Cruising along the Norwegian coast in winter is magical. Northern Lights glowing in the sky each night, and each morning a new town or city sparkling in the icy half light, beckoning you to follow the experienced tour guide to explore the sights.  And always the siren voice saying “Yes it is beautiful with the ice on the mountains and snow on the streets, but come back when there is sun until midnight, the flowers are blooming and our meadows glow green instead of white” Who could resist that song?

But reality gets in the way. Yes, we are retired, and we have a good super fund, which means we have a good lifestyle, but will it stretch to yet another cruise along the Norwegian coast, and perhaps a bike tour along the Loire Valley in France? I settled down shortly after we returned from our cruise to find out.

Our bank accounts gave me some information, and most banks now sort what you spend into broad categories, which helped me a bit. We manage our own super fund, so we have some shares and other investments, which gave me some more insights. But although the information I needed was there, it wasn’t organised enough to make plans.

I tried to find a simple accounting package just for domestic accounts: no BAS or invoices, or preparing wages and salaries, but there was nothing very suitable.  I have some computer skills, so I thought I’d build a simple spreadsheet to organise the information I had. It helped a bit, but not enough to get the suitcases out.

Some of my children work in IT, so I told them what I wanted to do. The answer they gave was try AI. So I did.

My previous experience with AI were some scary media stories about how it was going to take over the world, and some helpful information about the weather and arthritis, so I thought why not give it a go with this project?

I asked ChatGPT to help me build a simple spreadsheet to get some insights into my finances. I said I didn’t need to do any business stuff, just organise my domestic finances. The answer came back why not try using Python instead.  I like pythons, they keep the mice down, but they seem a strange choice to organise my finances. My helpful AI person told me that Python was a  computer language used to build financial packages. I’d dabbled in computer programming, but not Python, so I thought why not, and I’d like to learn how to use the language. So down the snake hole I went.

And what a marvellous wonderland I discovered! Not only building a very useful domestic financial system, but digressions into writing a convincing story about  the sample family I use to test the system I’m developing, the psychology of colour, and its use in building apps, developing a philosophy behind the app, so that it feels consistent, and useful, and digressions into what the AI person knows about me, and what it knows about itself – the answer was not much more than what I tell it as we interact, and some surprisingly insightful ideas about itself and the upcoming role of AI in our world.

So let’s go on an adventure together!