Inspiration
Credit cards are one of the most common ways to make purchases. They are quick and convenient, they enable us to make online purchases, and many of them offer rewards and additional consumer protections. But all these benefits do not come without a cost. With such easy access to capital, consumer debt is at an all time high. As of fall 2020, Canadians owe over $2 trillion dollars in consumer debt (an average of over $63, 000 per adult).
One might then wonder, why not avoid credit cards altogether and use cash and debit for all purchases. This would prevent you from taking on debt and having to pay hefty interest penalties, but it would also mean you miss out on the valuable cashback and/or airline miles your credit card offers. Furthermore, it's much harder to keep a record of purchases you made in cash, meaning you won't be able to leverage that data to better understand your spending patterns and budget more effectively.
What if you could have the best of both worlds? What if you could get cashback on your purchases without risking taking on debt, all while being able to leverage data about your spending habits to better help you make and stick to a budget.
What it does
Introducing CARDio. The first 'credit'-card that pays YOU interest.
You pre-pay a certain amount of money to your card at the start of every month, this amount is your spending limit. Your deposit is invested and sold incrementally as you spend it over the course of the month. At the end of the month, you pay back all that you have spent, but the return that your deposit generated is yours to keep. You can choose to either apply it towards your credit card bill or to reinvest it and leverage the power of compounding.
- You can choose how to invest and earn interest on your unspent budget throughout the month.
- We show you analytics of your usage to nudge you towards budgeting your money and saving for the long-term.
How we built it
- The front-end is built using React and Material-UI.
- The back-end is a REST API built in Nest.js with a MongoDB database.
Challenges we ran into
- We first tried to build a React Native mobile app, but found that we didn't have enough expertise on this to actually build the app like we wanted.
- So last night we had to restart in plain React js for the web.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Building our first hackathon project in React, MongoDB.
- Brad's first time working on a team where everyone was very competent.
What we learned
- It's very important to resolve the product vision and conflicts regarding at the start of the process rather than leave it for later on.
What's next for CARDio
- Add the banking infrastructure to actually allow people to charge money to cards using the Modern Treasure banking APIs.
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