Compound Interest Calculator

Live demo site
Figma concept

Inspiration

We were inspired by our interest in finance to develop a user-friendly web application that allows users to calculate earnings from a mutual fund. Our goal is to provide a fun interactive way to visualize the growth of funds, and also to educate users on the importance of investing early.

What it does

Users will enter the principal, appreciation, monthly contribution, and years invested. Additionally, users may enter a percent of depreciation if they want to account for factors like inflation. The website will then generate a graph showing the growth of their imaginary funds over the given period of time.

How we built it

Contributions

Jacob Harris: Backend Developer, Data Storage
Bryant Monahan: Backend Developer, Spring Interactions
Jeff Luo: Frontend Developer, Graph Generation
Daniel Fairchild: Concept Designer, Documentation

We made the decision to split our work between a front end and back end application to maximize our efficiency based on our programming backgrounds. In the back end, Jacob and Bryant worked hard to develop methods used to calculate the growth of an investment each month and created a link between back end and front end classes. In the front end, Daniel and Jeffrey worked on the design and the implementation. Daniel worked on the Figma concept design while Jeffrey worked on the front end using React, Tailwind CSS, and Recharts to graph the data.

Challenges we ran into

Sending Data:
- Problem: Initial difficulty sending data and utilizing methods from the back end to the front end and vice versa.
- Solution: The team used a file to save data and format it as a JSON for front end to read.
Creating JSON Objects:
- Problem: JSON objects had too much information and were difficult for front end coders to recompile.
- Solution: Created a new class that stores key values to make it easier to store data sent to front end as JSON objects.
Collaboration:
- Problem: Struggled finding best means of working on the same class at once. Originally used Microsoft live server, but struggled with program crashing and code being lost.
- Solution: Turned to simply forking code from GitHub Repo to VSCode. Overcame issues of interfering with others' progress by clearly communicating what changes were being made.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating Website Functionality: Front end created a functioning groundwork for our website with intuitive graphing capabilities.
- Spring Boot Both front end and back end succeeded in implementing Spring Boot to send files back and forth, which proved very challenging at first.

What we learned

Efficiency can be maximized by organizing teamwork before the event. It is crucial to set up a clear direction with coders to fill established roles.

What's next for Compound Interest Calculator

We hope to get our code running on a functioning website to be used by interested students. We would also like to add extra functionality by allowing users to enter how much money they would like to have in a given time, in which the program would then let the user know what combination of principle, monthly payment, and appreciation they would need to achieve that profit.