Inspiration
Inspired by helping people from low-income backgrounds budget their finances better, we sought out to create an alternative to traditional budgeting apps, which often cost money, being counterintuitive for a low-income audience. That's why we made PathForward, a zero-based budgeting website that makes people think about how they spend their money.
What it does
With zero-based budgeting, you are more conscious about your finances. After reporting a monthly income, you are required to spend every dollar of it to a category. PathForward covers common expenses like rent, groceries, dining, and shopping. Leftover dollars are put in a "savings envelope" which users can track over time to understanding how much money they are spending per month compared to what they want to set for that spending. PathForward aggregates your transactions from your bank account for you, so you don't have to count anything and can simply look at your spending habits and make adjustments. With your previous spending month laid out in front of you, you know exactly what changes to make for next month, helping you build a brighter and more financially secure future. Furthermore, users can set goals and check them off once accomplished, to keep their aspirations regularly in mind and ensure that they stay on track to achieving their financial goals.
How we built it
We utilized a MERN stack, utilizing MongoDB as our backend, React as our frontend, and Express and Node on the backend. During account creation, users report their monthly income and create a list of budgets which they set specifically amounts of money towards. To get the information from a user's bank account, we utilized the Plaid API to link a bank securely with our application, and pulled the most recent transactions from Plaid. With this, users can easily connect any bank they partner with from various institutions through a seamless UI integration. Afterwards, we query for a user's transactions and display a graph of recent monthly spending in specific categories which a user can filter by, and also two pie charts, one being a chart of the user's goal budget and the other being a chart of the user's actual spending towards each category for the previous month.
What's next for PathForward
In the future, we plan to enhance PathForward by integrating more personalized features. Our next goal is to offer financial literacy tips and goal-setting tools based on individual spending patterns, utilizing machine learning algorithms to tailor specifically to every user. We also aim to further differentiate from traditional budgeting apps by holding users accountable: as our monthly incomes are (typically) fixed, spending too much in a category like dining or transportation means that you have to cut down in another category. We plan to add a system that requires you to deduct overexpenses in one category from another category, to make users more likely to stick to their goals and achieve their financial aspirations.
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