How to Save Money Now with ChatGPT Finances (6 Real Use Cases) | Ethan Bloch

Ethan Bloch (0:00)

ChatGPT can just pay for itself. I have one that will run monthly, which is checking all my subscriptions. Have any changed in price recently? Are there any you think I don't need anymore based on what you know about me? And that will just run each month and ping me. Help me figure out the best way to optimize taxes based on my current situation. I'm considering buying a house, here's how much, building an interactive site to help me think through it. When I'm making certain big financial decisions now, there's nothing I will make a decision about before I talk it through with chat. I want to show you also what that looks like.

Peter Yang (0:31)

Hey, everyone, my guest today is Ethan, the product lead for ChatGPT Finance. Really excited to get Ethan to show us how to use the product to save money, and hopefully grow a portfolio. So welcome, Ethan.

Ethan Bloch (0:41)

What's up, Peter? Thanks for having me. Really happy to be here.

Peter Yang (0:44)

Dude, you spend most of your career on this financial problem, right? On solving how many people with their personal finances and everything. So maybe before we get to the product, can you talk about your background and what you think AI unlocks for personal finance?

Ethan Bloch (0:56)

Yeah, for sure, for sure. So, you know, for whatever reason, I have been obsessed with finance for a really long time. Actually, my first love was a computer at like six. And then my second love was finance for whatever reason. By, you know, 10, you know, I had had a credit card in my mom's name. I was balancing a checkbook. I had a bank account. And when I turned 13, I started day trading my bar mitzo money. My parents, for some reason, thought that was OK.

It just sort of kept pulling me, you know. And so it's just been a common theme. Again, when I was 13, this is sort of to set the time, 1998 So it's sort of the bull market of the internet bubble. I felt like a hero. And then by 2001, I sort of had my entire net worth wiped out. And so by the age of 15, I had experienced so many people, you know, wait till later or maybe never experience. And again, it's always just a passion that, you know, eventually led me to where I am now.

But I think most relevant to what I work on today, way back in 2012, I actually started a company called Digit that was an AI financial chatbot that helped consumers save money. It was text message based and you would talk to it. And I really thought the technology was good enough to build an AI for everyone to help manage their money. We ended up helping, you know, millions of Americans save billions of dollars of Digit products. It was a 10-year journey, but a lot of what we wanted to do just wasn't possible. The tech wasn't good enough. People would talk to Digit and it'll tell them, I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't do that. And so I thought that was that and Digit I'm getting acquired in 2021

And I thought that dream sort of died more or less. But as we all know, in 2022, ChatGPT came out.

And for me, it was another sort of a howve.

Maybe what we wanted to do at Digit would now be possible. I really didn't want to start another company. I just done a 10-year journey and I didn't really have to work. And so I'm like, what am I going to do with my life? And I'm starting another company, focusing on what's now possible with LLMs and financial data, with my co-founder Roushub. We started that for really a year or so, got an idea for a product, started building that, fast forward, OpenAI ended up acquiring us earlier this year in April of 2026 And so now I'm here within ChatGPT bringing forth all this passionate knowledge for building this AI for consumers that I've been thinking about for so long.

Peter Yang (3:25)

Got it. Okay. Why don't you show us the product, man? I think a lot of people still haven't tried ChatGPT Finances.

Ethan Bloch (3:29)

Yeah, sounds great.

Peter Yang (3:30)

So show us how to get to it.

Ethan Bloch (3:32)

So I'm going to walk through a few different modes and things you can do. I think the first mode that's probably the easiest to get started with is I want to show you how anyone can sort of watch ChatGPT pay for itself. And what I mean by that is today, our finances product is included in a plus and pro subscription, which costs $20 a month. We've been working to make sure ChatGPT can just pay for itself. So if you pay $20 a month, how do you have it save you or find $20 a month that you otherwise didn't know you could do? So let me start there and then we'll get progressively more complex and more complex.