Own Your Loan

Inspiration

Personal loans can increase your overall purchasing power, but many people take up loans they can't afford, ending in a cycle of debt. We want to help people in the cost-benefit analysis of taking up a loan by converting numbers into things, which humans find it easier to think about. Visualizations help to drive home what the opportunity cost of a loan is, or what the benefits of investing in a high-yield savings account are, for example.

What it does

Own Your Loan is a website that takes in user input on the user's financial situation and infographic preferences (e.g. whether they want visualisations based on the number of coffees, laptop costs etc.) and transforms these into easy to understand infographics. For the time being, we have scaled pictures of coffee cups to visually show proportions between amounts of money! In the future, it should also compare loan schemes between banks and translate the cost and benefits of these into visualizations depending on what the user wants to translate the numbers into.

How we built it

We set up a GitHub repository for our project and used HTML, CSS and Javascript (languages none of us have ever worked with before) to create a website. We used online tutorials and stack overflow for learning, which was rather laborious but our lack of experience meant that even putting a button on the page made us feel like coding gurus :-)

Challenges we ran into

With no prior experience building websites, coding in HTML, CSS or Javascript, and most of our group not having used GitHub for collaborative coding, this project was very challenging. Given the timeframe it was important we learnt quickly and efficiently. Here are a few challenges and things we learnt: -Understanding the structure of website building and how the different blocks relate to each other

How the languages are structured in terms of syntax and writing functions
How to incorporate javascript with the html
How to make buttons, change colours, fonts, images and navigate between pages
How to take user input and transfer it between pages

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud our website works! Although it doesn't have all the features we intended to yet, having functioning buttons, page navigation and the ability to take user input to do interest calculations is amazing :-)