Chips to Spare

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Savings
AI Analysis

Hi, we are Chips to Spare, the smarter way to budget.

Chips to Spare is a digital piggy bank that helps users easily allocate their money into customizable savings goals, track progress in real time, and build healthier financial habits without feeling overwhelmed. Unlike traditional budgeting apps, Chips to Spare makes saving feel tangible, rewarding, and dead-simple, turning everyday spenders into confident savers. We believe Chips to Spare is the future of personal finance — accessible, intuitive, and empowering for everyone.

Inspiration

Finances are tough. Everyday we’re faced with so many options, yet we only have a limited budget. We must make careful choices and be conscious of our spending habits. With this in mind, we wanted to develop a tool that anyone can use to spend money in a responsible manner. Ideally, it would serve as a reminder of one’s financial goals, while also assisting with budgeting needs.

What Chips to Spare does

Chips to Spare is a financially conscious web app, designed to make saving as smooth as can be. Users can add an unlimited number of saving targets to suit their needs, each with a saving goal based on their best estimate. Specifically, it can automatically contribute a percentage of a user’s income towards all of their saving goals, on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. If users want more control over your savings, they can make individual direct deposits to their saving targets as well. Users can track active saving targets, but they can archive them as well. Completed saving targets give users complete flexibility: they can either continue saving toward these goals, or archive them for future reference. Chips to Spare also provides advice and recommendations regarding saving progress on a target-by-target basis, so that users can make the most informed savings decisions.

How we built it

We built Chips to Spare using React. We thought it would be interesting to create an app that helps people to budget and save up for fun trips and dream purchases. They are able to input various goals they would like to reach in terms of savings, and can track their progress through monthly deposits. While building the project, we used Git as our primary form of version control and brainstormed our thoughts on Google Docs.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into include routing within our web page. As we expanded our project from the main page to include the profile page and login pages, we ran into merging issues from multiple developers editing React Routing information. However, we were able to debug around this through our thorough commit history throughout the development process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have created a fully functional web app so quickly, that incorporates routing and email authentication. With our app, we are able to create targets for money saving, edit saving goals, and receive feedback on our current habits.

What we learned

We learned that while it is very easy to get a rough skeleton of the app, a lot of small details go into completing an app. There are a lot of functionalities that are needed, such as ensuring that if a user deletes a saving target, the total money saved correspondingly goes down. In general, there could be endless small details that need to be implemented to make the app both secure for users and intuitive to use.

What's next for Chips to Spare

One next step we foresee for Chips to Spare include deploying it as a mobile app. We envision a platform where users can plan on the go and collaborate with friends and family in planning group trips or other expensive purchases. Another improvement would be to offer the option of automatically depositing these funds to savings to assist with the investment process.