Budget Tracker

Description

A comprehensive web-based budget tracking application built with ASP.NET MVC and PostgreSQL that enables users to monitor their recurring expenses and revenue streams in real-time. The application provides an intuitive interface for financial management, moving beyond traditional spreadsheet limitations to offer a more dynamic and user-friendly budgeting experience.

Problem

My wife and I were tracking our household finances in a spreadsheet, but we wanted something more convenient. We needed a way to visualize our income/expense ratio to maximize our savings. I also wanted to brush up on my ASP.NET skills, so building a simple budget tracker seemed like a practical project that would solve our spreadsheet problem while giving me hands-on practice with modern web development.

Solution

I built a Budget Tracker web application using ASP.NET MVC with PostgreSQL as the database. The application allows me to track recurring expenses and revenue streams in a simple web interface. I can add and categorize different types of income and expenses, view current balances, and see monthly budget utilization. The project gave me good practice with ASP.NET MVC patterns, Entity Framework, and PostgreSQL while creating something useful for our household budgeting.

Story

This project served a dual purpose: solving a real-world problem while refreshing my ASP.NET development skills. As someone who wanted to get back up to speed with modern .NET development, building a practical application that my wife and I would use daily provided the perfect motivation and context for learning. The project also gave me hands-on experience with deployment and environment management. I containerized the application using Docker, which allowed me to maintain consistent environments between local development and production. Managing the local development setup alongside the production deployment helped me understand the full software lifecycle and gave me practical experience with modern DevOps practices. The application and the database were deployed to my Coolify based cloud server in containers. Check out the live site button for a demo with a demo user account and seed data. I'm still working on some features, such as user settings, etc. But the core of the application is complete for now.

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