, Jimmy!

It shows net worth, near term larger expenses, recurring bills and income, details funding sources and liquidity, a pretty chart showing monthly spending trend, a 10 year portfolio projection under certain spending scenarios, investment positions - where held and who owns them.

Overall, a very useful - and now automated - monthly document that speaks to both of us as partners, rather than me “telling my wife” how the finances are.

This is something that would take me several hours to put together, now it is all automatic. Plus, we can ask Jimmy to make adjustments during our monthly meeting and ask clarifying questions, and Jimmy will do it immediately.

So, these are just some of the initial ways that I have started to use it.

And then some of the obvious pushback, i.e. giving access to financial information, emails, etc.

While I get that point of view, to me it’s similar to people 25 years ago having fear of putting their credit card on the internet. Fast forward to today, and it is commonplace to put your credit card details into a web browser and then two days later a package shows up.

Furthermore, not only does Google have access to all of our emails, Amazon has our credit card information and knows where we live, TurboTax has all of our tax information, Microsoft has our folders and spreadsheets, the list goes on... I don’t see a fundamental difference here.

And then you will get people that say, well, if something is free, then that means you are the product!

I broadly agree, but there’s an important nuance. For example, Instagram has over 1 billion users. On average, 95% of those users do nothing else but scroll and consume content. The other 5% are creators or augement their businesses making money by using that tool. So, to me, as long as you use a tool productively, you just might offset the cost you pay by theoretically being a product.

Finally, I think the economy is going to change pretty significantly in my opinion. For decades, if not longer, companies have been implementing precise psycological methods to convince consumers to buy things, often that they do not need. This might just change the name of that game. Because now they are going to have to go through your personal agent first.

I think Jimmy is up to the task.

PS, for those interested, here is the redacted family financial check-in document.

_{Prompt you could consider using: Muse, you are my family CFO. I am giving you read access to my bank accounts, credit cards, and investment accounts through Plaid. Here is how we will do the monthly money check-in: Pull last month's transactions and current balances for every connected account, plus anything I owe. Categorize every transaction into simple buckets: housing, groceries, dining out, transport, kids, shopping, travel, subscriptions, other. Build the report in two parts. Part one is a single page in plain language my partner and I can read in five minutes: what we spent, what came in, whether we are on track, and one thing to watch next month. Part two is the detail: full spending by category, every investment position, our net worth, and progress toward our long term goal. Help me set a monthly spending target. Every month after that, show me actual versus target and my average so far this year. Pick the one or two spending categories that moved the most and explain why in plain words. One time thing or new habit? Include a simple ten year projection. Grow the investments at a rate we decide on, subtract yearly spending. Tell me what is truly available if we needed cash, and flag what I should not touch except in an emergency, like retirement accounts or long term holdings. Just clear numbers and what changed. Start by confirming my accounts are connected, then ask me clarifying questions to get started building the first draft. The goal is to have this automatically done every month end.}

Cool new feature on Wealthsimple is the Portfolio Pulse where you can see other’s people portfolios, including the largest.

Hats off to CalmDodo17 with $48,000,000 and FiscalPolarBear39 with $29,000,000.

Even super rich people DIY and use predominantly low cost ETFs.

That is the whole idea I keep talking about, and it is exactly what I teach in the Simply Investing Masterclass: build your own low cost ETF portfolio and keep the advisor fees for yourself. $197 CAD, lifetime access, full refund guarantee:

“Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

—Douglas Adams

How are you using AI?