Savings.io

A savings webapp that helps students strategically save towards an emergency fund and suggests investments based on an ML sentiment analysis algorithm.

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What it does

Savings.io is a webapp designed to strategically help students and others set aside a small amount of money each month towards an emergency savings fund through the use of an extensive cost-of-living dataset. It also advocates for financial investment education by providing resources and links to guides and articles. Finally, it is able to return US securities determined through a ML sentiment analysis model (VADER) to be performing "well", which acts as a good starting point for beginner traders.

How we built it

Savings.io was build on python using Google Colab & Pycharm in a 36 hour period.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was finding a suitable database with enough information to query from in order to support our budgeting backend. We required an extensive cost-of-living dataset, which was uncommon on the internet.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Integrating a working backend, specifically our budgeting backend and the investment portfolio backend, with an aesthetically-pleasing frontend developed on the Django framework, was something that was new to our entire team. Despite the learning curve, we are quite happy with the result!

What we learned

As mentioned, it was our first time completing a project from start-to-finish including both backend requests and frontend displays. We learned quite a bit about Django frameworks and API calls, which will definitely come in handy in the future.

What's next for Savings.io

Due to the time constraint, some of our planned features were not implemented. Notably, we wanted to incorporate a student's existing trading experience when return an investment portfolio and finance resources. Our intention was a customizable algorithm based on the user's skill level. Furthermore, UI improvements for the investment portfolio were planned, such as plots that detail historical data based on the recommended tickers, or areas where links to company financial statements would reside.

Additionally, we hope to include more parameters in our budgeting portion of the program, such as a student's parental support/income, which would help us provide a more accurate cost-of-living, and thus a better suggestion for the amount of money saved towards the emergency fund.

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