BudgetBuddy

Inspiration

The Great Recession left a great impact on many people from the generation who saw their parents or loved ones experience the downturns. It is now also known that inflation is rising consistently each year and the desire of many young adults is to pursue a higher education in order to make more money but at the cost of a large student loan. This is why we wanted to help in some aspect which was budgeting.

What it does

Everyone has a goal in life, but it takes time and planning in order to achieve it. Creating a budget is one way to assist in that. We created an estimated budget based on idealistic conditions of the user's annual salary in order to find the cost of living and expected expenses for cities in the LA county. Then we created a realistic budget where the user inputs all their monthly expenses along with their monthly salary, we deduct their expenses from their salary. This way the user realizes whether certain expenses are too much and should be allocated elsewhere, the idealistic budget assists in this with showing that it may be possible to have lower expenses since it takes their location's costs into account.

How we built it

Using skills used in CS010A and B along with the IDE, VSCode.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble having the getline() feature take in the file information organized in city and average apartment cost along with trying to connect a website with c++. We had an idea of taking into account all cities in the United States but realized that we didn’t have the capability to find all the information for those cities and be able to manage BudgetBuddy to do its job with the list of cities as well. We couldn't run the code in VSCode through live share so we did it through the UCR remote servers instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We felt accomplished for having reached over 350 lines of code along with only having simple syntax errors rather than logic errors.

What we learned

We realized we had to account for a whitespace in the buffer zone which is why the file information wasn't being read accurately. We also learned that it is a struggle to connect web development and c++ due to having to go through another program to allow the information to be passed between the two main languages of HTML and c++. If the scale of what wants to be accomplished, set a goal to a small point and expand from there to where everyone is comfortable. We settled from 10 cities in LA county to all of LA county.

What's next for BudgetBuddy

We will expand it to be used across the states and not only SoCal. Expand to be have a better UI by having it become an app. There's also the possibility of adding more financial features such as having an option to allocate money into a retirement fund or bond or stocks.

Built With

• c++