🤖 AI-assisted draft — February 20, 2026
Most people know they should get their finances in order. Most don't know where to start. Budget trackers track spending but give no guidance. Financial services manage portfolios for high fees. The practical middle ground doesn't exist as software.
So I built one as a set of text files.
Open Plan is a folder of markdown files. Copy it into any AI chat (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or a local model) and say "help me with my finances." The AI reads a router file, asks intake questions, picks the right module, and walks you through it.
No app. No account. No subscription. No server.
Open Plan has three layers.
1. A router the AI reads at the start of every session. It asks intake questions, follows a decision tree to pick the next module, sets tone and privacy rules, and tracks state in a local JSON file.
2. Eighteen modules across five phases:
3. A data ladder that unlocks deeper analysis as you share more. Level 0 is conversation only. Level 2 adds a credit card CSV. Level 3 adds a pay stub. Each level produces useful output. Stop whenever you want.
Fix the present before planning the future. Open Plan starts with leaks you can fix now: a missed 401(k) match, a withholding gap. These often matter more than asset allocation tweaks.
Budget is an output, not an input. Set goals. Compute required savings. The spending ceiling falls out of the math. The budget is what's left.
Each dollar decides for itself. Many decisions reduce to simple inequalities. If your marginal tax rate now is higher than your effective rate in retirement, pre-tax usually wins. Each dollar makes the optimal choice independently.
Start anywhere, go deeper. There's no required sequence. The router picks the highest-impact module for your situation.
Open Plan works with no data at all. The quick-start module asks for rough estimates: income, spending, age, 401(k) match status. It produces a first-pass savings waterfall from conversation alone.
This lowers the activation energy. You get actionable insight in minutes with zero files. Then it suggests exactly which file to grab next if you want to go deeper.
Built with a sub-agent tree. Twenty-two AI agents across three providers wrote all 18 modules in parallel. Three independent models reviewed the output. A reconciliation agent applied consensus fixes. Blueprint to verified v1: about 8 minutes.
The modules are plain markdown with YAML frontmatter declaring prerequisites, data level, outputs, and completion signals. The router manages flow. No code, no database, no API. The AI is the runtime.
If you use a cloud AI (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini), your financial data is transmitted to that provider's servers. The router makes this explicit. Check your provider's privacy policy.
If you want total privacy, run Open Plan with a local model. The modules are just text. Any instruction-following model on your own hardware works. A 70B parameter model on a Mac with 64GB of RAM handles it fine.
Either way, no third-party app or financial company sees your data. Your files live in your folder. Delete the folder and the data is gone.
Open Plan is not financial, tax, legal, or investment advice. It is an educational toolkit and structured workflow for thinking through your money. Outputs depend on your inputs and the quality of the AI you use. When a question requires a professional (tax filing, estate planning, insurance), the system says so. Consult a qualified professional for personalized guidance. No guarantees of accuracy or completeness.
It is also not a product. There is no company behind it, no monetization plan, no premium tier. It is an open-source experiment.
Repo: github.com/abclark/open-plan
Clone it. Open the folder in your AI of choice. Start with: "help me with my finances."