FinSim - The Personal Financial Simulator Mobile App

Background

The day I got my first smart phone (a Noika 6600 with Symbian OS) I wanted to create mobile apps. However I never made any significant effort as I was quiet busy and happy with the web development. While working from home during Covid times I decided to learn new skills and do something productive. With a little push from my better half, I decided to finally do some mobile app development.

I did some research on possible options and shortlisted the Flutter framework. I purchased a course on Udemy and started learning Flutter. After around 2 months of learning and developing multiple dummy mobile apps during the course, on 3rd July 2021, I started my work on my first mobile app “FinSim - The Personal Financial Simulator”. I had around 20 mobile app ideas, some were very basic and some were quite complicated. I decided to go with this idea as it was simple to implement (as there was no server component) while still being useful to the end user. On 21st September 2021 I successfully finished and published the mobile app on Google Play Store.

Why

In the past I was used to keep record of my daily expenses. While I don’t do it any more as most of the transactions are online, I still list the details of family finances (accounts, investments, loans etc.) in an excel sheet every 6 months. While this is a good way to keep record of the past and current financial status, it does not predict anything about the future. While anyone can do a quick mental calculation of his/her financial status in next few years, it quickly becomes difficult when we add multiple income sources, assets and loans. Then there are things like: compounding, appreciating and depreciating assets, varing interest and principal components of EMI, big expenses planned in future. Therefore, there is a need for a tool that can take into account all these calculations and produce precise results.

Goal

The goal is to help the user in seeing his/her current financial status and help in predicting the future by allowing the user to simulate the impact of his/her assets (and loans) and future decisions. In simple terms the application is a calculator that takes input of various incomes and expenditures and creates visualizations for the coming time (next few years). Frankly this can be easily done in an Excel sheet, but then again how many of us have done it? The usability that a mobile app brings over an Excel sheet cannot be understated.

Conclusion

This was my first mobile application and I am quite satisfied with the output but I want to improve its usability to make it more intutive. Also I am not a financial advisor, therefore I personally (or through mobile app) do not intend to give any financial advice. Please use you own judgement while making financial decisions.

Google Play Store Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.sunnyjaiswal22.finsim