The card audit

Your chat reads your card statements and sorts every charge into Living and Freedom, the way the book defines them. You keep the savings it finds. Ascenza takes the result back and shows what it does to your Freedom date.

Get your statements

The prompt works on the files your card issuer already gives you. Do this once for each card you use.

1. Sign in to the card's website. The phone app usually cannot save a file.
2. Open the page called Statements or Activity.
3. Set the date range to the last 12 months. A full year catches the bills that only come once.
4. Download the activity as a CSV file. A PDF of each statement works too, it is just more files.
5. Attach every file to one chat in ChatGPT or Claude, then paste the prompt below.

The prompt

Information you paste into ChatGPT or Claude is invisible to Ascenza. Ascenza will keep only information you bring back and confirm here.

I am working through the book Everest and its app, Ascenza. Audit my card spending for me.

Attached are my card statements or activity exports for the last 12 months. Use every file.

Rules.
1. Ignore card payments, transfers between my own accounts, and refunds that cancel a charge.
2. Count only full months. Say which months you used.
3. Sort every charge into one of these, using the book's definitions.
   Living is the fixed costs my life and job cannot run without. Housing, utilities, groceries, transport, insurance, minimum debt payments, phone, internet.
   Freedom is the spending-now half of my Freedom bucket, everything I chose to spend on now. Restaurants, travel, subscriptions I enjoy, hobbies, gifts, shopping.
   Not spending is investments, savings transfers, extra debt payments, taxes, business costs.
   A gym I do not use is Freedom, not Living. A subscription that feels automatic is still Freedom unless my job or home needs it.
4. A cost that repeats every few years (a car, a roof, a big trip) goes in as a monthly average, not as a one-off.
5. List my fixed monthly bills by name with the amount.
6. Compare the last three full months to the three before. Name up to three categories that rose, with the monthly amount.
7. List bills I could call about or cancel, each with what I would save in a year. Insurance, internet, phone, memberships, duplicate subscriptions, unused services.

Write the audit in plain English. Then finish with a block that starts with the line ASCENZA RETURN and has only the lines I list, one per line, nothing else after it.

ASCENZA RETURN
baseline: [total monthly spending, Living plus Freedom, whole dollars]
living: [monthly Living total]
freedom: [monthly Freedom total]
line: [name] | [monthly amount] | [living or freedom]
creep: [category] | [+monthly amount]
negotiate: [bill] | [yearly saving]
months: [first month] to [last month]

Give me up to 20 line rows, one per bill or category you want kept as a budget line, up to three creep rows and up to ten negotiate rows.

What comes back

The chat writes the audit in plain English, then ends with a short block that starts with the line ASCENZA RETURN. The block holds your monthly baseline, your Living and Freedom totals, the lines it sorted, what rose, and the bills worth a call.

In the Ascenza app, open the Money screen and choose Run the card audit. Paste the block there. The app shows you each line and you confirm the ones you want kept, one tap each. A line you skip is never saved. The lines you confirm go into your Living or Freedom bucket, and your Freedom date moves with them.

Run it every quarter

Spending drifts, and most of it drifts upward. Run the audit again every three months with the newest statements and paste the new block into the app. The Money screen keeps the date of your last audit and says when the next one is due.

The audit is arithmetic over your own statements. The method decides what to do about it.

Last updated October 27, 2026