What it does
Actual Budget runs locally and holds the ledger. A set of cron jobs read it on three cadences: daily for anything that needs a quick nudge, weekly for pattern spotting, and monthly for the bigger picture. The advisor sends its check-ins over Telegram, calling out new or creeping subscriptions and flagging spending that drifts from what's normal.
Why it exists
Budgeting tools are good at storing transactions and bad at making anyone look at them. Pushing a short, specific message on a schedule turns the ledger into something that actually gets read.
A detail worth calling out
The advisor doesn't work off hardcoded spending targets. It learns its own baseline from historical spending and measures drift against that, so it adapts as habits change instead of nagging against numbers set once and forgotten.