Before you paste anything

6 min read·Lesson 1 of See your money

By the end of this lesson your privacy settings will be set for money work, and you will have one real statement page redacted and safe to upload. Nothing gets pasted into Claude until this is done.

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.

On a phone: open the statement, use the markup tool, draw a solid block over each item above. Then save it as a new file, close it, and open the new file again. That last step is the one people skip and the one that matters, because some apps keep a drawn mark as a layer floating over the page rather than part of it. If the blocks are exactly where you drew them, you are fine. If not, screenshot the redacted page and upload the screenshot instead.

One statement line with the card number and IBAN blacked out and the date, description and amount left readable — Keep the date, what it was, and the amount. Everything else on the line is someone else's business, including Claude's.

Prove it with one line

Do not upload the whole document to test this. Redact one page, then copy one redacted line into an Incognito chat.

I am about to work through a bank statement with you. First, a privacy check.
 
Below is ONE line copied from a statement I have already redacted. Tell me only:
 
1. Anything still in this line that could identify a person or an account: full or partial account number, card number, IBAN, national ID, tax number, phone number, address, or a full personal name.
2. For each one, quote the exact characters you mean.
3. If nothing identifying remains, say "nothing identifying remains" and stop.
 
Rules: report only what is actually in the text below. Do not guess what the hidden characters might be and do not try to reconstruct anything I have blacked out. Do not comment on the spending. Reply in the language I wrote this in.
 
LINE:
[paste one redacted line here]

You should see

Either a short list quoting the exact characters that are still identifying, or the sentence "nothing identifying remains". Anything longer, especially a remark about what you bought, means the prompt was not followed. Resend it.

Check it

You are in an Incognito chat, not your normal history
You have opened Settings > Privacy and know which way "Help Improve our AI models" is set
On your redacted page, no full account number, card number, IBAN, national ID or address survives
Dates, amounts and descriptions are all still readable
You have not typed a CVV, PIN, one time passcode or password anywhere

If you see

The common failure is a redaction that is not really there: you draw a black box, save the file, and the mark moves or disappears, because the app stored it as an annotation rather than as part of the page. The test never changes: save, close, reopen the saved copy. If the block is not exactly where you drew it, screenshot the redacted view and use the image instead. If Claude ever quotes back digits you thought you had covered, delete that chat and redo the page.

What you just learned

Incognito is the right room for statement work: not saved to history, never used for model improvement.
Training is opt in, retention is thirty days by default and up to five years if you opted in, and switching it off is not retroactive.
Black out account and card numbers (last four is enough), IBAN, national ID and address; keep dates, amounts and descriptions; never type a CVV, PIN, one time passcode or password.
Save, close and reopen a redacted file before you trust the black box.

Next: the reason most people never get past step one, a PDF their bank locked.

practice

Open Claude Cowork on your own computer and try this on real files. Each module ends with a checkpoint where you submit what you made.

Open in Claude

Unlock the statement