BudgetBucket

Inspiration

As university students living away from home, and trying to become financially independent, we noticed how increasingly difficult it has become to afford necessities such as food.

According to Statistics Canada, food prices in the year 2022 rose the fastest since 1981. Prices for food purchased from stores rose 9.8% (Statistics Canada) with a CBC article from October 2022 reporting that

"Cereals are up 17.9 per cent. Baked goods are up 14.8 per cent. Fresh fruit is up by 12.9 per cent. Fresh vegetables are up by 11.8 per cent. Dairy products are up by 9.7 per cent. Meat prices are up by 7.6 per cent" (Pete Evans, CBC News).

The increasingly unaffordable prices for food became our inspiration for BudgetBucket.

What it does

BudgetBucket provides insight into how inflation is impacting your grocery list. Using recent data from the Consumer Price Index provided by Statistics Canada, BudgetBucket determines how significantly impacted each item is in your grocery list, and provides alternatives that you can consider. It also allows you to understand how financially sound your grocery purchases are by providing an overall inflation-impact score that explains how much your specific grocery list is influenced by food inflation.

How we built it

Our tech stack included: React.js MongoDB Google Cloud Platform Express.js Node.js

Challenges we ran into

Being able to problem solve and debug code while sleep deprived.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Turning a problem that we noticed in our daily lives into a viable solution. As well as picking up technologies we had not used before.

What we learned

Learned about inflation, the economy, and how to understand statistics related to the inflation of goods.

What's next for BudgetBucket

We want to improve our project by implementing a more integrated UI and use regression models to project a product's expected increase or decrease for the user.

Built With

• express.js
• gcp
• mongodb
• next.js
• react