RapidFIRE

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  Homepage Screenshot

Inspiration

Personal finance is a passion of mine. I wanted to do a project that was personally interesting as well as aligned with the title sponsor Intuit. The name is a play on the theme of Intuit's product suite - an adjective related to speed followed by the context of the tool. i.e. TurboTax, QuickBooks, RapidFIRE.

FIRE stands for Financial Independence / Retire Early, which is the concept of not having to work for money such as through passive income, and achieving that state at an earlier age than typical retirement.

The goal of my app is to show different graphical information for various calculations needed to plan for retirement. The inputs should be flexible to target certain dollar values or time deadlines.

What it does

As of posting this: nothing.

I wanted this hackathon to be a casual event focused on learning new skills and spending time with friends who I rarely see now that we are all at different stages in life. It was wonderful to spend time working on something fun in a low pressure environment.

How I built it

It is currently a React app deployed locally with yarn.

Challenges I ran into

The first half of the time was spent trying to do fairly complicated things from the ground up. This was not necessary and was all scrapped in favour of boilerplate code for generic app functionality. After this pivot I was better able to focus on more valuable aspects specific to my goals.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Creating a web app was a completely new experience for me.

As mentioned in "What it does", I was pleased with my attitude and intentions going in so it was an enjoyable and casual experience.

What I learned

• basic React app setup
• Postman API testing/mocking
• yarn/npm
• API key usage
• app deployment strategies

What's next for RapidFIRE

(assuming these do not get added between submission and dev cutoff)

• charts showing projected values and targets
• user input can modify charts
• link to Intuit APIs such as importing data from QuickBooks
• have user accounts
• link to database storing plans users have created
• descriptions/info/FAQ with relevant information about topics such as tax advantaged accounts and government allowances
• links to quality sources on the above mentioned topics

Built With

• javascript
• react