AI advises 40-year-old with €70,000 and €800 a month

AI therapy: €70,000, €800 a month and living with mum at 40

A 40-year-old man with €70,000 in savings, an €800 monthly salary and a second-hand BMW asks a computer program what to do with his life. The answer comes without anaesthesia: "you don't have a salary, you have an allowance". There is no consultation, no appointment, no fifty minutes on the couch. There is a written, public conversation, answered by an artificial intelligence that its users call, half seriously half jokingly, their psychologist and financial adviser.

The case arises in a Spanish digital community. The mechanics never change: someone lays out their situation — home, car, payslip, loneliness — and the chatbot replies with numbers, no pleasantries and a dose of reality that few friends dare to serve. The result is a kind of automated financial therapy that divides readers between those who applaud the frankness and those who see it as textbook cruelty.

An €800 salary that doesn't pay for the home

The protagonist makes it clear from the start: his €800 a month is not a failure, it's a choice. He asked for reduced hours and is "very comfortable" with that schedule. His mother, retired, receives a good pension, the house is paid off and she doesn't ask him for a single euro for the household. The car, a second-hand BMW, is his indulgence and he is not willing to sell it. "I really like it," he concludes.

The digital adviser's response admits no nuances. With that income and that context, it argues, there is no salary but an **allowance**: housing, food and utilities are covered by a third party. The real cost of living, it insists, is subsidised by the mother's pension. And it brings to light the small print that had not been put on the table: BMW insurance — about **€600** a year —, the ITV and maintenance — another **€400** — and petrol. The **€100** in fixed expenses he declares (gym, parking and fuel) are labelled a fantasy.

The tug-of-war repeats in every reply: he defends a comfortable present, the program returns a bill he doesn't see because he doesn't pay it. The whole conversation rests on that mismatch.

How long do €70,000 spread over 20 years last?

Then comes the question that gives the conversation its title: how much of the €70,000 can be spent so that it lasts until he is 60. The arithmetic is relentless. Spreading the capital over twenty years leaves **€3,500** a year, that is, **€291.66 a month**. A calculation that also ignores inflation: at 2% a year, those €291 today would buy considerably less in two decades.

The chatbot sums it up bluntly. The €70,000 is not a fund to spend, it is a cushion: "the cushion that separates you from the street if something happens to your mother". Putting it into any risky product, it rules, would be lunacy. The reaction is immediate: if he sells the car or goes travelling for half a year, he'll blow half of it. He wanted to spend "sensibly", not end up like Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas.

At 40, with mum: "prolonged adolescence"

The issue stops being accounting and becomes existential. The user admits that, at almost 40, he feels like a teenager, and adds: "But that's cool". He has no partner or children, leaves work and does whatever he wants, and housing costs him nothing. The diagnosis is that of a **prolonged adolescence**, with a warning about the curve: at 20 it's normal, at 30 it starts to grate and at 50, without changes, it's a tragedy.

The scenario he himself proposes — a mother who lives to 100 and a permanent job for life — doesn't save the equation either. Then a nuance emerges that runs through much of the exchange: if he is an only child, one day he will inherit the house. It is the hope many keep, and also the one the program deactivates: the model works as long as the family network and the health of the retired woman who sustains it hold up.

The manual for not being a burden in someone else's home

When the question drifts towards living together, the answer becomes a list of domestic survival rules. Contribute something tangible even if symbolic — **€100** a month for food, water and electricity — to avoid seeming a burden. Keep the room and bathroom spotless. Leave no trace of your own passage. In a word: be a tenant with a discount, not a kept son.

None of this solves the underlying problem, and the program itself admits it. The rules serve to keep the living situation from exploding, not to build a life project of one's own. It is the difference between surviving comfortably and having a plan.

From assets to dating: the sentimental consultation

The service does not distinguish between a mortgage and a date. The same tool that calculates how long €70,000 lasts receives requests such as that of a forty-something who wants to leave what he calls nuncatrincnunca, or that of another who asks how to approach his neighbour. The answers maintain the tone: the problem is not technique but mindset and, above all, economics. At 40, with a low salary and living with his mother, one does not project the "life success" that, it argues, is what attracts.

Some reply that this reading mixes self-esteem with payslip and turns emotional life into a spreadsheet. The program does not give in: it recalls that material conditions matter a great deal, and that young people who continue living with their parents do not do so for comfort but because of two decades of housing prices and wages that do not rise.