Budget Bunny

Inspiration

With the increase of reliance on online banking services due to general digitization as well as COVID-19, online banking has naturally become the main platform for financial management for many individuals. We would like to make sure that such a platform is equally accessible to youth, especially females who tend to have lower financial confidence, as many now have bank accounts at a young age.

What it does

Budget Bunny is a simple financial management app for young female teens, providing features including setting saving goals, tracking progress towards such goals, basic bank account transaction features, and educational personal finance videos. Its minimal and intuitive interface makes it easy to use and understand, also providing a visually-inviting user experience.

How we built it

By using a collaborative browser based IDE to create the application’s functions and Figma to design and showcase the user experience, we built Budget Bunny.

Challenges we ran into

Developing our idea was the main challenge as we had to ensure there was demand, it had a unique selling proposition, and it was feasible to code with our skills. It took a lot of time to flush out our idea as many features we wanted to include were not possible at our skill level or our budget; however, we were able to communicate continuously until we reached an agreement on a product/service that was both desirable and feasible.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although this was our first hackathon, we were able to use the numerous workshops to learn new skills, solve a problem, and develop a minimum viable product for our idea! With minimal experience using Figma to design/prototype, we were able to learn how to use its myriad of features and successfully execute a fully designed prototype.

What we learned

After a gruelling but exciting 36 hours as novice hackers, we learned how to work together to target a problem, design an effective solution, and create an MVP that we are all proud of! Battling COVID’s additional challenges of zoom fatigue and working from a distance was a great learning experience and helped us remember the importance of taking breaks, calls to regroup, and providing support without being there in person.

We also took advantage of the workshops to refine and discover new techniques, skills, and interests that we hope to continue to advance in the future.

What's next for Budget Bunny

Budget Bunny is very much a work in progress, and we have many features that we would like to add if given more time, including personal usage metrics, multiple ongoing saving plans, saving history, and more customizability to savings plans. We hope to develop and implement more metrics to determine the effectiveness of Budget Bunny within our key demographic in the future as well. We would all love to revisit Budget Bunny someday when equipped with the right skills and tools to develop a fully functional app!