Fantasy Finance

Like many college students, we love fantasy football. The competition, rivalries, trash talk, and excitement of checking our matchups every week keep us coming back. The only problem? We weren't exactly making money from it.

After losing a little too much money playing fantasy football, we started wondering what would happen if we took that same competitive energy and put it toward something that actually improved our financial futures. Instead of losing money competing against our friends, what if we could compete to save it? That's how Fantasy Finance was born.

Fantasy Finance turns personal finance into a competitive fantasy sports experience. Players compete against friends in monthly head-to-head matchups, earning points based on how efficiently they manage spending, savings, investments, and bills.

Unlike traditional financial leaderboards, Fantasy Finance uses personalized budgets based on each player's financial circumstances, making competition fair regardless of income. Each financial category acts like a fantasy sports position, contributing to an overall efficiency score. With interactive matchups, league standings, and monthly performance reports, we make building better financial habits fun, social, and rewarding.

We built Fantasy Finance using React, TypeScript, and Vite, integrating Capital One's Nessie API to simulate banking transactions, balances, and financial activity.

We developed a personalized budgeting and efficiency scoring engine that evaluates spending, savings, investing, and bills. We then designed a fantasy-inspired interface with head-to-head matchups, league standings, and interactive financial visualizations.

Our biggest challenge was creating a fair scoring system where players with different incomes could compete equally. We realized that allowing users to set their own budgets could make the system easy to exploit.

We addressed this by developing a baseline engine that generates personalized financial targets based on income, expenses, and financial obligations. Another challenge was translating complex financial calculations into an engaging fantasy sports experience.

We're especially proud of building a scoring engine that rewards responsible financial decisions rather than wealth, making financial competition accessible to people in different financial situations.

We're also proud of combining financial analytics with fantasy sports mechanics, creating an experience where everyday spending and saving decisions contribute to competitive matchups and league performance.

We learned that gamifying personal finance requires more than simply assigning points to transactions. Building meaningful competition means understanding financial behavior, designing fair incentives, and making calculations transparent.

We also gained experience working with banking APIs, developing financial scoring algorithms, and designing an intuitive user experience that balances financial literacy with entertainment.

We plan to integrate Plaid for real financial account connectivity and SpacetimeDB to support real-time multiplayer matchups, synchronized leaderboards, and competitive leagues.

We also want to introduce an AI financial coach powered by Gemini that identifies opportunities for improvement, provides personalized recommendations, and helps players maximize their financial efficiency while building healthier money habits.

Ultimately, our goal is to make managing money something people genuinely look forward to. And if Fantasy Finance helps us save back some of the money we lost playing fantasy football, that's a win too.

Technologies used and planned: React, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vite, HTML, CSS, Capital One Nessie API, Plaid API (planned), SpacetimeDB (planned), and Gemini API (planned).