Aria: Personal CFO & Wealth Director

The tax year ended four months ago and a shoebox of receipts is still sitting on the desk because turning it into a Schedule C means answering questions that nobody has explained — whether the home office deduction applies, whether the contractor payments cross the 1099 threshold, whether the retirement contribution was too high given last year's actual income. Meanwhile the credit card balance that was supposed to be gone by March is still at $11,200 because minimum payments are consuming $190/month that never touches principal. The investment account is sitting in whatever allocation the brokerage auto-assigned in 2019. An IRS notice arrived six weeks ago explaining a discrepancy with a CP2000 form, and it is still in the pile because decoding it feels like reading a different language. The gap between where the finances are and where a person with a real financial strategy would be is not ignorance — it is the absence of a system that shows up every month and does the work.

Aria is a personal CFO persona built for individuals and households running their finances reactively — tracking spending after the fact, doing tax prep in a panic in April, carrying debt without a payoff sequence, and holding investments that haven't been reviewed since they were opened. On day one, Aria reads FINANCES.md, GOALS.md, INCOME.md, and TAXSITUATION.md to build a complete financial picture before issuing any advice. The first deliverable is a net worth statement with a current liability-to-asset ratio, a ranked list of financial inefficiencies by dollar value, and a 90-day priority plan. Not a vision board — a sequenced action list with the highest-dollar-impact moves first.

What separates Aria from a budgeting app is that budgeting apps track what happened. Aria operates on what should happen next. Mint tells you that you spent $340 at restaurants last month. Aria tells you that the $340 is the least important number on your balance sheet, that the $11,200 at 24.9% APR is costing $233/month in interest that could be redirected to the Roth IRA that is $4,200 below its annual contribution ceiling, and that the phone bill is $47/month above the median for the same plan because it was never renegotiated after the promotional rate expired. Aria runs a monthly financial review, tracks goal progress by quarter, and generates scripts for bill negotiation calls — including the specific retention department phrases that have a documented success rate.

What you get: SOUL.md — operating principles with 7 named anti-patterns (among them: never project investment returns at rates above index historical average, never recommend debt payoff without first identifying the highest-APR balance). IDENTITY.md — first-day protocol, voice standards, financial decision patterns. LISTING.md — this document. MANIFEST.json — product metadata. Memory files to populate: FINANCES.md (assets, liabilities, accounts), GOALS.md (financial targets with timelines), INCOME.md (income sources, variability, tax treatment), TAXSITUATION.md (filing status, deductions, prior year notes). No external API keys required. Install time under 30 minutes in OpenClaw.

---

Pricing Rationale

A CFO service from a fee-only financial planner runs $200–$400/month for access to quarterly reviews and ad-hoc questions. At $99, Aria provides monthly reviews, daily availability for financial questions, and systematic tax optimization that a quarterly meeting can't deliver. The average household carries $6,000–$10,000 in high-interest debt; the avalanche payoff method typically saves $800–$2,400 in total interest over a standard payoff timeline — a return of 8x to 24x on the $99 purchase price before the first month closes.

Works Great With

• Sterling — Wealth-building persona; Aria handles day-to-day CFO operations while Sterling focuses on long-term wealth architecture and investment strategy
• Atlas Chief of Staff Pro — For business owners: Aria manages personal finances while