I started to work at the age of 15 for $5 an hour and would work every weekend. Yes, it was a little bit of money, but it eventually began to accumulate, and to me, it seemed like a lot. I basically used up all that money to buy junk food and sweets. At the age of 16, I worked at Legoland and made even more. My first paycheck was spent on the same day in taking my mom out to eat at the mall and a watch of the comic-book superhero, The Flash. I never really thought much about my money aside from spending it! At the age of 18, I got a credit card. I was responsible for a while, but then I got more and more credit cards due to the perks. I was getting FAFSA, so I thought to myself,
If I were to pay off my classes with my credit card, then I can just use FAFSA to pay it back.
Oh, what a mistake that was… I think I ended up buying a computer, and didn’t have enough to pay classes. I abused my wallet, and it never got better.
During my time at university in Santa Cruz, I have stacked up about $9k in credit card debt. I eventually got an internship at a large company called Guidewire, and let me tell you… the first time I got my paycheck, my jaw dropped. At 23 years of age, you’d think I would be more responsible with money. Nope. Aside from paying my rent when living in East Palo Alto, I spent that bad boy like it was nothing. I went to the lengths to buy an iPhone due to every tech bro using one. Well, I couldn’t afford a Tesla, but I could maybe afford an iPhone? Nope. I ended up buying a PC and a monitor just to play Valorant once or twice. I don’t even play games anymore. So, yeah. Don’t let me be your accountant.
Budgeting is so difficult and by having debit and credit cards, there is no physical connection nor sentiment when using them. Budgeting needs to become easier and simple!
Coming back home with $10k student loans and a $9k credit card debt, I had to do something about it. Especially when I work at an amazing company but near minimum wage. So… I tried to stop my bad habit. Ah, it would come up every now and then, but week by week I saw my debt get cut down. Today, March 2025, I am only in $2k debt. I have been going out to every 2 months or so, but every week I cut down my debt. Good, right?…
I don’t plan to quit here with Avaris, formerly known as BudgetTrak. I wrote this application in PHP for practice given that my job heavily uses PHP. However, I plan to migrate this application using JS. It took me 3 months to write this application, but if I did it with JS, it could have taken me one.