If you’re a creative professional, your butt probably clenches up the second you see the word “finances”. I’ll be using that word a lot, but stay with me, because there may finally be a way for us creatives to make the F-word feel a little less terrifying.

Last week, I talked about how AI helped me visualise the space in my dream home and understand architecture-speak a bit better. This week, I get into how it helped me understand what it actually costs to build that dream home.

Like most middle-class folks, my wife and I will need to take on a huge loan to build our home. Since we’re buying land and then building a new house on it, we have to go with what’s called a “Composite Loan”. This type of loan is a little easier to manage, because the money is released in tranches, but it will still mean we will be paying off the debt for the next 15–20 years. Yay.

When you meet a loan officer at a bank to talk through their loan options, they will most likely open up a spreadsheet on Microsoft Excel, the nemesis of creatives everywhere. They’ll then proceed to add a lot of seemingly arbitrary numbers into that spreadsheet, which will start tiny — an “interest of 8.5%” doesn’t sound so bad — but then progressively the numbers get larger and larger until the loan rep has to manually click-and-drag the “Total” column’s width just to accommodate all the digits.

Staring at those numbers, I couldn’t help but feel that despite 20 years of making what I thought was decent money and running a small but fairly successful business, I was just as clueless as I was when I got my first real paycheque.

My first job as a creative professional was as a copywriting intern at a little agency called Brand David, where I made no money. Technically, I lost money in that job because I still had to drive to work, buy my own lunch, and pay my way. But it felt like a small sacrifice, because I got to learn from some of the sharpest creative people in advertising at the time.

Six months in, I got “promoted” to junior copywriter, which came with a salary “bump” of ₹10,000 a month. I didn’t negotiate, obviously. That’s not what we creatives are trained to do. We’re taught that because we love our job, we should just STFU and be thankful anyone would give us money at all. I’ve watched this play out across the creative industry — with interns, freelancers, writers, designers… people with two days of experience, and people with two decades.

I, too, was incredibly grateful that I’d been “promoted”! That I’d be making 10,000 bucks more than my current zero-rupee pay package, while also doing what I loved, and being around super-cool creatives…? It was as close to winning the creative profession lottery as a starry-eyed, hopeful junior copywriter could ask for. Cha-ching!

I first broke the news to my dad, who had one piece of advice that has stuck with me through the years. “No matter how much money you make, always save and invest 30% of every paycheque, and then never touch that money.”

I’d love to tell you that I followed his advice right away, but I was 23 and an idiot with the first taste of my own money. The time for saving was not now, Dad! Now was the time for living like the prince I was.

I learned quickly that 10K couldn’t get you very far, even in 2006. And in the following years, after I’d had a couple of jumps in jobs and salary, I did start to put my dad’s advice into practice. It was an embarrassingly tiny sum I’d put away every month, obviously, but it was… something.

I’m sure my dad tried explaining compound interest to me at the time — but I’m equally sure I would’ve zoned out the second he opened Microsoft Excel on his laptop.

While I didn’t understand compounding, the idea of “saving” money every month was easy enough to grasp, even for my primitive, non-analytic, creative brain. So that’s what I figured I’d do. 30% of every paycheque deposited into a mutual fund and then forgotten about.

It was many years later when my older brother, a ridiculously successful and savvy investor himself, cornered me and explained how compounding works, as simply as he possibly could, bless him. But even then, the only way he could explain it was by opening up, you guessed it, Microsoft effing Excel. But that time I tried to focus long enough to get to where he explained the exponential part of the curve, which is the point on a graph where the line starts to go vertical. And boy, did that thing shoot straight up a few years down on the X-axis. That’s when investors will tell you, “your money makes money”. I’ve been chasing that point on my life graph for the last 20 years, and someday, I hope I cross it.

Today, of course, is not that day.

Today, I’m looking at a graph that’s showing me compound interest working against me. I could take a loan of, say, a crore at 8.5%, but I’d eventually pay the bank more than double that amount over 20 years. Meaning the interest I’d pay would exceed the amount I borrowed in the first place. WTF, I hear you say. I agree. WTF, indeed.

It was all well and good to know that compounding was this abstract concept that would — eventually — make me enough money to not worry about making money ever again. That 30% I was putting away didn’t really hurt anymore, TBH.

But the kind of numbers this debt would throw at us were numbers I hadn’t ever encountered before, month after month, for 20 long years. Twenty years is half my lifetime. I needed to first understand the challenge before I tackled it.

So off to Claude I went with my predicament.

“I want to understand compound interest in the context of a composite home loan, but I don’t want to look at a spreadsheet. Can you help?”

Never one to shy away from an ELI5 challenge, and after some back-and-forth to understand my financial position, Claude whipped up a simple and beautiful Claude Artifact. The tool had no spreadsheets in sight. Instead, I had simple sliders for the loan amount, down payment, interest rate, tenure, and prepayment assumptions, along with a graph showing how each decision affected the repayment timeline.

We were off to the races. I could test every possible scenario — from varying the down payment to tweaking the interest rate to extending the loan tenure… and I finally had a clear picture of what my soon-to-be poverty-stricken ass would be paying back until I was old(er) and grey(er).

For the purpose of this post, I asked Claude to make a stripped-down, generic version of the same tool. But suffice it to say that you could probably build some version of this for yourself in an hour or so.

Thanks to the tool, I now understand that even a 0.25% difference in the interest rate can have a massive impact on the total payout. I also understand how much difference the down payment makes. But most of all, I know where to push back against the bank, and on what specific points.

I’ve been running an intentionally small creative business for 16 years now, and it is the most volatile thing. It’s that volatility that makes a loan like this feel that much scarier. A salaried person can worry about job security, of course, but a creative business has its own special flavour of uncertainty. Some months are up, others are down. Some clients stay for years, others ghost you after the first presentation. The bank, of course, doesn’t care about the emotion or the unpredictability of creative business. The EMIs will need to be paid every month, no matter what.

This business will always be mercurial. That’s the nature of the thing, and frankly, the engine that’s always kept me sharp — but now I can see the exact shape of what I’m walking into, physically and financially.

This home is going to be a rollercoaster ride of every emotion on the spectrum. But between this loan planner tool and the layout visualiser tool, I’m going in a little more empowered and a lot less afraid.

Aaaand unclench.

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