WealthNest

A personal finance and budgeting web app built for Indian users — track expenses, plan a monthly budget, set savings goals, and learn basic financial concepts like SIP, FD, and PPF.

Built with Node.js, Express, MySQL, and plain HTML/CSS/JS.

Features

• Login/signup with hashed passwords (bcrypt) and JWT sessions
• Forgot password flow — sends a secure, time-limited reset link by email
• Expense tracker with categories and payment methods
• Budget planner that recommends a Needs/Wants/Savings split based on income, and compares it against what you've actually spent
• Financial goals with auto-calculated monthly savings targets
• Savings tracker with weekly/monthly/yearly charts
• SIP, FD, compound interest and savings goal calculators
• Government schemes directory with verified official source links
• Rule-based spending insights (no AI — plain JS logic run on your own recorded data)
• Account settings for username, email and password

Tech stack

• Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript
• Backend: Node.js, Express
• Database: MySQL
• Auth: JWT + bcrypt
• Email: Brevo transactional email API (HTTP, not SMTP)

Running it locally

1. Install dependencies

   npm install

2. Set up your environment variables

   cp .env.example .env

   Then edit .env with:

   • Your MySQL credentials
   • A random JWT_SECRET
   • Optionally, a Brevo API key (BREVO_API_KEY, EMAIL_FROM_ADDRESS) so password reset links actually get emailed. Brevo's free plan sends up to 300 emails/day over HTTPS — this is deliberate rather than SMTP, since most free hosting platforms (Render, Vercel, etc.) block outbound SMTP ports.
   • If email isn't configured, reset links print to the server console instead, so the app still works fully for local testing.

3. Create and seed the database

   npm run seed

4. Start the server

   npm start

5. Open http://localhost:5000

Project structure

• backend/ — Express server, routes, controllers, services, MySQL models
• frontend/ — HTML pages, CSS, and vanilla JS
• database/ — schema and seed data