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AI Help with Finding Monthly Costs

Step 7 of the SmartJudge financial picture asks for your monthly income needs - your regular bills and living costs, both now and once you are living separately. It can be overwhelming to try and find your current monthly costs for so many bills. The good news is that you can use AI to help you find the answers.

  1. Download and clean bank transactions
  2. Upload to an AI assistant
  3. Review and verify

1: Download and clean your bank transactions

Many couples have a primary bank account used for household bills. If you log into your online banking, you can download a spreadsheet (often called a CSV file) of your transactions over the last 12 months. Using the most recent year ensures your figures are up-to-date.

Important privacy step: before using AI, open the downloaded spreadsheet and delete the columns containing your Account Number, Sort Code, and Name. The AI only needs the dates, transaction descriptions, and amounts.

2: Upload to an AI assistant

You can upload this sanitised spreadsheet to a trusted Large Language Model (LLM) like Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT.

  • Create a new chat and look for the attachment icon (often a + symbol) next to the text box.
  • Upload your spreadsheet and copy and paste the exact prompt below into the chat:

Act as a financial data analyst. I have attached a spreadsheet of my bank transactions for the past year. Review the line items and estimate my average monthly cost for the following categories: Mortgage; Rent; Council Tax; Gas and Electricity; Water Charges; Home Insurance; TV and Streaming Subscriptions; Telephone/Broadband; Food & Housekeeping; Debt Repayments; Car Expenses; Public Transport. Please generate a downloadable spreadsheet with exactly three tabs: Tab 1 (Summary): A clean table showing the calculated average monthly cost for each of the categories listed above. Tab 2 (Itemized Breakdown): A detailed list showing exactly which transactions you assigned to each category, so I can verify your work. Tab 3 (Uncategorized): Any transaction that does not clearly fit into the categories above. Do not guess - if you are unsure, place it here.

3: Review and verify your results

AI is a helpful assistant, but it isn't perfect. It is essential that you review the output before adding it to your form.

  • Check the categorisation - look at Tab 2 to ensure the AI didn't mistakenly put your weekly grocery shop into “Car Expenses”, and check Tab 3 to see if any major bills were missed.
  • Consider other accounts - a single bank account might not cover everything. You may need to repeat this process for credit cards or other joint accounts, or manually add missing expenses.
  • What if you don't have the data? If you don't have access to an ex-partner's account for certain bills, that is okay. Provide your best honest estimate. You can even use AI to help establish a baseline (e.g., “What is the average monthly gas and electricity bill for a 3-bedroom house in [Location]?”).

Your data is private

SmartJudge will never see the spreadsheets you download from your bank, nor will we see the conversations you have with your chosen AI. SmartJudge only securely processes the final numbers you choose to enter into our forms.

SmartJudge turns your financial picture into a free assessment of how a judge in England and Wales might divide your assets.

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