Budget Buddy

Stop letting money control you. Our app gives you the power to budget without stress, find credit cards that work for you, and make mortgage decisions with confidence.Take back your financial freedom!

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Our Inspiration

Our story started with a very real concern we’ve all felt as college students; financial security. We wanted the ability to plan our financial future with confidence. It was frustrating not knowing how much we’d need for things like housing or a car, and we realized we needed something to give us clarity and control. Building this application gave us our confidence back in our financial well-being.

What it does

Budget Buddy is a personal finance management app that empowers users to take control of their financial future. It simplifies budgeting for home and auto expenses, helps users find the best credit cards based on their needs, and provides tools for making informed mortgage decisions. With AI-driven insights, Budget Buddy offers personalized recommendations on saving, spending, and financial planning, enabling users to reduce stress and make confident choices. It's designed to help people track their financial health, set goals, and ultimately take back control of their money. The core features are: Create a budget, then based on your budget, create personalized tips using AI, Make me a Budget, uses AI to create a budget based on your income and expected savings each month, Credit card recommendation: Get the best credit cards on the market based on your needs (i.e. travel), Mortgage Calculator: Uses an external API that analyzes the market and gives you an accurate estimate for your mortgage based on today's rate

How We Built It

Our app is powered by advanced technologies like React, Firebase, and AI, delivering a smooth and intuitive user experience. With secure login, users can easily input their financial details into a personalized dashboard, where our AI provides tailored, actionable insights to guide their financial decisions.

Challenges We Faced

Our main challenges were integrating different APIs, learning Next.js, and implementing AI features. Working with various APIs took some effort to ensure everything functioned seamlessly. Using Next.js introduced new tools and techniques that enhanced the app’s performance and scalability. The AI features needed to be effective yet easy for users to navigate, so we focused on keeping the design user-friendly. These challenges pushed us to refine our process and improve the overall product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team has an endless list of accomplishments during shellacks we are proud of. For one of us, it was our first time building a full-stack application. For the rest of us, we all dove and learned a lot about using the OpenAi API. Converting our financial tips to speech was another huge accomplishment, in that we can assist those in need of audio to receive their financial advise. We are also proud to advance our knowledge in react as well as progress in full-stack applications incorporating AI as a big feature in our application.

What We Learned

This hackathon has been a truly transformative experience for our team. For one of our members, it was their first time working with full-stack development, learning to navigate both the front-end and back-end with technologies like React and Firebase. It was a steep learning curve, but an incredibly rewarding one. For the rest of the team, we challenged ourselves to explore the capabilities of AI in a new context: personal finance. From understanding how to implement machine learning algorithms to developing an AI that provides meaningful financial advice, we pushed beyond our comfort zones. By the end of this experience, we came away with new skills and a deeper appreciation for how AI can empower users to make smarter financial choices.

What's next for Budget Buddy

Budget Buddy has exponential potential in assisting users with their financial growth. With future growth and support, Budget Buddy aims to become a trusted resource that gives back to the community. Our team is very passionate about Budget Buddy and we intend on using it for our own personal finances and hope others will join us in our financial success.

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