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Our initial planning map
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A layout of our dashboard page, including a display of account balances and weekly or monthly reports
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Our most important section: the budgeting page, where you can view and add transactions, calculate earnings and track spending
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A fairly basic savings page, with a total savings balance followed by goal, total and remaining balances towards specific funds
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A resource page with REAL scholarships and grants with information for each, and functionality to search or sort
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This financial tips page had two initial versions: a mosaic and a list layout, both with hyperlinked resources
Inspiration
Our inspiration came from seeing high schoolers who full-time jobs and academics, struggle to budget for future expenses like college. We realized that financial literacy was a skill that many students needed but rarely had access to in a way that aligned with their busy lives.
What it does
Full-time Finance is a comprehensive app that helps high school students manage their finances effectively. It allows them to track their earnings from part-time jobs, monitor spending, set savings goals for college, find scholarships, and learn financial literacy essentials.
How we built it
We built Full-time Finance using Java Swing for the GUI, ensuring cross-platform compatibility. We used NetBeans IDE for its robust Swing support and integrated WindowBuilder in Eclipse for rapid UI development. Data persistence was handled through a local file system initially, with plans to scale to a database.
Challenges we ran into
Implementing a user-friendly interface that was also information-rich was challenging. Ensuring data integrity and security, especially when handling personal financial information, required careful consideration and research into best practices.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We’re proud of creating an application that’s not just functional but also educational. Our app’s design intuitively guides users through the basics of budgeting and financial planning, which is an accomplishment given that using Eclipse was a new experience for all of us.
What we learned
We learned a lot about UI/UX design, the importance of data security, and the intricacies of financial planning. Balancing simplicity with functionality in a financial app was a significant learning experience for us.
What's next for Full-time Finance
Moving forward, we plan to integrate Full-time Finance with live financial data by linking bank accounts, implement cloud-based data storage and synchronization, and connect with financial experts to provide better resources. In the future, we also aim to partner with schools and educational institutions to provide this tool as a resource for students, once our app is fully functional, efficient and secure.
Additional Details
While working on Full-time Finance, we faced some unexpected challenges that limited our timeline. Despite these issues, we put together a strong concept with a solid and impactful application. It’s designed to teach teens about managing money, which is an essential skill in this increasingly digitized world, and with further development, we genuinely believe that our app could help many working high school students around the world. Right now, our app is just starting out, but we plan to continue fixing, improving and expanding this idea after this hackathon. Hopefully, this can one day be something that makes an impact for those that need it.
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