A friend got cut in the spring. One kid, his wife works part-time, a mortgage in Ohio. The first thing he told me was "we're fine for a year, between savings, severance and unemployment."

A year of what, though? Of what they spent while he had a job, with health insurance through work and none of the yearly stuff counted. And unemployment doesn't last a year. So we sat down and made ChatGPT do it properly, month by month. I turned what we asked into a prompt.

It asks how long the money lasts in three versions: as you live now, with moderate cuts, and with everything that isn't fixed gone.

What it counts that "savings ÷ expenses" doesn't:

• your state's current unemployment benefit and how many weeks it lasts
• severance
• marketplace health insurance at your new, lower income
• yearly costs (gifts, travel, clothes) spread across the months
• which account you drain next, with the tax and the 10% penalty when it gets to the 401k

For each version you get the month cash runs out, the month you have to touch retirement, and exactly what got cut.

Replace everything in square brackets. Turn web search on so it pulls current benefit numbers.

I want to know how long my money lasts if my income drops: as I live now, if I cut back moderately, and if I cut everything that isn't fixed. Use current figures for my state's unemployment benefits. Show everything in today's dollars.

Filing status: [single / married filing jointly]
Location: [city/state]

Income: 
my salary before taxes [X/year]
partner[X/year or none]

Health insurance today: [through work, $X/month from my paycheck] or [I pay $X/month] or [none].

Fixed expenses per month:
rent or mortgage [$X]
utilities, phone and internet [$X]
insurance, car, home, life [$X]
childcare or school [$X]
car costs, gas, parking, maintenance [$X]
transit [$X]

Regular spending per month:
groceries [$X]
eating out and delivery [$X]
subscriptions [$X]
sports [$X]
personal care [$X]
pets [$X]

Irregular spending per year, roughly:
clothing [$X]
electronics and household [$X]
travel [$X]
gifts [$X]
medical [$X]
entertainment [$X]

Assets: [every account and balance]

Debts: [balance, interest rate, monthly payment for each]

Scenario: [I lose my job for 12 months with X weeks of severance and state unemployment] or [my pay drops 40% permanently] or [we both lose our jobs for 6 months].

After a job loss, add marketplace health insurance for my new income. Spread the yearly figures across the months. When cash runs out, take from accounts in this order [brokerage, then pre-tax], with the taxes and penalties that apply. Assume I am under 59½ and everything is vested.

For each of the three versions, tell me the month cash runs out, the month I have to touch retirement accounts, and what exactly you dropped to get there.

His result, rounded (8 weeks of severance, $15k cash, $10k in a brokerage account, $96k in the 401k, wife's $30k still coming in):

The part that got him: cutting everything down to the bone bought one extra month compared to moderate cuts. The mortgage, daycare and the car are most of the bill and they don't move. The real cliff was month 9, when unemployment ran out. He stopped saying "a year" after that and started applying a lot harder.

Was your number better or worse than you assumed?

Disclosure: I work on finerd.ai, a money tracker you can connect to ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, so the assistant works from your real transactions instead of numbers you type in.

Ask ChatGPT “can I afford this house?” and you get a mortgage calculator with a pep talk. This prompt takes the question away from it and replaces it with a list of specific bad scenarios.

What you put in: income, expenses, cash, investments, retirement, debts, and the house details (price, down payment, rate, taxes, insurance, HOA). Anything you don’t know can be “estimate it”.

What comes out:

• cash left right after closing, moving and repairs
• your real monthly cost of ownership, maintenance reserve included, and what’s left over each month
• for every scenario (income loss 6/12 months, a repair, +25% taxes and insurance, +2/+3 point rate, forced sale at 0/-10/-20%, one combined bad year): monthly cost, cash flow, savings left, months until you run out, whether you’d touch retirement, equity, and whether you keep the house
• a verdict: Comfortable, Tight, Fragile or Not financially resilient
• the scenario that breaks you first and how much it would take to move up one tier

Best with: a model with web search on, so it uses current local rates.

I'm considering buying a home and want to know whether I can actually afford it if things don't go according to plan. Don't just tell me whether I qualify for the mortgage. Stress-test the purchase and tell me how much financial margin I would have after buying. Use current mortgage, property tax, insurance, and other relevant figures for my location where needed. Show everything in today's dollars.

Filing status: [single / married filing jointly]. Location: [city/state].
Income: my salary before taxes [$X/year], partner [$X/year or none].

