Mecord

Inspiration

It is widely known that budgeting is key to building healthy spending habits and stable savings for the future. However, what exactly are we saving for? Without clear intentions, it is often difficult for people to stay motivated to follow their budget as the desire for immediate pleasure is naturally stronger than desire to invest in the future. Our budgeting system, Mecord, was born to guide people to set clear and intentional goals for their budget and savings, leading to decreased impulsive financial choices.

What it does

Mecord takes user's input of item they wish to save up for, its price, how many weeks they are willing to save up for, and their usual spendings. What sets Mecord apart from other budgeting platforms is that based on the ratio of the user's average expenses, Mecord recommends the user the best timeline for success. For example, if the user responds that they spend a lot of money on eating out or ordering takeout, the result will recommend them to have gradually increasing cuts in savings as they progress through the weeks to build healthy spending habits. The result table displays the maximum money the user can spend on each category and how much they will be saving in total per week.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build the frontend of the webpage. The input fields would be taken into the localStorage, then it would be used to calculate various factors such as necessities-non-necessities ratio, total savings, and types of distribution of savings through the weeks. Originally, the math was done in the backend using Kotlin, but due to technical issues with our devices, we decided to leave the calculation to Javascript as well. Once the distribution of savings and the expense values for each category were determined, it is neatly displayed on the results table.

Challenges we ran into

Our backend development in Kotlin began to break due to our commits clashing with each other. The Kotlin language and Gradle stopped working even after reinstallation of VS Code extensions. After 3 hours of debugging and reverting, we decided to steer back to the frontend and handle the math there instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our accomplishment of successfully reflecting our Kotlin script to a Javascript code.

What we learned

We learned that the communication between frontend and backend is crucial and that it needs many components installed before running properly. While exploring languages, we also discovered that Kotlin has many simplifications that Java does not offer, which makes it easier to visualize data structures and write the script. However, there were limitations as Kotlin was most suited for macOS and Linux platforms.

What's next for Mecord

With additional time for development, Mecord can implement more personalizing options to creating the budget, such as additional expense categories, greater variance in distributions, and using machine learning to identify user's spending patterns more accurately.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• kotlin