My Brand New Expense Tracking App

I’m super excited to introduce my very own expense app. I wanted to create something useful since I’m trying to be responsible and get a handle on my personal finances. I committed to planning, designing, coding, and publishing this app live on the web for easy access and fun. So far, it’s very simple and a great start for the potential that I see it becoming. In order to use it, you simply register and login. From there you are able to create spending categories, and then add your daily expenses within those categories. Your account is even customizable with a profile photo adding feature.

Budgeting

I’ve become aware that choosing and creating a budget is also choosing that lifestyle. As a creative, numbers and metrics were not really my ministry. However, I am becoming more numerate and cognizant of what being smart with money entails. Of course, every budgeting book starts out with “the first step is changing your mindset.” This just didn’t resonate with me enough to be relatable. Instead, “choosing the best lifestyle according to your wallet,” makes more sense to me. I’ve been studying personal finance, along with business, and being good with numbers ultimately includes a level of organization and management. By management, I mean it’s a constant activity to monitor and make decisions based off of the facts, which is the best thing that numeracy helps with.

Fully Committing

I had to fully commit to building this app and learning the program language to achieve it. As a web developer, I wanted to commit to learning PHP and with this project, I would be presented with problems that I needed to find out how to solve. To give this undivided focus, I ended up putting everything else on pause, including all content creation. Coding takes a lot of time believe it or not. It is a respected field where it isn’t all glitter, but the gold is in the actual time of putting in the work just like everything else.

Improvements

Starting out with the app, I wanted to mimic the “envelope stuffing” budget method of having different categories at a certain max amount and then displaying the amount spent within that category. However, my goal for the app is to make it as visually friendly to understand the numbers as possible.

Right now, it needs some instructions and guides for users but those are coming soon. I’ve had sooo much fun making this that I will see through to it being at full potential.

For the design, I found it from researching inspiration, and from there, I was challenged to incorporate it into my functioning app. I hope to add more animations and more complexity to it later.

Closing | Recap

Getting your life together as an adult comes with a level of organization that is intentional and a practice. Setting out to be more responsible includes giving yourself grace while knowing where you want to be in the end; and believing you can get there.

Feel free to use my cute expense app.

Until Next Time,
Tamara