Lucky

💡Inspiration

According to a study ** "45%" ** of Americans have 0 dollars💰 in their savings account". We created Lucky to help people save money. Have you had a dream but with no clear vision and plan on how to make it a reality? If you are like us, you might have faced that on daily basis. It is not easy to come by money however, money can easily ‘leave' one's possession if not properly managed. Money management skills are therefore important skills for life especially in the youthful days as wealth creation is not entirely about how hardworking an individual is but factors such as his/her ability to understand how money works and apply its management principles are of the essence.

• Savings play an integral aspect in an individual’s financial management skills since it is the bedrock of personal financial success.

• Savings is not just about setting money aside for future use but also has to do with keeping anything of economic value.

• Savings are securing assurance today for tomorrow's uncertainties.

⚙️What it does

Lucky is a savings app that encourages people to save money. We help people not just look at what their balance in their bank account is, rather we use ML to help them save and set goals. How's our solution different?

1. We limit the user to set only a single goal so they can be laser-focused.
2. We allow the user to create a vision board to help them envision their goals. According to a study "Savings rates soared by as much as 73% when people got fully and emotionally engaged in why they were setting money aside". Seeing a vision board will get the person emotionally engaged in their goal.
3. We not only allow a user to get data from their bank account but also allow them to submit their receipts. People can track their expenses, even if they wish to move away from credit cards.

🖋 How we built it

We used react & material UI for the front end. For the backend we used express, node.js & stored data in Postgres. We utilized plaid to retrieve the user's banking information. We used Azure's Receipt Model to interpret receipts.

The routes created on the backend

1. /api/accounts/initial_token
2. /api/accounts/public_token
3. /api/transactions/
4. /api/transactions/receipt
5. /api/goal

We used GitHub to collaborate on the project and we used different techniques to work seamlessly.

🚧🎢 Challenges we ran into

• We spent quite some time getting the date picker to work.
• We live on different continents, so major time zone differences posed hurdles in communication.
• One of our teammate's power went off and had a problem working with him for a while.
• We were used to deploying our backend applications on Heroku, but now we tried to deploy it on Railway, and it worked but then when we tried to connect to the frontend, It throw a CORS error, we couldn't make that work because we weren't familiar with the platform.

🎉🎉Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are so happy that we made a project that's not just for a hackathon but for us to use daily and benefit from its features to have a better lifestyle. We are happy to be able to help address a problem that's plaguing our community in a short amount of time.

📚What we learned

We learned a lot about Postgres as most of us were MERN stack developers we explored other databases apart from MongoDB. We also learned why people have saving problems and the root cause of it, which we will use in our lives in the future. We also explored both Material UI and Tailwindcss and tried both but finally we changed everything to Tailwindcss

✈️What's next for Lucky

• If we can get funding for branding and operations we can make this project into a start-up. The reason we stand out from our crowd of competitors is that we have features unlike any other, for example, the goal-setting one.
• We wish to make a mobile app
• Add more budgeting for future
• Automate Savings Account
• Improve our ML model and integrate it with our web app

Built With

• azure
• express.js
• github
• node.js
• postgresql
• react