Introducing $magic

For a while I had been looking for a simple way to budget and track expenses without turning personal finance into a second job. As an international student, most of the popular budgeting apps felt like overkill. Too many onboarding steps. Too many assumptions about how you live and earn. Too much effort to absorb before any value came back the other way.

What I wanted was small and direct. Enter the income. See where it goes. Decide what to save. Move on with the week. When the off-the-shelf option does not fit, engineers tend to do the obvious thing.

I built my own.

Introducing $magic

$magic is a tiny web app for budgeting and tracking your monthly money without friction. Open the page. Enter your income. Pick the state you live in so the after-tax math is right. Add your budget items and any outstanding debt. That is the entire onboarding.

How it works

The flow is deliberately short:

1. 01Type in your monthly income.
2. 02Pick your state. California, Florida, Texas, and New York are wired in today, with the rest of the country on the to-do list.
3. 03Add your budget categories like rent, groceries, and subscriptions.
4. 04Add any debt you are paying down, with the balance, interest rate, and target payoff timeline.
5. 05Look at what is left to save, and adjust until the picture is honest.

What it actually does

• Smart budgeting that updates the moment a number changes. Every edit reflects in a pie chart and a clear breakdown of what is left to save, so you can move sliders around and feel the tradeoffs instead of running spreadsheet math in your head.
• Debt tracking that does the boring math for you. Enter the balance, the interest rate, and a target payoff date. The tool computes the monthly payment, accounts for interest, and keeps the schedule honest as the balance comes down.
• Full privacy by design. No accounts, no backend, no cloud. The entire state lives in your browser through localStorage. You can export your data to a file when you want to move it, and reimport it later. The tradeoff is that the data stays on the device, which for a private budgeting tool is the right default.
• PDF reports you can keep. A clean export of your current budget and debt picture, so you can save it for the records, share it, or compare it against next month without logging in anywhere.

Why no accounts

The smallest version of a finance tool that respects you is one that does not ask you to hand over the data in the first place. No signup, no email verification, no recovery flow because there is nothing to recover from. If you want the data on another device, the export button gives you a file you can move yourself. For something this personal, that is a saner default than the industry norm.

What is next

$magic is still small on purpose. I would rather add features that earn their weight than ship a long roadmap. On the near list:

• More states supported in the tax engine, in the order people actually ask for them.
• A goal-based saving view, so you can model what if I save an extra $200 a month against a target like an emergency fund or a flight home.
• Optional encrypted exports, so the file you carry between devices does not sit in plain JSON.

If you or someone you know wants a straightforward way to budget or track debt, the link is below. Feedback welcome, especially the kind that names a specific friction.