Week 28: Updating budget app

I’ve been using my budget app for over two years now. But lately, I’ve found myself slipping. I no longer feel excited to log my expenses like I used to. In the beginning, I would record every transaction the moment it happened. Then it became a two-to-three-day delay. Then a week. Now, it’s over two weeks, and I find myself sitting on weekends, manually entering old transactions and banging my head wondering, "What was this UPI payment for?"

That friction was killing the habit.

So, after procrastinating for quite a while, I decided it was time to fix my budget app. I built a quick prototype.

Goal: Let me add the expense first inside the budget app, and then use the app’s camera to scan the merchant's QR code and directly trigger a GPay payment—making it feel seamless.

Result: I managed to get a basic version working by tweaking the app. It’s not perfect yet—sometimes the QR parser works, sometimes it doesn’t—but I’m still working on it and hope to get it to 100% reliability soon.

Along the way, another idea struck me. Why not build a unified dashboard that brings together all my expenses, savings, and investments in one place? Something that shows my actual net worth. And yeah, I still laugh at the word net worth. For someone from a middle-class background, it feels like a bit of a joke. But still—I want to know where I stand.

So, I explored the Zerodha API docs and integrated my budget app with my Zerodha portfolio. Now, I can see a full picture: income, expenses, savings, and investments—all in one place.

After running the numbers, it turns out I’m doing okay-ish for my age. Definitely not great, but not terrible either. Long way to go.

But that’s exactly why I built this. To get clarity. To cut the noise. And to get a little closer to the future I’ve imagined—step by step.