How to Create an Effortless, Personalized Budget With Our New AI Budget Builder

Creating a budget is a crucial part of tracking your spending and creating sustainable habits. But we’ve heard over and over — from members, from financial professionals, from chatter on social media — that setting and sticking to a realistic budget is much harder, which can be discouraging. Origin built a tool to solve that problem: our AI budget builder. This new tool analyzes your past spending to instantly create a personalized, realistic budget. You’ll get clear, data-backed recommendations that are fully adjustable and customizable to your lifestyle and goals. Budgeting isn’t overwhelming when you don’t have to start from scratch.

Origin now offers a suite of completely customizable budgeting tools designed to fit any budgeting preferences. So if you want to examine your spending down transaction by transaction, choose your own category limits, and pick your own overall monthly budget maximum, Origin’s platform will support you. And if you want to implement a mix of AI-driven, data-backed recommendations and your own observations, you can do that too. 

Now let’s walk through how you can build your budget with an assist from AI.

Step 1

First, make sure all of your financial accounts are connected. (Need a guide for that? We've got you.) This part is key; in order to analyze your spending to inform your budget, our tech needs access to the data. 

Then, find our AI budget builder button at the top right of your spending tab.

Step 2

Here’s where the magic happens. 

Our AI budget builder analyzes the last six months of your cash flow — that is, how you spent in every single category and where your income sources are coming from — to give you a personalized diagnosis. When this analysis is complete, you’ll get a summary of your average monthly income, savings, and spending, along with unique insights and opportunities based on your cash flow trends. 

The TLDR? Each budget insight you get is completely personalized and based on your patterns.

Step 3

Our AI budget builder then suggests a new monthly budget for you, based on its analysis. This proposal is automatically compared to your past six months of spending, so you can understand how it stacks up to your recent habits and see how realistic it is. 

Step 4

We know we won’t always exactly land on the number you’re targeting or that you want to try, so the next step is an opportunity to adjust the suggested monthly budget. 

As you make that number bigger or smaller, we automatically provide insights regarding how feasible or risky your number is in comparison to your spending habits.  You’ll see how this affects your monthly savings as you use the slider, so you can pick an amount that works well with your current goals.  

Once you’ve set your monthly budget spending limit, you can stop there; it doesn’t matter what categories you’re spending in, as long as the total doesn’t surpass your monthly goal. But Origin goes further …  

Step 5

At this point, our AI runs its analysis again, based on the monthly figure you’ve landed on, and generates category-level limits tailored to your spending behavior. Once again, you’re in the driver’s seat: From these proposals, you can choose the categories and accompanying totals that feel like they make the most sense to you. Each category you don’t select (that is, specific types of spending) is put in an “everything else” bucket and still tracked, to help you ensure you don’t max out your budget. 

And just like that … you’ve created a monthly budget! 

Now you can add more categories; create groups of them, which give you a broader view; and adjust amounts. And if you realize you need to tweak your budget for whatever reason, you can re-run the AI analysis at any time. 

This new tool makes it effortless to create a personalized budget that’s realistic for your life and goals. 

Ready to get started?

Build your budget on Origin today.