Bevor du irgendwas einfügst

A bank statement is the most revealing document most people own: where you live, where you shop, who you send money to, when you get paid and how much is left over. That earns two minutes of setup before anything gets uploaded.

The scope of this course, stated once and meant: it teaches you to organise money you already have. It is educational, and it is not financial, investment, tax or legal advice. It never tells you what to buy, hold, sell or invest in, and never recommends a bank, a product or a rate.

The two minute setup

Do these on the free account you already have, before you open a statement.

1. Turn on Incognito for statement work. An Incognito chat is not saved to your chat history and is never used for model improvement. Open a new chat, switch it to Incognito, and treat that as the room you do money in. One month, one chat.

2. Look at Settings > Privacy. The setting called "Help Improve our AI models" is opt in, so it is off unless you switched it on. While it is on, retention runs up to five years instead of the default thirty days, and switching it off is not retroactive: it does not withdraw conversations already used. Make that choice deliberately.

3. Memory is on by default on the free plan. Claude carries things forward between chats, useful when it remembers you are self employed and worth thinking about when the subject is money. Anthropic states that Claude does not save financial account numbers. Everything else you type is ordinary text.

What to black out

One rule: remove what identifies the account, keep what describes the money.

Black out full account and card numbers (leave at most the last four digits, enough to tell two accounts apart), IBAN or whatever your country's full transfer identifier is called, national ID and tax numbers, and your home address including the one printed in the header.

Never type these anywhere, redacted or not: CVV, PIN, one time passcodes, passwords. No lesson here needs one, and nothing legitimate asks for one in a chat window.

Keep, because the exercise depends on them: dates, amounts, currency, description text and the running balance. Black out the amounts and there is nothing left to categorise. Other people's names are a judgement call: "transfer to mother" and a full name beside an account number are not the same risk.