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A Simple Python Script That Allows Me To Save More Than 20k A Year

How to use Python to convert a budget spreadsheet to a dynamic Python function.

Zach Quinn
Pipeline: Your Data Engineering Resource
6 min readFeb 14, 2023

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Hand holding 100 dollar bills.
Photo by 金 运 on Unsplash

Python’s Greatest Application: Saving Money

I made a realization in 2022: Despite having a banking app and a spending tracker (Mint), my wife and I never consciously set a yearly or monthly budget.

We had vague goals like “save for a house” or save x percentage of our gross income, but it took nearly a year for us to sit down and budget.

To that end, I created a Google Spreadsheet template that I initially started using.

Google Sheet spreadsheet budget.
The original spreadsheet. (Image by the author).

However, as anyone who works in data science will tell you, spreadsheets are almost never the preferred method of data storage.

That’s why, during time off, I converted the original spreadsheet into a Python function.

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Pipeline: Your Data Engineering Resource
Pipeline: Your Data Engineering Resource

Published in Pipeline: Your Data Engineering Resource

Your one-stop-shop to learn data engineering fundamentals, absorb career advice and get inspired by creative data-driven projects — all with the goal of helping you gain the proficiency and confidence to land your first job.

Zach Quinn
Zach Quinn

Written by Zach Quinn

Journalist—>Sr. Data Engineer; new stories weekly.

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