Inspiration
Our inspiration for the project stems from our motivation to inform our fellow students. Having three mature students in our team, concerns about future savings and planning are likely a larger concern to us and thought it would be interesting for fellow students to start thinking about financial planning and how saving early can lead to larger results in the long run.
What it does
The app allows for students to currently project how their retirement might look like. Using the interface and entering relevant data in the fields, our app is able to give an estimate based on the average salaries compiled in their potential work sector, how much money would be potentially be saved up at a standard retirement age, and how much money they would need to live on. From there the user can check how an extra year or one less spent working can affect this lump sum and how other variables (higher paying work domains, saving more of their salaries, paying off student debt) can also drastically influence these numbers. This may then provide some feedback on how viable current career plans are or provide some financial consciousness on how starting to save through investments early can lead to huge changes for the future.
How we built it
The app was built using react Back-end calculations for compound interest/yearly stipend post retirement/debt repayment were done using java script. Different estimated salaries for each degree were scraped from link using the python library beautifulsoup.
Challenges we ran into
Jason: I had little to no experience in react and javascript, thus I had to rely more on reading up on functions and syntax to contribute. I was however able to work mostly on the calculations in the back-end and contributed mostly in that aspect.
Malek: I've never done any web scraping so learning how to use beautifulsoup was interesting. I also hadn't used react in some time so getting reacquainted with it took some time.
Tristan: Having a lot more experience in React Native than React, I was glad to be able to get more experience in the latter. I realize that I underestimated how different the two frameworks can be. I also got the chance to practice git, which we used extensively between the three of us.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
That we were able to finish the project successfully. This was every members first in person hackathon and it was our main goal to have a finish product by the end of the submission time. We are also happy with the product it self (how it looks, since none of us really have any UI/UX experience) and the fact we were able to host a website that is now readily accessible.
What we learned
The main contributing factor to our success what properly planning our project from the start. Spending an hour in order to talk about features we expect/what we understand about what needs to be done/allocating tasks to each other, really allowed us to properly make use of each others time and assured that everyone understood the project correctly and was on the same wavelength for the final product.
What's next for Investment planning app
The web app will be available on link to be a potential resource for future students. Potential features that can be implemented in the future are factoring cost of children, numbers of how much retirement can realistically cost, how grad school can increase starting salaries but might result in larger debts, etc.
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