The Documents You Signed and Never Read

Find the last thing you signed without reading it, and download the PDF.

If you can't think of one, try the phone contract, the tenancy, the gym or the car finance. Or try the insurance renewal that arrived as a 30-page PDF and went into the archive unopened.

You signed in a hurry, and ever since, the terms inside have been deciding what leaves your account every month.

Why point AI at it? Because AI is best at exactly this job, reading forty pages and finding the one line that'll cost you.

People use AI for poems and holiday ideas, but they almost never point it at the paperwork. That's where I'd point it first, with one document a week and twenty minutes each.

By the end of a month you'll know what you've signed, and you'll usually have found some money.

The method, for any document

1. Use the whole document. Download the PDF from the email or the account page. Your own summary won't do, because your summary is the version that missed the expensive line. Nor will the first two pages. For paper, photograph every page flat and upload them all in one message.
2. Protect your details. Use a temporary chat, which is a chat that isn't saved to your history, or black out the account numbers first. AI doesn't need them to read the terms.
3. Give each document its own chat. In six months you'll want these answers again, and you don't want the gym terms getting mixed up with the car finance.
4. Ask the first prompt below. A prompt is the message you type to AI. Then ask which pages AI couldn't read, and redo those. A page missing from the scan is a clause AI will never warn you about, and AI usually won't notice the gap.
5. Check every point against the page. Open the document beside the answer and go to each page AI quotes. AI can be wrong about what's normal. For example, clause 14 might be standard in the UK while AI is comparing with another country. Let AI point, and do the looking yourself.
6. Ask the second prompt, and answer its three questions. They cover the part AI can't know. Maybe you're moving in March, or you never use the gym on weekdays, or the car's doing twice the mileage you guessed.
7. Decide, send, and put the dates in your diary. If the decision is a message, let AI draft one with the wording quoted, for example "I'd like to leave on [date] under clause [x]". Send the message yourself, from your own email. Then put every date AI found in your calendar. That calendar entry is the real result, because it stops the same thing happening next year.

The two prompts

To understand the document, use this.

This is my [phone contract / tenancy / insurance policy / car finance agreement]. Read all of it, including the small print. Then tell me these five things in plain English.

1. What I pay, when, and every way that amount can go up.
2. The dates that matter. When it ends, when I can leave, how much notice I have to give, and any date after which something changes automatically.
3. The three clauses most likely to cost me money that I probably don't know about.
4. Anything that looks unusual or unfair compared to a typical agreement of this kind.
5. Anything you couldn't read or that seems to be missing.

Quote the exact wording and page number for each point. Don't give me advice yet. I want to understand it first.

To decide what to do about the document, use this.

Given all that, what are my realistic options? Stay as I am, renegotiate, switch, or leave at the next date? For each, what would I need to do, by when, and what's the catch? Then ask me three questions about my situation that would change your answer.

Which document first?

Start with whichever costs you most each month. Here's where the expensive line usually hides, document by document.

• With phone and broadband, the contract ended months ago and you're paying the out-of-contract rate. Or there's a mid-contract price rise clause tied to inflation plus a few percent.
• With a tenancy, it's the notice period, the break clause, and what the deposit scheme actually lets them deduct.
• With an insurance renewal, the price went up when the policy renewed itself, the excess changed, and there are exclusions on page 23.
• With car finance or a lease, it's the mileage cap, the end-of-term charges, and the balloon payment.
• With a gym, subscriptions or memberships, it's the notice period and the "minimum term renews automatically" line.
• With an employment contract, it's the notice period, restrictive covenants, and who owns what you make in your own time.

If you're not sure, the phone contract is the fastest win.

AI isn't a lawyer, so for a tenancy dispute, a redundancy, or anything with real money at stake, use AI only to understand the document. Then you walk into the free advice line or the solicitor's office knowing what to ask.

Download the phone contract this weekend and give it the first prompt.