Inspiration
As soon-to-be college students, learning the basics of personal finance and wise spending are important to us. We want to come out of college as debt-free as possible, manage our resources, and we thought that as we went on this journey ourselves, we could also create a tool for others who have similar circumstances. Even from a simple Google search, it is starkly evident that financial management is no easy task, and we wished to provide our users with a free resource to try to address the debt sector of financial management.
What it does
Our website gathers crucial financial data from users, including details regarding income, essential expenses, and existing loans. Using their data, we make their lives easier by calculating out relevant info, such as their total weekly expenses and loan repayments at the given payback rate.
How we built it
We programmed our website on Visual Studio Code, using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As web development beginners, we spent a large amount of time watching YouTube videos, reading documentation, and reviewing resources such as GeeksForGeeks, W3Schools, and StackOverflow to understand the basics of web development. Being a loan repayment and savings calculation tool, we used formulas found online as well as our own calculations using data collected from the user.
Challenges we ran into
As aforementioned, being beginners, we struggled at several points during the programming process, for example, creating dropdown menus, printing user required expenses as they submitted, and using user input to make calculations of loan with interest. Additionally, it took us a long time to make accurate calculations and write our own functions of interest and debt payment.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Outside of our project, we are proud of acquiring and demonstrating web development knowledge within two days. We are also excited to have successfully completed our first hackathon!
What we learned
We gained a lot of proficiency in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It's a lot harder to make a website than what you might think! Since we also had to do a lot of research on finance to bring our users the most optimal experience, we also gained a lot of insight into how financial management (specifically debt management) is handled.
What's next for DebtEase
We've only had two days to work on this, so it's definitely a work in progress, but we are still super proud of our project so far. We definitely want to refine the appearance of the website, and the structure itself. We recognize that there is still so much more to financial management that we haven't covered, so in the future, we will be enhancing our framework.
License
We are operating under the MIT license.
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