Upstart Finance

A retirement plan calculator that tells you how long will it take for you to reach your target amount. The system also advises investment funds for you based on your expenses and balances.

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Inspiration

Inspired by the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) movement, we shared ideas around creating a tool that would encourage less spending while investing in sustainable stocks. We wanted a tool that would calculate savings to retirement, encouraging folks to spend less take control of their finances. We added as a stretch a way to gamify investing by showing people what could be invested and how much you can project to have investments after x amount of time and allowing you to live a financially free, financially independent life.

Common FIRE calculators uses a savings rate that inadvertently encourages an increase of spending by adjusting proportionally the amount of expenses to the amount of income earned. We set out to create a calculator that would allow for a user to take control of their expenses by staying within a fixed amount while also (hopefully) increasing their income. We then thought about the difference of the proportion of that savings users would save could then be invested in sustainable vehicles.

What it does

We made a calculator that seeks to solves the issue of not being able to save enough for retirement before late 60s. We also allow for users to then invest in sustainable products.

How we built it

This project was built with a lot of collaboration and google, chat gpt and brain power!

Tech used:

  • MUI
  • JavaScript
  • React
  • MongoDB
  • Netlify
  • Heroku

Challenges we ran into

With the constraint of 24 hours for project planning, ideation, designing and developing we faced a number of challenges:

  • deploying the back-end and connecting to front-end
  • creating a formula in JavaScript for the calculator
  • dev environment pains

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Having a working formula
  • Sleek design
  • Creating a solution for solving an issue that's top of mind for many
  • Working as team

What we learned

  • Configuring a full stack app for efficient development takes time
  • Deploying a full stack app takes time

What's next for Upstart Finance

  • We aim to implement out stretch goals to include a chat bot that would assists users with best practices in saving and investing for retirement
  • Creating a visual component that inspires users to continue with their sustainable investments by gamifying the online shopping experience with a browser extension

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