Code a Monthly Budget Calculator Program! Functional and Practical Beginner Python Project Tutorial!

what's going on you guys welcome back to the channel uh today we've got a fun introduction to python practice uh beginner project where we're gonna build out a monthly budget calculator tool um and so before i get started if you find this or anything else on the channel useful i really appreciate uh subscribe to the channel as we're getting started here helps me know there's some interest and it really helps me uh get things going this is a pretty new channel and i want to keep bringing content like this to you guys so that's my pitch and now let's get right into the code and so when i say monthly budget calculator i'm thinking you essentially take the income that a person expects to get every month and you prompt them for it and then you do math and then you gather info on the expenses and you return what we're going to call the margin and essentially say if they're going to be above or below next month so it's a pretty simple formula when you look at it like this but since income can come from a variety of different ways and there's a whole bunch of different itemized expenses it can be useful to add together we're going to go ahead and build out a tool that gathers the inputs and the expenses from a user and then does the math for them to return that margin so this is a great intro to python practice project if you're very familiar with object oriented programming in python this might not be the video for you because it's going to be a little more basic and just help cover some some introductory topics so just to get started i'll just say print welcome to the budget estimator so um i usually just at the beginning of a program i like to print out on the console what's going on so the user knows exactly what they're doing and why they're there and then we'll gather a couple variables here we'll create a variable called income and we'll make it a float because we don't know they could add enter a decimal enter an integer and enter any kind of number so just make it a float to be safe and then we'll make an input which is going to prompt the user to enter a value on the screen and so we'll say input enter your monthly and since we want to not have to calculate tax and everything we'll just say enter your monthly post tax income and then we'll just tell them us dollars just so they know what their uh what units they're entering it in and then we'll make another variable and we'll call it additional and we will make that the same float input and we'll just ask for any other revenue stream so a lot of people they might have rental properties or a youtube channel or anything else that's making money that they don't necessarily count as primary income and so it might not be included in that first variable so we'll say enter any additional income you expect next month i mean honestly even maybe they have a birthday and they think they're gonna get 200 bucks in there and they want to include that so um we'll just uh do the same as before and then that'll be it for income and so we'll just do a uh we'll call it total income and all you have to do is add those two together to get this value and so right here we're creating an additional variable after we get these two inputs from the user that shows total income so now let's go ahead and transition into the expenses phase of things so let's go ahead and print out and just say great your total income next month will be and let's do so str is going to be the string conversion of a variable so if you have something that's numerical either floats or integers and you do str and then parentheses that's going to convert whatever variable you put in there into a string and that's the only way that you can display something with another string value and have it all concatenated together like this so we're going to print out their total income and we'll say now let's now we will get some expenses data okay and now let's enter uh let's go ahead and do this as a function just because it can be a great learning tool here so we'll say we're going to create a function that's the def you're defining a function now and we'll call it gather expenses okay and we don't have to pass any variables in if we did they would have to go in here and then we just tab one indentation level inside and now you're writing info inside of a function and so we'll call this first one housing and we'll use the same float input format and we will say enter your monthly and instead of post-tax income let's say enter your monthly housing expense so that could be rent or mortgage and we're gonna just gather a few expenses here so we'll say that's housing then let's do a second one called utilities and say enter your monthly utilities total expense and so this is going to be like water electric trash sewer whatever all added together and then we'll say housing utilities let's go ahead and ask for food and say enter your monthly food expenses so that's groceries plus like meals out and then let's just do a last one and call it miscellaneous and that'll be enter your any let's just say enter any additional monthly expenses okay and so what we'll do then is we'll make another one called total expenses just like we did with income and we will just do a sum of all those expenses we just gathered so housing plus utilities plus food plus miscellaneous is total expenses and then let's return total expenses so that's how you send a value back out of a function um and the important thing to know about python functions is this isn't actually going to run we've just defined the function but we haven't called it anywhere so the way this program is going to run when it starts up is line 4 5 6 8 9 10 but it's object oriented programming meaning it doesn't just go down and execute every line in order if you have something like like this function defined elsewhere you have to actually call it to get it to run so it's currently just skipping over this block so what we'll do is we'll actually call we'll go ahead and create another variable called expense total because that's the value that we want to get back but it's going to be equal to calling this function so this is this means that after we say okay now we'll get some expenses data it comes down here and expense total is going to be equal to the value that we return out of this function that we're going to run right here okay and so if you have any specific questions about that feel free to let me know about in the comments i can explain in a little more depth if you need any specific additional info but then let's go ahead and calculate um well just like before let's say do print let's go ahead and say great your total expenses next month will be and then we will put in here the expense total very cool and then let's go ahead and um do calculate something i called it before i called it the margin and it's just going to be the total income and it's going to be minus the expense total so this is going to be all the money you have coming in minus all of the money you have going out and let's actually do a conditional if statement here to determine what we should display as the output so let's say if the margin is greater than zero we'll say greater than or equal to right so that's at least breaking even or having some extra money if that's the case let's go ahead and print your total surplus next month will be and then let's add to that the string right string conversion of the margin value um and then we'll say else you could you could do another if or you could do an l if which is another version of conditional but basically the only other scenario is margin is less than zero right because we handled greater than or equal to in this first one so let's just print you will come up and let's add the string version of margin you will come up margin dollars and then let's add another string short or we'll say negative um and i think with these strings that we're concatenating let's put a dollar sign in there um just to make units clear and let's do that everywhere that'll look pretty good okay so that's really all we need and then let's just say print and thanks for using the monthly budget tool alright so just good way to round out our function so let's go ahead and run this been a lot of talking a lot of writing code and let's actually see what it does all right welcome to the budget estimator enter your monthly post tax income say three thousand dollars we're doing all right enter any additional income you expect next month it's my birthday maybe we're going to get 300 of birthday money okay total income will be 3 300. let's get some ex housing expenses let's say hundred dollars for rent all of your utilities added together 300 bucks food expenses 100 bucks a week let's say 400 and then 50 dollars for fun um so total expenses next month will be 16.50 your total surplus will be also 16.50 is that right i just kind of randomly picked some numbers let's see here 16.50 yeah these add together and that's half of 3 300. okay well that's crazy um so there you see we had surplus let's go ahead and run it again um and see if we can get it to be we're at a negative so 1500 bucks 100 of additional income but rent is still 900 bucks utilities are 500 bucks um 400 for food and some unexpected 1 000 expense next month well you can see we're going to be 1200 negative so right there that's just a useful um little tool to help you kind of see your financials in a pretty clear way and it's really just a great introduction to python a way to write an actual practical function because so much python can just be like write an if statement if given two variables and one is this and the other is that and you just lose sight of what could this possibly even apply to in the real world so hopefully that was a great little python practice exercise for you hopefully you found it useful if you did again i really appreciate a like and a subscribe on the channel it helps me out a ton and if you had any comments on what you saw here today or you want to see anything in particular in the future feel free to drop me a comment below and let me know about it i will try to get back to you as soon as possible and as always good luck with your code and thanks for watching thanks bye