Total income program: budget and savings calculator

Question

I started my cs50 course this week and I will be trying to make little projects alongside to reaffirm what I've learned thus far. Here I have made a very basic budget and savings calculator, I am hoping to increase the complexity as I improve.

Where could I improve this in terms of simplicity & structure/slickness? Also are there ways I can make this more complex and add things into it? thanks!

#include <cs50.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)

// Prompt for Monthly Income
{
    int Monthly_Income;
    {
        Monthly_Income = get_int("Please enter your monthly income");
    }

// Prompt for total Expenditure
    int Expenditure;
    {
        Expenditure = get_int("Please enter your monthly expenditure");
    }
    int Income_Remaining = (Monthly_Income - Expenditure);
   
    printf("Income remaining %i\n", Income_Remaining);
   
// Prompt for savings per month
  
    int S; 
    {
        S = get_int("Enter your target savings contribution per month");
    }
// Calculate total Discretionary income
    int Discretionary_income = (Income_Remaining - S);
    printf("Discretionary income %i\n", Discretionary_income);
// Calculate Savings total per month
    int i = 0;
    int Total = 0;
    do
    {
        Total = Total + S;
        i++;
        printf("your total savings are %i\n", Total);
        printf("total months %i\n", i);
    }
    while (i < 24);
   

}

Answer 1

Declare and initialize variables at the same time

You can simplify the code a lot by declaring and initializing variables at the same time, like so:

int Monthly_Income = get_int("Please enter your monthly income");
int Expenditure = get_int("Please enter your monthly expenditure");

You were already doing this for Income_Remaining and Discretionary_income.

Don't write redundant comments

Avoid writing comments that don't really add any new information. A lot of code is self-explanatory, for example if you see:

int Monthly_Income = get_int("Please enter your monthly income");

It is evident that you are prompting for the monthly income, from both the properly named variable and the text passed to get_int().

Split your program into multiple functions

For larger programs it will become a necessity, but it is good practice to also see if you can split up a small program like this into multiple functions. Even if a function is only called once, it can be beneficial to make it a separate thing with its own name. For example, printing the savings over time could be split off:

static void print_savings_over_time(int monthly_saving) {
    int total = 0;

    for (int month = 1; month <= 24; month++) {
        total += monthly_saving;
        printf("Total savings in month %d: %d\n", month, total);
    }
}

int main(void) {
    ...
    int S = get_int("Enter your target savings contribution per month");
    ...
    print_monthly_savings(S);
}

Adding complexity

Also are there ways I can make this more complex and add things into it?

Yes you can. You should not add complexity for complexity's sake though, follow the KISS principle.