Three skills for the home office
· Matt Horn
There is probably a 401k somewhere with your name on it that you have never once opened. This is far more common than the people who talk about money let on.
These are three skills for Claude, folders of instructions it picks up and follows, for the questions that don’t fit in one conversation.
| Skill | What it’s for |
|---|---|
| life-paths | What you could actually do next, worked out from your record instead of a personality quiz. |
| financial-planning | Your real numbers turned into a plan: what you can save, when you could stop, what happens if things go badly. |
| writing-axes | The thing you’ve been rewriting for a week. |
They ask a lot before they answer anything. financial-planning looks up this year’s actual contribution limits rather than recalling them, writes down every assumption it makes and what happens if that assumption is wrong, and then hands the finished plan to a second copy of itself whose only job is to find what’s wrong with it. That takes 84 tool calls where answering off the top of its head takes 10.
life-paths has a rule I’d want from a person. “You can do anything” and “be realistic, lower your sights” are both treated as failures of evidence: it’s meant to tell you what your record actually supports, commit to a real recommendation, and then treat your disagreement with it as information rather than error. You own the decision. It just has to show its work.
When what surfaces isn’t a planning problem, like a crisis at home or health news, the instruction is to “stop being a process and be present.” Planning resumes later or not at all.
The full version runs for hours. There’s a short one, about twenty minutes of questions, and it will tell you once what the long version would have added. Start there.
In Claude, open Customize Plugins, click the + under Personal plugins, choose Add marketplace, and paste matt-w-horn/skills. Install it and all three turn up under the + in any chat. Nothing to download.
If you happen to use Claude Code, it’s /plugin marketplace add https://github.com/matt-w-horn/skills.git and then /plugin install skills@matt-horn-skills.
Pick whichever question is actually bothering you. And if it tells you something that sounds wrong, say so. That part is on purpose.