MoneyBuddy

Don't work harder, be financially smarter

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Inspiration💡

According to the OCED, only 1 in 3 adults worldwide understood basic financial concepts in 2021. This means that roughly 2/3 of the worldwide adult population lacks financial literacy and understands concepts like credit and budgeting. This is reinforced by the fact that in 2022, just the American adult population alone owned more than $800,000,000,000 (800 billion) in credit card debt, not including loans and other types of consumer debt. Our team wanted to make a difference and help improve financial literacy while reducing consumer debt, so we created MoneyBuddy, the app that helps you be financially smarter instead of working harder. This app mainly targets those who are in the lower middle class and are struggling financially, but it can be used to help people in all social classes.

What It Does⚙️

MoneyBuddy is a web application that helps you manage your money better. After registering on the website, you'll be asked to take a short survey, where you will be asked to provide some small blurbs about your financial situation. All of these factors will be run through an algorithm, which will calculate a "financial index" value ranging from -5 to +5 to represent how well you are doing financially. The index will be used along with your survey answers to provide personalized feedback on what you should do to reduce your debt and increase your wealth. All of these will be displayed on your dashboard, along with infographics to show your wealth. The dashboard shows you how much of your money you should spend on needs, spend on wants, and save for the future. It also tells you if you what type of spender you are, like a "average" spender for example.

How We Built It🛠️

Backend

The backend is built using the Python language and is hosted locally. It uses sqlalchemy to connect to a postgresql user info database running on railway.app. FastAPI is used to run the backend web server, which communicates with the frontend. PassLib is used for encrypting/decrypting user passwords in the SQL database and pyjwt is used for decrypting JS user tokens for secure login.

Frontend

The frontend is a website built using Vue.js and tailwindcss for the GUI elements. The code is stored on Github, and it's deployed using Github Pages and Github Actions.

Challenges We Ran Into 😭

  • Kris didn't have experience previously with Vue.js, so he had to learn as we were developing the app
  • We initially planned to use CockroachDB, but we couldn't connect to it using sqlalchemy because the driver library was having issues
  • We had issues installing dependencies for the backend (blame pip and windows)

Accomplishments We Are Proud Of🎉

  • How we managed to collaborate and work on the project while separated in different timezones with different sleep schedules
  • Making a working user authentication system in a short time span
  • Making all of the technologies (frontend and backend) we used work together without issues

What's Next For MoneyBuddy⏭️

A lot has to be done before MoneyBuddy can be released to the general public. Some of these things include:

  • Switching to hosting the backend and database on a AWS/GCP instance for scalability and account for traffic
  • Applying machine learning to offer personalized recommendations instead of using just a user index
  • Expanding the survey to collect more details for more accurate reccomendations
  • Partnering with financial organizations/governments to expand suggestions to topics like stocks to invest in and local government relief programs
  • Adding links to resources on how to manage your money better

Big shout-outs go to the developers of the libraries we used in our project, mokshalabs for creating the adorable logo we used and to the organizers of OneHacks for hosting this awesome hackathon!

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