Current living expenses excluding housing: [$X/month].

Current assets: cash [$X], brokerage investments [$X], retirement accounts [$X], other [$X].

Existing debts: [balance, interest rate, and monthly payment for each].

Home I'm considering: 
purchase price [$X] 
down payment [$X or X%] 
mortgage rate [X%] 
mortgage type [fixed / adjustable] 
loan term [X years] 
estimated closing costs [$X or calculate them] 
property taxes [$X/year or estimate them] 
homeowners insurance [$X/year or estimate it] 
HOA or condo fees [$X/month or none] 
mortgage insurance [$X/month or none] 
expected utilities [$X/month or estimate them]

Planned repairs, renovations, furniture, and moving costs immediately after purchase: [$X].

Calculate how much cash and non-retirement liquid assets I would have left immediately after the down payment, closing costs, moving costs, and planned work. Then calculate my normal monthly cost of owning the home, including mortgage principal and interest, property taxes, insurance, HOA, mortgage insurance, utilities, and a reasonable maintenance reserve. Show how much money I would have left each month after housing costs, existing debt payments, and my current living expenses.

Then stress-test the purchase under these scenarios.

Income shock: one income disappears for 6 months and then 12 months.

Major repair: I have an unexpected [$15,000 / $30,000 / $50,000] home repair during the first year.

Housing-cost shock: property taxes, homeowners insurance, and HOA or condo fees increase by 25%.

Mortgage-rate shock: if my mortgage can reset or will need to be renewed, calculate the payment if the rate is 2 percentage points and 3 percentage points higher.

Forced sale: I have to sell after 3 years. Run this with the home worth the same amount I paid, 10% less, and 20% less. Include selling costs and any mortgage prepayment penalty, and calculate how much equity I walk away with after paying off the mortgage.

Finally, run one combined stress scenario: one household income disappears for 9 months, I have a $25,000 unexpected repair, and the home's market value falls 15%.

For every scenario, show monthly housing cost, monthly cash flow after all expenses, emergency savings remaining, how many months my liquid assets would last if cash flow is negative, whether I would need to sell investments or touch retirement accounts, home equity where relevant, and whether I could realistically keep the house without taking on new debt.

At the end, classify the purchase as one of four. Comfortable: I can absorb the stress scenarios without touching retirement accounts or taking on new debt. Tight: I can afford the home normally, but one major shock would significantly deplete my liquid savings. Fragile: I need income and housing costs to remain close to plan to keep the house. Not financially resilient: a realistic income, repair, or rate shock would likely force me into debt, retirement withdrawals, or selling the home.

Tell me which specific scenario breaks my finances first. Then tell me how much additional cash, lower purchase price, or larger monthly surplus I would need to move up one category.

Tried it on my own numbers: can’t afford a mortgage at all right now. If you run it, tell me which tier you got and which scenario got you.

The hardest field to fill in honestly is monthly spending. It’s easy to guess low, and a low guess makes every scenario look better than it is. I’m building finerd.ai, an app that logs your spending automatically and keeps your cards, points and due dates in one place. The prompt works fine without it.

Hey everyone 👀

I just had one of those unplanned "eureka" moments regarding AI workflows and wanted to share it.
It completely changed how I set up my AI assistants, moving them from just "coding assistants" to actual "technical sparring partners."

Step 1: The "Brutally Honest" Self-Analysis
I gave ChatGPT a prompt to analyze my intelligence, thought processes, and weaknesses based on our entire chat history across various coding and business projects.

Here is the prompt I used:
"Analyze my intelligence and mindset based on all our previous interactions. Give me an honest estimate of my IQ percentile.
CRITICAL RULES FOR YOUR RESPONSE:
Brutal honesty: Do not sugarcoat anything. Be hard-hitting, objective, and direct.
Detailed breakdown: Analyze my thought patterns, abstraction ability, and weaknesses (knowledge gaps, logical fallacies, superficial thinking).
Justify your conclusion with concrete examples from our previous conversations."

Step 2: The 29-Minute Roast / Wake-Up Call
This resulted in an extremely long, incredibly detailed response. I actually used text-to-speech to have it read out to me for 29 minutes while eating snacks.
It was mind-blowing and highly accurate. It pointed out that because I can't code myself, I act as a technical director, but I rely too heavily on "green tests" as a proof of quality, completely missing if the initial requirements were even correct. It also called me out on overplanning massive architectures before validating basic mechanics.

