SmartLife AI: An Intelligent, Inflation-Aware Personal Finance Management System — Design, Implementation, And A Roadmap Toward Predictive Financial Intelligence

Personal financial management (PFM) applications typically report nominal income, expenses, and balances without indicating how inflation erodes purchasing power or whether a user is on track for long-term goals such as retirement. This paper presents SmartLife AI, a full-stack, inflation-aware personal finance platform built on a React/Next.js frontend and a Python FastAPI backend. The current (Phase 1) implementation — 32 REST endpoints across 19 database entities, validated by 24 automated unit tests — provides financialrecord management, bank-statement ingestion with rule-based categorization, and four deterministic engines: Inflation, Real Wealth, Life Value, and a Retirement Projection Engine with accumulation-and-drawdown simulation, alongside an FY 2025-26 Indian income-tax optimization engine and a linear-regression expenseforecasting baseline. Every worked example in this paper is computed directly from the deployed engines. The paper also specifies the Phase 2 roadmap — comparative ARIMA/LSTM forecasting, a myScheme-aligned government-scheme recommender, a credit-card suitability scorer, and a Gemini-based advisory layer — establishing a reproducible baseline for the completed half of the project and a falsifiable specification for the remainder.