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Walley The Wallet
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Walley When You're Broke
Inspiration
In a study conducted by the National Postsecondary Student Aid, results showed that 70% of college students incur educational debt by the time they graduate with their bachelor’s degree. College students face unique financial challenges such as low income, high costs, and student loans Walley the Wallet is a website created to help college students with student loan debt better visualize their loan repayments and to incentivize healthy spending habits.
What it does
Walley’s home page greets users to enter the budgeting application or to explore various educational resources pertaining to budgeting and finances. The budgeting page hosts the main functionalities of the website: a home base storing all of a user’s budgets, expenses, and miscellaneous purchases, designed in React.js, and in depth analyses and comparisons of different student loan payment plans, coupled with visualized graphs, powered by Recharts, to help guide users through their loans. Additionally, Walley acts as a virtual pet having his health directly linked to the user's budget savings. As the user approaches the budget limit, Walley's health begins to decline until the budget (and Walley) is no more. To encourage lower spending, users can complete financial challenges to earn points, which they can use to customize their Walley.
How we built it
To build this project, we began building the base work mostly in vanilla Javascript, before adapting the page into React and continuously adding features and visuals as we continued to develop the application. We researched various data visualization methods and came to the conclusion to use Recharts for our graph visualization.
Challenges we ran into
This being everyone’s first hackathon, we ran into a few complications when getting everything started. For many of us, this was also our first time coding in a team environment so using and understanding sharing code through GitHub took some time. Another challenge for us was learning to code in JavaScript as most of us were unfamiliar with it. Many times throughout the process, adding a new feature would obstruct the functionality of other features so we would have to reanalyze our code several times to identify the issues. As in most Hackathons, time was the largest challenge and oftentimes we needed to down size the scope of the project to better fit the tight time frame.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite not having much Hackathon experience, we are proud that we were able to make a functioning website that aims to **uplift and assist **college students. Being our first time working with React, we are all very proud of the amount we were able to learn and implement in our project in such a short time. Overall, we are very proud that we finished and submitted our Hackathon project.
What we learned
We all learned valuable skills during our short time at HackGT 11, including technical skills such as React and Javascript, and how to work on a development team utilizing Git and developer tools. It was also very valuable to us all to have the opportunity to develop a project from start to finish in such a short time period.
What's next for Walley The Wallet
There are many next steps in store for our friend Walley. A few of our plans include an improved point system, including added incentives available for purchase, a larger variety of challenges, and a social system with a global leaderboard* to incentivize budgeting among communities. Another plan is to add **personalized advice based on previous month’s spending habits developed over time as users continue to use Walley. Finally, we plan to increase available student loan information and customization, with implementations for federal loan forgiveness and possible loan alternatives available. This is just the tip of the iceberg for what's in store for the future of Walley The Wallet.
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