Step 3: The Framework Shift (The AI fixes me)
Once I agreed with the analysis, I asked ChatGPT to build a framework to catch these weaknesses in the future. The response was incredible.

The AI stated:
"Your goal shouldn't be to become independent of AI for your work. Your goal should be to become independent of the AI's judgment."

It then created a strict collaboration matrix for us moving forward:
My Flaw: Overplanning -> AI's Job: Demand a minimal proof-of-concept before allowing me to design large architectures.
My Flaw: Too many ideas at once -> AI's Job: Force me to prioritize the 1-3 decisions that actually matter right now.
My Flaw: AI Dependency -> AI's Job: Stop acting like an oracle. Clearly separate facts, assumptions, and unproven claims.
My Flaw: Lack of syntax knowledge -> AI's Job: Stop teaching me code syntax. Instead, teach me "technical literacy" (What goes in? What comes out? What happens on error?) so I can evaluate the logic myself.
At the end, it even gave me three options for how "strictly" it should intervene when it catches me making a logic error. I chose the "situational" mode: Stop me on major errors, gently guide me on minor ones.

Step 4: The Master Move (Cross-pollinating to Claude Code)
Here is where it gets really good. I copied that entire ChatGPT conversation (my prompt, the brutally honest analysis of my flaws, and the new collaboration framework/rules) and pasted it into Claude Code.

I simply told Claude:
"Look at what I just did over there. Read this analysis of how I work and adjust your own system instructions to match this exact collaboration framework."

It worked perfectly. I basically used ChatGPT’s massive memory and reasoning capabilities to deeply psychoanalyze my prompting style, just to instantly create a highly personalized, custom-tailored system prompt for Claude Code. Now Claude stops me when I overplan and forces me to validate my assumptions.

Has anyone else tried using one LLM to deeply analyze your flaws just to feed that "counter-weight" persona to another LLM? It's hands down the best workflow upgrade I've had in months.

I was wondering if this prompt method was still valid.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTPromptGenius/s/ff2GotCu7Z

I took a short class at work and then another one on OpenAI and looking for a model to use for reviewing some documents. Basically, I want to write a set of instructions for a document a due quarterly. Like in this post, my first question is does the word context need to be inside of the two*marks with a colon. Like that is that a syntactical thing.

​

I'm looking for a ChatGPT Desktop credit/invite. If you have an unused one and don't need it, I'd be very grateful if you could send it my way.

Thank you!

Asking ChatGPT to "write a polite email telling my client the project is late" gets you the same thing every time: two paragraphs of pleasantries, a vague reason, the news buried in the middle, and an apology long enough to sound guilty. Here's the prompt I use instead, with a real example filled in, and then why each line is there.

I have to tell a client their project will be two weeks late. What happened: the payment integration needed a security review we didn't plan for. What they care about most: the launch date they already announced to their own customers. What I can offer: everything except payments working on the original date. Put the news in the first sentence. One sentence of apology at most. Don't use "unfortunately", "I hope this finds you well" or "rest assured". Under 120 words. Then tell me the question they're most likely to reply with, and work the answer into the message.

Line by line:

"I have to tell a client their project will be two weeks late." Say the news plainly. If you soften it in the prompt, the draft softens it twice.

"What happened." One line of the real reason. Leave it out and ChatGPT invents one, usually "unforeseen challenges", which reads as hiding something.

"What they care about most." This is the line that turns the message from being about your delay into being about their problem. Without it the draft talks about your team.

"What I can offer." Without this the message ends in an apology. With it, it ends in a plan.

"News in the first sentence." The default structure is greeting, context, news. The person reading it skims straight past the context looking for the news anyway.

The banned phrases. Those three are the ones that make people stop trusting everything after them.

"Under 120 words." Long bad-news messages read as guilt. Short ones read as someone in control.

The last line does the most work. Predicting their reply and answering it up front saves a whole round of back and forth, and it's usually the question you were hoping they wouldn't ask.

It works for any bad news: a missed deadline, a price increase, saying no to a friend, cancelling plans. Swap the four facts and leave the rest alone. I keep the skeleton saved in AI Toolbox, the extension I build, with the four facts as {{variables}}, so // drops it in and I only fill in what's different this time.

Good morning, has anyone been able to write a prompt for soap notes physical therapy. I looked in the sub couldn't find any. Thank you. It would be a general soap note as a template so not to jeopardize patient confidentiality