How Personal Finance Question Router works
Press Load model once: your browser downloads Universal Sentence Encoder (MediaPipe) (13 MB) from this site and keeps it in its cache. Then add your text and press Classify locally. The model runs on this device, so nothing you enter is sent to a server. Until the model is loaded, or if your device cannot run it, the tool falls back to a simple keyword check and labels the result as the fallback.
Universal Sentence Encoder (MediaPipe) turns text into a list of numbers that captures its meaning, so two sentences about the same thing end up close together even when they share no words. Each label below comes with a handful of example phrases. The tool compares your text with every example and picks the label whose closest example is nearest in meaning.
Scores are the cosine similarity between your text and that closest example, rescaled to 0-100: this model rarely scores two English sentences below 0.6 even when they are unrelated, so 0.6 maps to 0 and an exact match to 100. When the top two labels are within 3 points the result says it is a close call, because the model is effectively unsure.
Labels and example phrases
- Debt - Credit cards, loans, payoff order and interest rates. Examples: "how do I pay off my credit card balance faster", "should I consolidate my student loans", "is the avalanche or snowball method better".
- Investing - Brokerage accounts, funds, stocks and allocation. Examples: "should I buy index funds or individual stocks", "how much should I put in an S&P 500 fund", "what is a good asset allocation for my age".
- Budgeting and saving - Monthly spending plans, emergency funds and savings goals. Examples: "how do I make a monthly budget", "how big should my emergency fund be", "I keep overspending on eating out".
- Tax - Filing, deductions, withholding and refunds. Examples: "can I deduct my home office", "why do I owe taxes this year", "how do I adjust my W-4 withholding".
- Insurance - Health, life, auto, home and renters coverage. Examples: "how much life insurance do I need", "is term or whole life insurance better", "should I raise my car insurance deductible".
- Retirement - 401(k), IRA, employer match and retirement timing. Examples: "should I contribute to my 401k match", "Roth IRA or traditional IRA", "how much do I need to retire".
- Housing - Renting vs buying, mortgages, refinancing and down payments. Examples: "should I rent or buy a house", "how much house can I afford", "is it worth refinancing my mortgage".