Embeddable Credit Score Calculator

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  Credit Score Estimator

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  Embedded into an article

Inspiration

I try to keep track of my credit score as much as possible. One thing I know for certain is that I am in the minority here. Many people my age are not well versed in the details of personal finance. I myself had to self-learn through many Google searches and finance related blogs and articles.

Reading articles is cool and all, but what I would have really appreciated would have been some sort of hands-on tool or app to see how concepts really worked, especially with something like the mysterious credit score. What if personal finance blog authors could easily add a credit score calculator app right into the middle of their article with just a single line of HTML???

What it does

This is an embeddable credit score calculator. It can be placed into any HTML page with a single iframe, with the source being the URL of the calculator (no downloads required!) How cool is that?

How I built it

I used HTML and a lot of CSS to prettify the application. Bootstrap 5.0 was used for the forms and organizational structure of the HTML. The calculator is entirely client-side JavaScript.

Challenges I ran into

I had to build my own credit score algorithm, which I describe as "Inspired by VantageScore 3.0". VantageScore 3.0 is a credit score model which is widely used by banks and other financial institutions to give users an estimate of their credit score without actually hard-pulling their real score. The problem? VantageScore 3.0 is proprietary, with only weightings of how much impact various features have on a user's credit score (i.e. paying off your credit is 40% of the score, credit utilization is 20%, and so on). However, this was good enough for me, and with information from how two of my banks categorized what was 'good' and 'poor' for features such as those aforementioned, I was able to build this app.

Another challenge was that I was working without a team, which certainly limits the scope of the project.

Accomplishments that I am proud of

It works! And it's fairly accurate, it got within 20 or less points of the real scores of multiple people, including myself, that I beta tested the calculator with!

What I learned

I learned how to use iframes, and learned how it is tricky to figure out how to ensure the app looks good on the parent HTML page.

What's next for Embeddable Credit Score Calculator

If the people who see this like it and see value in it, then I'll gladly buy a domain name and set up the files to be delivered via a CDN for people who wish to use it on their websites/articles/blogs.

Built With

• bootstrap
• css
• html
• javascript