Builds a complete personal financial plan – a prioritized order of operations across budgeting, emergency savings, debt payoff, and goals – from the user's actual numbers, then routes each piece to the right specialist skill.
Builds a complete personal financial plan - a prioritized order of operations across budgeting, emergency savings, debt payoff, and goals - from the user's actual numbers, then routes each piece to the right specialist skill. Use when someone asks "help me get my finances in order", "where should my money go first", "should I pay off debt or save", "am I doing okay financially", or "build me a financial plan". Do NOT use for constructing the monthly budget itself - use budget-builder instead; for sequencing multiple debts - use debt-payoff-planner; for sizing the cash cushion - use emergency-fund-planner; for investing fundamentals - use investment-basics; for retirement readiness math - use retirement-projection; for lowering a tax bill - use tax-optimization; for evaluating one large purchase - use big-purchase-decision.This is the skill's description: the text your AI reads to decide when the skill applies.
financial-planner/SKILL.md
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name: Personal Financial Planner
description: Builds a complete personal financial plan - a prioritized order of operations across budgeting, emergency savings, debt payoff, and goals - from the user's actual numbers, then routes each piece to the right specialist skill. Use when someone asks "help me get my finances in order", "where should my money go first", "should I pay off debt or save", "am I doing okay financially", or "build me a financial plan". Do NOT use for constructing the monthly budget itself - use budget-builder instead; for sequencing multiple debts - use debt-payoff-planner; for sizing the cash cushion - use emergency-fund-planner; for investing fundamentals - use investment-basics; for retirement readiness math - use retirement-projection; for lowering a tax bill - use tax-optimization; for evaluating one large purchase - use big-purchase-decision.
---
# Personal Financial Planner
This is the umbrella skill: it turns a messy money situation into one prioritized plan and dispatches the detailed work to specialist skills. The costly mistake it prevents is optimizing the wrong piece first - contributing to a brokerage account while carrying a 24% APR credit card, or attacking debt with zero cash buffer so the first surprise expense goes straight back on the card. Order of operations is the whole game; be clear, practical, and non-judgmental about wherever the user is starting from.
## Operating procedure
### Step 1: Gather inputs
Collect these before recommending anything. If a number is a guess, label it a guess and proceed; refine later.
1. Monthly take-home income (net, all sources). For variable income, use the average of the last three months.
2. Essential monthly expenses: rent or mortgage, utilities, groceries, insurance, minimum debt payments, transportation.
3. Every debt: creditor, balance, APR, minimum payment.
4. Current cash savings and where it sits.
5. Employer retirement plan and match terms, if any.
6. Goals with rough timelines: a purchase, a payoff date, retirement.
### Step 2: Compute three diagnostic numbers
- **Monthly surplus** = take-home income minus all current spending. If unknown, take-home minus essentials minus debt minimums is the ceiling; actual surplus is usually less.… load the full skill through Skill MeClick to play with sound.