Funancial

Funancial’s mission is to spread financial literacy to young adults. Our memorable and engaging website encourages high schoolers and college students to seek and spread financial knowledge.

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Inspiration

The idea for our project came about when one of our team members mentioned they opened a Roth IRA. This started a conversation on what everyone our age should know about finances and how difficult it is to figure out the world of finances without having intergenerational knowledge. We created a website to hook young adults into building their wealth and to house basic resources to open a Roth IRA, open a first credit card, file your own taxes, and more.

What it does

Funancial's website has three components: 1) Funancial Calculator, 2) Funancial Quiz, and 3) Funancial Resources. The Funancial Calculator inputs the user's age, income, savings, and interest in investing, and outputs a story of how their money will grow or stagnate depending on their investment choices. The Funancial Quiz hooks users to discover which billionaire they are based on a series of personal questions. Funancial Resources offers educational resources for users to open their first Roth IRA, their first credit card, to file taxes, to start budgeting, and more.

How we built it

We used Matlab to build a precise Funancial Calculator with multiple choices for investing to give a precise prediction of the amount of money they would have by the age of retirement. We used Javascript to implement Matlab into the webpage. We used Bootstrap as a template for our website. We implemented a simple Buzzfeed-style quiz using Javascript (Thanks to github.com/tushargugnani).

Challenges we ran into

Our first challenge was to narrow down which features we wanted to implement. We knew we wanted to choose three, and it was difficult to let go of certain ideas (for example, we wanted to do a "letter to yourself" in the style of FutureMe regarding the user's financial goals). Another challenge was implementing the quiz, particularly adjusting images to fit the skeleton code. Figuring out how to deploy the website onto Github was an obstacle due to how our repository was structured. And finally, the Funancial Calculator offered challenges regarding the transfer of code from Matlab to Github.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of every hurdle we overcame, the relationships we built as a team, and all of the financial knowledge we learned and shared with each other through through the creating of Funancial!

What we learned

We learned that certain languages can be complex, and noticed advantages of one over the other. We learned how to work as a team, in particularly how to communicate milestones, goalposts, and deadlines so we could stay in sync and on track.

What's next for Funancial

An idea we loved but didn't have time to implement was creating a tool for users to schedule send emails to themselves based on prompts such as "What is your financial goal in the coming year?" This lets users reflect on their goals and send gentle reminders to themselves to stay on track with their finances. It also allows Funancial to develop a community of returning users.

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