A Mile in My Financial Shoes

Inspiration

We were inspired by the lack of financial education provided, so we wanted to create a nonlinear story about managing a budget as well as learning about Capital One's credit card rewards. At the same time, we understood the challenges of students and low-income families and wanted to shed light on their kind of story.

What it does

A Mile in My Financial Shoes follows one week in a college student's journey in managing money right in Seattle. The website is structured like interactive fiction, where you as the user can forge your path to create your destiny. On every page at the top is your remaining budget. Text with underline are links to external websites to learn more about a specific part of Seattle. In the end, you will see how much you have left in savings and how much you earned in rewards, as well as more resources to learn about financial literacy.

How we built it

We utilized Twine, which builds on Markdown, HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Capital One and Unsplash images as well as Google Fonts are also used.

Challenges we ran into

Twine has a different syntax than traditional HTML, CSS, and Javascript, so it was difficult figuring out how to subtract values between items in order to determine savings. Once that was figured out, we could also estimate the amount of rewards earned by using Capital One's credit cards. Both of us are not native to Seattle, so our inclusion of Seattle culture and history depended on research. Especially as one of us is a high school student, how to deal with money has not become important just yet.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a project that encapsulates many facets: storytelling, budgeting, credit cards, and Seattle culture and history. In the end, all the grind and headaches were worth it.

What we learned

We learned so much about styling, Javascript, Twine, and most definitely Seattle, especially Seattle Underground which is beneath current-day street level Seattle.

What's next for A Mile in My Financial Shoes

With the possibility of going into debt, we want to have another calculation estimate for the amount of interest owed. Credit Card debt is also a severe problem, so we hope to develop that in the future.