UniSave

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Inspiration

We believe that financial literacy is a key aspect of everyone’s life, which is why we choose the Capital One and State Farm challenges. Budgeting and tracking spending is a part of our lives daily, especially considering we are college students and relatively broke. Since a lot of us have variable incomes, the typical financial spending trackers don’t apply to us as they’re based on a fixed income. We also believe a lot of college students aren’t thinking about being financially literate -- which is why we decided to help spark introspection and inform college students about different financial hacks.

What it does

Our project is a financial budgeting website that helps college students learn the basics of personal finance, budget variable income via bank statements, and track their purchases while comparing the capital allocation of their budget to the recommended budget for college students.

How we built it

First, we divided up individual functions and assigned tasks based on our skill levels. Since we had someone who was more familiar with programming on our team, they worked on some of the harder things like navigating through API's. We merged the code based on how the website was being developed, and we reviewed each others code to make sure everything was going smoothly.

Challenges we ran into

Since this is the first hackathon the majority of our team has participated in, we ran into some trouble figuring out how to split up the work assignments and what tools to use. To elaborate, we used React, a JavaScript framework, and the majority of the team had to learn it on the spot to contribute to our website. This was a major learning curve, and we spent the majority of the time learning it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since this was the first hackathon for the majority of our group, we are proud of the progress we made in the project and learning about the tools we used to create the project. We are also proud that we figured out how to implement the Capital One API to our project, as it adds a layer of complexity a lot of us weren’t familiar with. We are also proud of going out of our comfort zones to accomplish something like this, as it took a lot of dedication and perseverance.

What we learned

We learned a lot more about front-end development, since we had relatively minimal experience with it. Conversely, learning about the backend of things, especially API’s, was completely new for a lot of us and we learned a lot there. We also learned a lot about group programming and how to divvy up tasks as a lot of us have only programmed by ourselves.

What's next for UniSave

First, finishing some of the functionality. Although we figured a lot out and got a good portion of the project done, we still have to implement things to make the project more complex and formatted. Secondly, updating the layout of the project and making the website more seamless. We are planning to make the project have a greater user experience to appeal to more users.