Budgie

An app that teaches college students how to budget, one chirp at a time.

Comment

Inspiration

As college students, we know what it's like to be on a budget, and even to be struggling financially. We wanted to make an impact on our fellow students and ourselves, so we decided to create a budgeting application that is focused on improving a student's understanding of how a budget works, how they can budget on their own, and how they can be more financially literate.

What it does

Budgie introduces a gameified points system in which users can maintain or stay under their budget, read financial articles, and create a budget for themselves based on their monthly income and how much they want to save.

How we built it

When building Budgie, our team used HTML, Bootstrap, Javascript, and Typescript. We collaborated using a shared Github repository and Discord, where we added different branches and communicated information. We started by creating the website's bare bones, and then proceeded to build out its features. 3 members worked on the user interface while another worked on the Firebase, Javascript and Typescript functionality.

Challenges we ran into

While developing Budgie, we experienced difficulties, including merge conflicts, styling issues, and a learning curve for the tools used. Some of our members were new to Github, so actively using branches was a challenge we faced. We wanted to make our visual components more unified, so we changed course from using regular CSS to using Bootstrap, which caused some slowdown in our progress in order to learn the library. Lastly, each member of the team was learning a new tech stack, which allowed us to broaden our horizons, but also took longer.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

How well we worked together! Our team has never worked together on a project before, so being able to work comfortably together and understand each others' strengths and weaknesses was a great accomplishment. We are also very proud of our team for learning Git and Bootstrap in less than a day and creating a product that we ourselves would use. Lastly, we're proud of our 2 new-to-hackathon team members for being so willing and quick to learn, and doing a great job with their work.

What we learned

USE BRANCHES. We seriously learned how powerful version control is. We also learned parts of a project that each of us were unfamiliar with in an incredibly short amount of time. How to pace our work and take breaks was also another skill we learned. While an all-nighter does help to get work done, it's not so great for the brain.

What's next for Budgie

We would love to deploy Budgie as a fully-fledged mobile and web application through hosting! That way, users can keep up with their budget in a more accessible way. We would also love for users to be able to securely import their transaction data from a service/bank of their choice in the future (i.e. Plaid), so transactions don't have to be manually tracked. However, we also believe that manually tracking expenses can also help users be more aware of their spending habits. We hope to have quizzes to earn points, so users are more incentivized to learn. Lastly, we would love to add a financial news API, so that users can get a daily stream of financial content that can help foster financial literacy.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates