As a college student, and more importantly trying adulting for the first time, money seems like such a big scary subject. Suddenly getting a big hefty amount of money, having the urge to spend it on everything you can lay your eyes on. Trying to use budgeting apps available and realising that you dont have the subscriptions and steady monthly incomes these apps ask for. This is what inspired budget bloom. A budgeting app that can be tailored to you, your lifestyle.
It helps you track your money, spending, and lets you save for your own goals. It also teaches you how to invest the money that you save, like informing you about topics such as stock market investing, treasury bonds, low-risk investing, mutual funds, maintaining a good credit score, etc. in layman terms. So, you don't need a degree in economics to be fiscally responsible.
We built Budget Bloom using React for the front-end, with local storage as our main method of data persistence. This helped us keep things lightweight and offline-friendly, especially since we were building for users who might not always have consistent access or subscriptions. We used simple conditional logic and React state to manage budgets, goals, and the Learn page. The whole platform was built to be fast, easy to use, and actually make sense for students figuring out money for the first time.
We had a difficult time trying to incorporate characters into the app, trying to make it into a game, and reinforcing positive reinforcement to the user by using a point system where users would get points based on how they completed their goals and how much time they took.
We're proud of adding the characteristics of a moneyplant growing, and each goal having a flower which blooms as you come close to achieving it. both of these features tend to provide a small sense of achievement, which motivates the users to set and complete more goals. The other thing is to incorporate an entire page, dedicated to trying to help the user gain basic --- knowledge in an effort to help invest the saved money, because as we all know in economics, savings are equal to investments; which was the main thing we want the users to learn and enforce. A penny saved is a penny earned.
Over the course of building this platform, we tried our best to make it as user-friendly and intuitive as possible. That included thinking about how a young teenager would think, what features would be helpful, and how we could best try to make the app cater to every individual's own personal needs.
We are going to build this into a gaming app, with cute characters that jump around from screen to screen. So, every time you add money into a goal you have, your character plucks out money from the money plant and adds it to the goal line and levels up. In the future, we're also going to have an option to link your bank account, so you don't have to worry about manually adding each transaction or worry about missing a subscription payment. The same can be done for Apple Pay, Google Wallet, or any external apps like Venmo. BudgetBloom will have it all covered.
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