I paid off over $50k in debt using a simple system - but tracking it manually wasn’t very straightforward. So, using AI tools like Cursor, I built the tool I wish I had back then.

The Problem

I walked into my first job out of college with $50k of debt. Luckily, I was motivated to learn how to be efficient with my paycheck.

Knowing that I wanted to be debt-free as soon as possible, I started by making a budget and tracking my finances in a spreadsheet each month. Ultimately that was a huge help in figuring out how much extra money I could comfortably put towards my loans.

But that spreadsheet was a mess. It wasn’t something I could give to a friend or family member if they were looking to follow the same process.

I needed something simple, clear, and actionable that anyone can use.

The Snowball Method

I learned the debt snowball method from Dave Ramsey’s 7 Baby Steps. It’s super simple:

1. List all your debts in order from smallest to largest, for example:

   1. Credit card with $5k at 25% interest

   2. Car loan with $10k at 8% interest

   3. Student loans with $30k at 5% interest

2. Make the minimum payments on all debts, then put everything you can towards the smallest loan to pay it off ASAP

   1. Make minimum payments on the car loan and student loans, then put everything possible towards the car loan

3. Once the smallest loan is all paid off, roll that money into the next smallest loan

   1. After the credit card is paid off, put all the money from those payments towards the car loan, while still paying the minimum on the student loans

4. Repeat this process until each debt is eliminated

Building It with AI

With ChatGPT’s 4o model, I described my idea for a budget tracking and debt payoff app and asked it to generate a PRD (project requirements document) to turn the idea into a web app. The PRD helped identify the app’s target users, core features, tech stack and other details required to get started.

I also asked ChatGPT to generate a landing page and create a color palette based on those requirements. My exact prompt was this, which provided the image that follows:

Looks pretty damn good in my opinion!

From there I went into Cursor’s Agent mode, attached the PRD and color palette, and told it to start building a MVP to demonstrate the core budgeting and debt payoff features.

I’m specifying Agent mode here because that’s the most autonomous way to work in Cursor. For a long time I was using the Ask mode (just normal chat) but that required me having to approve every single change that it proposed, which can be very tedious even in smaller applications. Agent mode makes all those changes autonomously, and you can still look through the changes to see which you want to keep or reject.

Cursor needed some guidance along the way, but it did 95% of the work to build a functional Demo that I showed here:

There’s still more to do of course, since this is just a static application that doesn’t actually save your information. But I’ve set it up in a way that should be easy to get to that next step with user authentication, database/storage, etc. which should all be easy to integrate via Supabase.

Takeaways

It probably took ~5 solid hours to build this app. Mind you, most of that time was simply spent directing Cursor’s Agent mode to “add this,” or “change that” - I’m starting to feel more like a Software Composer at this point (shoutout Riley Brown).

You can make apps like this with little to no coding experience. I had a specific idea in mind, so I let ChatGPT generate a PRD. Documentation like this makes it super easy to let Cursor do the heavy lifting, since you already have some guidelines in place and aren’t starting from scratch. But besides a few stylistic tweaks, I barely wrote a single line of code.

All this is to say that, if you haven’t tried making your own apps to solve your own problems, there’s never been an easier time to get started. The barrier to entry is nearly non-existent. Build something that makes your life easier.

Feel free to reach out if you need help getting started :)