Inspiration
Budgeting as students studying abroad was an issue we saw in ourselves and others. There are many apps that aren’t tailored to behavioural traits and are ineffective in helping us budget. We felt it was necessary to create a tool that is personalised to ensure a maintainable plan that aligns with your lifestyle and spending habits.
What it does
It is a visual web application that starts with a questionnaire covering your spending habits, including an International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) that asks questions about your behavioral traits. Through this personality-informed method, this tool creates a weekly/monthly budget plan that is suitable for the user. Additionally, it can plan around your budget or suggest a budget for you, provide tips that will help maximise your savings, and provide you with 3 types of plans depending on your priorities (saver, balanced, or social budget).
How we built it
We discussed our ideas on ways to integrate a psychological aspect with the issue of budget planning, and created prompts that we put into Claude AI. To create the prompts, we used the following behavioural dimensions in order to curate an appropriate plan for the user: methodicalness +organisation, risk taking + fun seeking, and gregariousness + extraversion. Claude wrote the code necessary for creating the web application, which we then put into Visual Studio Code.
Challenges we ran into
We struggled to understand the code and how to run it in VS. Additionally, one of the commands in the code was incorrect, so we used Claude to understand what the issue was and how to fix it. Finally, we used Claude to understand the basics of the code, as we don't have any prior coding experience.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of integrating our studies into a field that we are not familiar with, and using it to create a web app that would help with an issue we faced when we first started studying in London.
What we learned
We learned the basics of coding, translating ideas into software, and how to use our studies to solve real life problems as international students.
What's next for BudgetBestie
This app is tailored for London university students, so we can include other countries and ensure that transportation, entertainment, groceries, etc are specific to the location. Furthermore, this web application is a budget planner, but an add-on function could be a budget tracker that would help determine if any changes to the original plan are needed.
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