Perfin: Personal Finance and you

Inspiration

A large percentage of the millennial generation and younger struggles with financial literacy. More than 25% of millennials have no retirement savings and even among those who consider themselves to be knowledgeable about personal finances, only 19% answered questions about fundamental financial concepts correctly. From personal experience, there can be an overwhelming amount of resources, and even then, there's a disconnect between the learning portion and actually implementing the learning portion.

Enter Perfin: Personal Finance and you, which not only educates, but bridges that gap between learning and putting the learning to use!

What it does

Perfin: Personal Finance and you is an app that has two main focuses: to educate users about the different topics related to personal finance, and the assist users in managing their personal finances.

In the Learning portion of the app, the user is goes through different modules of content, each of which have different lessons associated with it. As the user goes through the lesson, they will be asked questions about the reading in order to make sure that they are following along. After the lesson, they will complete exercises where they can apply the knowledge from that lesson. To finish off, the user will see the key takeaways from that lesson, as well as earn some fish (points) for completing the lesson. After all the lessons for a module are completed, the user earns more fish and unlock the key takeaways and exercises for the module.

In the Budgeting portion of the app, the user is able to create monthly budgets, as well as categories for those budgets. They are then able to input their expenditures for each category as time goes on. Those expenditures are calculated against the budget in order to show the user the percentage of the budget that they are at. As the user uses the app for longer periods of time, they are able to view the history of their budgets and actual expenses compared to the budget.

How we built it

I first did competitive research and planning for the requirements and functionalities of the app, then proceeded to paper and pen wireframes. After the wireframes, I created a high fidelity Figma prototype, then proceeded to React Native with the little time I had left.

Challenges we ran into

I spent a little too much time in the competitive research and deciding what kind of content the learning section would have.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud of how thoroughly I developed the concept, as well as the Figma prototype. I put a lot of thought into the color scheme and typography in order evoke a friendly and approachable, but still exciting, feeling for the user. I am also impressed with how far I got with the React Native app, given the 2 hours I left myself to code. I haven't used React Native before, so I surprised myself by making screens that actually link to each other.

What we learned

Leave more time to develop!!! Also React Native takes a while to set up, especially with setting up emulators.

What's next for Perfin: Personal Finance and you

Finishing out the Figma prototypes and building the app through React Native! I would love to incorporate the functionality of adding different types of accounts (checking, savings, venmo, etc.) in order to be specify the account money is spent from, and then implement a system to see what percentage of spending comes from which account.

Built With

• figma
• react-native