First end-to-end build
BetterFuture
Financial simulation engine in Java with a Swing GUI — projects loans, income, expenses, and net worth across multi-year horizons.
- Year
- 2025
- Status
- Complete
- Stack
- Java · Java Swing
BetterFuture is a financial planning tool and my first complete build: pick your loans, income, expenses, and repayment strategy, and it projects your net worth year by year over a multi-year horizon.
The interesting part was the domain model. Loans, assets, and repayment strategies are separate classes with their own behavior, which made it possible to swap allocation logic — pay down the expensive loan first versus spread payments evenly — without touching the simulation loop. That separation is what I'd been reading about in object-oriented design; this is where it became a real decision instead of vocabulary.
- Engine
- Java — object-oriented domain model
- Interface
- Java Swing GUI
- Role here
- Kept as the baseline — where the work started