Money Moves

Money Moves 💸

Our Inspiration:

For most first-year college students, especially young women, this is the first time managing money, career decisions, and independence all at once. The ultimate problem is budgeting apps being rearview mirrors. They tell you what you spent after it's gone.

One of us had a trip to North Carolina coming up and was still spending on takeout and games the week before. Not because she didn't care about the trip, but because our brains don't connect today's small purchase to next month's big goal. Meanwhile, Strava proved that when progress becomes social and visible, people show up for hard things every single day. So we asked: what if your money worked like Strava?

What Money Moves does:

Money Moves turns saving into a social, game-powered experience: Your Life Roadmap. Instead of one savings account, you build a roadmap: ✈️ Japan Trip, 📸 Canon Camera, 🚗 First Car, 🏠 First Apartment. Each goal gets an emoji, a progress bar, and a "why this matters" note. Watching the bars fill feels like leveling up in a game, because people don't save for money, they save for memories, freedom, and independence.

A virtual pet powered by your streak. Duolingo's owl guilts you about lessons; our pet guilts you about your money habits. Complete your daily financial check-ins and it stays happy, evolving at streak milestones. Miss a day, it gets sad. Miss a week, it's visibly droopy and waiting for you.

Two systems, on purpose: the pet reacts to your habits (showing up daily); the progress bars react to your money (dollars saved). A broke week doesn't kill your pet, skipping the app does. That keeps it fair for students with irregular income.

A social friends system that shares progress, never dollars. Friends see "12-day streak 🔥" and "Japan Trip: 50%", never balances. Everyone competes on percentage, so the playing field is equal regardless of income. Milestones post to the feed, friends send kudos and cheers, and our Instagram-style messages let you celebrate each other's money moves directly. Privacy by design.

Money Minutes: learning that feeds your pet. 60-second, zero-jargon lessons count as daily tasks. Complete one and your pet gets fed. Lessons are triggered by your life, not a curriculum: saving for a trip unlocks travel budgeting; your first paycheck unlocks "why your check is smaller than you expected." Every financial term in the app is tap-to-learn.

Money → career, made visible. Career goals live in the Life Roadmap ("Emergency fund. So I can take the internship I actually want"), and a Career Money lesson path covers negotiating your first offer and understanding benefits. Financial confidence is career confidence.

Tracking & projections. Spending is auto-categorized from transactions (Plaid sandbox data), and projections show where you'll be in 3, 6, and 12 months if you stay on track.

How we built it:

Design: Full UI/UX designed in Figma (plus Figma Make for interactive UI exploration) Frontend: React web app Data: Plaid sandbox (dummy) data to simulate bank transactions, categorization, and balance awareness Database: [YOUR DB — e.g., Firebase / Supabase] powering the friends system, messages, and shared milestones Scope decision: We deliberately built ONE complete user journey. One demo user, end to end, rather than five half-finished features

Challenges we ran into:

Challenges We Ran Into

One of our biggest challenges was deploying the React application and making sure it connected properly with our Flask backend. At first, the application would not build or deploy correctly because of issues with the repository structure and hosting setup. We overcame this by debugging the code, reorganizing parts of the repository, and configuring Render correctly until the website successfully went live.

Another challenge was connecting the Plaid API so users could view their bank balances and transaction history. At first, the API key was not configured correctly, so the banking data did not appear in the app. We reviewed the API documentation, studied the available use cases, corrected how the API key was stored, and debugged the integration until the banking information successfully appeared in the application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

A privacy-first social model no major fintech has cracked: community without comparison of dollars. A streak mechanic proven by Duolingo, applied to money habits, with a pet that makes consistency emotional. A working friends system with real database connectivity, built in under 24 hours. Goals framed as life experiences. A design philosophy, not just a feature. Hitting all five solution criteria in the challenge prompt: money management, technology & games, community, career connection, and an empowering, accessible experience.

What we learned:

Maryam: I learned what it truly takes to build a web application, even when it is only a demo. I gained experience with designing the user interface, organizing the different pages, and thinking about how each feature should work together to create a smooth experience for the user. I also learned more about the technical side of development, including how APIs connect different systems, how API keys are used, and how the frontend communicates with the backend.

Catie: I leaned a lot about how to create, manage, and present a presentation for a tech-powered tool aimed for finances. It gave me good insight on some of the coding needed for a web application, as well as the relation to financial literacy for young, early career women seeking assistance. I was interested in the topic a lot, and enjoyed writing out the descriptions on the slides and connecting it to the ultimate challenge requests. I got to learn that effective financial tools for the next generation must go beyond passive tracking to provide active, community-driven empowerment beyond just literacy. Creating it all under a quick deadline allowed me to learn good collaboration skills and trust between team members in different roles.

oscar: I learnt a lot of important technical skills, such as using API keys, keeping environment variables, working with postgresql databases and hosting web servers. The last one in particular was most challenging to me, since I had to remotely build the React application (a framework I was unfamiliar with) and learn web hosting in mere hours. Most importnatly though, I learnt how to properly split up development between Frontend (done by Karina) and Backend (done by me), and then integrate the two together. I thought it simulated a real development pipeline and working in a multi-faceted team

karina: Though my main focus was figuring out the front-end and how to make the UI we designed actually come to life, I learned a lot about other technical aspects, specifically, the backend. I learned about different softwares and how to connect datatbases to store user information. In addition to that, along with the team, I learned how to save the information and how to connect APIs to fetch the information.

king: I learned a lot from this Hackathon experience. First, I learned that teamwork is very important. We had to communicate, share ideas, and work together to finish our project in a short amount of time. I also learned how the front end and back end work together to build a complete application. This helped me better understand the software development process. In addition, I learned how to use Figma to design a user interface. I created the first version of our app layout in Figma and then used Figma AI to improve and refine the design. Throughout the project, I also improved my problem-solving, communication, and time management skills. Overall, this experience taught me that building a successful product requires not only technical skills but also collaboration, creativity, and continuous learning.

What's next for Money Moves:

Kudos system. Add special outfits or different pet avatars for leveling up or goals completed. AI features able to tell when a user has been at a job for an extended period of time, to give tips on negotiating a raise. Add a tool to help users understand their specific benefits (ex. 401k) and translate jargon into the progress-bar format. AI resources to delegate portions of a paycheck into separate savings based on the user’s curated “roadmap”. Small chat rooms curated for users with similar career goals.

Built With

• api
• claude
• codex
• figma
• flask
• gemini
• plaid
• postgresql
• react
• sqlalchemy