Finally, the day has come and I graduated from Flatiron’s part time Data Science program. And it has come and gone. Now I am left with a very tough question, how do I retain and keep up to date on all the skills I learned. I have asked my instructor and he recommended some HackerRank daily practice problems along with code wars. I didn’t really like these ideas as I didn’t really like the structure and set up of these. Being the genius instructor he is, Jeff recommended doing another project. A project that I choose and feel very passionate about. I never really thought about it until now.
The search started. What to build, what to build? I got it! I am going to build an expense tracker using python and its many libraries and maybe even do some exploratory analysis along with modeling to calculate my future spending habits. I mainly want to do this just to have an easy way to keep track of my expenses. As of right now, I just use good old trusty excel every month. This is great and all but I would love an automated way to do this. In addition, different tools like Mint and other expense trackers never seem to categorize my expenses correctly. The biggest issue is…….drum roll please………bars. I go out with friends quite often to drink socially on the weekends. The expense trackers out there generally just categorize that as a restaurant and so it goes into the food category. This is a problem. I want to know how much money I am spending on food (both groceries and eating out) along with how much money I spend at bars yearly. So here I am at the start of a new project. I will be blogging my project as I progress through it. First step is requirements.
Requirements:
- An application that can connect to multiple websites
- PNC bank to get my current positions
- Credit Cards
- Chase Credit: To obtain my expenses recorded on my Chase Sapphire card
- Apple Card: will have to figure out how exactly to log onto my credit card online through apples website
- Discover Card
- American Airlines Citi card Machine Learning/AI to categorize the expenses
- Once all information is obtained in a data frame or list, I will need to create some code to categorize my expenses into different buckets
- Buckets
- Rent
- Bars/Going Out
- Bills
- Student Loans
- Pay Check Visualizations:
- Interactive visualizations to tell a story and give concise snapshot of where most money is spent
- Dashboard like view
NOW…….time to code! I will be posting weekly while progressing through this project!