R U Beating Inflation

Inspiration

Our entire time consists of Business Analytics and Information Technology students who also studied Finance, where we learned from Professor Richter that investing and not only saving money is vital to maintaining your wealth and retiring. Many students only put their money into a bank account with an Annual percentage yield (APY) that is too low to beat inflation. We decided we wanted to use our skills to build a program demonstrating to students the importance of investing money.

What it does

Our program takes user excel files containing bank transactions and their compiled investments. Then, it compares the user's compounding growth to inflation by outputting a line graph with one line representing inflation and the other representing the user's savings and stock portfolio.

How we built it

We programmed in R via R studio and used the quantmod library to extract stock information and analyze our data. For the frontend interface, we used Shiny, an R package meant for building interactive web applications.

Challenges we ran into

Sourcing our data was the most challenging part. We had initially wanted to accommodate the user by allowing them to choose their bank on our frontend interface so we can extract its respective APY for its various account types. However, no such database exists. Instead, we opted to use bank transactions inputted by the user and calculate the growth there, which ultimately proved to be a more flexible feature. In addition, our team was using Shiny for the first time, and we worked to understand how the package works.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to kick off this project, use our R skills, and learn how to use the Shiny package. Throughout the event, our team had great discussions about what would be financially relevant to our users, which encouraged us to think deeply.

What we learned

About Shiny and acquiring data from government databases and what they have to offer. Also the different potential formats of transactions and statements.