Find Your Way Home

Inspiration

We were inspired by wanting to make personal finance education more accessible and easy to understand. When a person attempts to purchase a home, there are several factors which determine whether they are approved or not. These include the individual's credit score, various debts, gross income, and more. This process is often not very transparent, leaving people confused about why exactly they are currently not in a financial position to purchase a certain home. In order to help people understand their current potential to purchase a house and provide suggestions on how to improve this position, we created "Find Your Way Home". "Find Your Way Home" is a home purchase eligibility calculator which informs users on whether or not they will be approved to purchase a certain home based on their financial information.

What it does

Our web application is made for potential homeowners understand their ability to buy a home. We also provide analysis based on a form filled out with the individual's income, payments, and debt. Moreover, we provide graphs and mathematical analysis on their input. We also provide resources for those who need help on different areas such as increasing their credit score.

How we built it

We used Python to create the data visualizations for the graphs that display how different factors of a person's finances affect their eligibility to purchase a home. We also used React.js to create the front end of the website: the eligibility form, the form results, and recommendations to help users reach their goal of purchasing a home.

Challenges we ran into

We had a few issues determining what python frameworks work best in order to visualize the Fannie Mae dataset we were provided with. We had to experiment with different data visualizations in order to determine which factors were correlated and demonstrated meaningful trends. For the front end of the website using React we experienced some issues implementing MaterialUI components in React to allow for better styling for elements on the webpage so we read through documentation and worked on how to implement UI/UX features.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully implemented a home purchase eligibility form that accepts user input for various factors that determine eligibility like loan amounts and credit scores. The website displays the results of the form that help a user identify which of their metrics fall below recommendations and determines whether a user is eligible to purchase a home or should reevaluate their plans with an advisor. The website also displays data visualizations of historical data that allow users to see patterns in factors that help users improve their level of eligibility.

What we learned

We learned how to implement different features with the new technologies we got exposed such as carousel features, cards with Material UI, and other UX/UI components. We also were exposed to several new python libraries such as Matplotlib and Seaborn.

What's next for Find Your Way Home

We are planning to deploy and host our application on the cloud using AWS or GitHub pages for greater scalability and reliability. We also want to provide user authentication for better security and user experience using either Auth0 or Firebase authentication.