Wealthsimple Kids

Lets make doing chores fun and rewarding for kids

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Wealthsimple Kids

Inspiration

Education costs are rising year over year and this is also leading to higher student loan debts. There are various ways both parents and children could save more and one of the methods is by saving in a RESP. RESP is a Registered Education Savings Plan in which the Government incentivize Parents to start saving early by matching their contribution.

However according to Stats Canada 2016 - over 50% of children (on average per province) are not registered for RESP where they could qualify for at least $7200 government contribution. Our aim is to increase awareness and provide a tool for families to take maximum opportunity by engaging their children.

What it does

It rewards kids for doing their chores. Rewards can be both long term or short term.

Parents create an RESP account on Wealthsimple and then register their family on our app Wealthsimple kids. Parents use that app to assign chores and other tasks which upon completion will trigger a reward. We have designed our app to provide both short term rewards (eg - gaming console , roller blades, etc.) and long term rewards (RESP savings).

The combination of bother short term rewards and long term rewards is essential. Children being young will feel more gratifying and motivated for the short term rewards and at the same time learn about the power of saving and compounding interest for the much longer term rewards (RESP).

How I built it

Back End:

Wealthsimple-node was created by us which provides functions to hit the Wealthsimple API in a declarative way.

Express was used to create API routes for the front end

Front End:

Snippets of Wealthsimple Fabric CSS were used to stylize buttons

Polymer was used to develop the front end to make use of native Web Components

Redux is used for front end state management. Note, for the purposes of this demo there is no persistent state. Rather, there is an initial state that is loaded every time the demo is loaded.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Wealthsimple-node was forked two times by other people from HACK THE 6IX, with one person confirmed to have used it for their project

5 Wealthsimple API's were implemented.

  • Token Exchange
  • Refresh Tokens
  • List Accounts
  • List Bank Accounts
  • Create Deposit

We found and reported an issue with the Wealthsimple documentation for the Create Deposit API. Client_id parameter was missing from the docs and has been added.

Files to look at:

  • Controllers: /controllers/**
  • Wealthsimple Functions: /functions/wealthsimple.js
  • Polymer Front-end Components: /public/src/components/**
  • Redux Front-end Actions: /public/actions/**
  • Redux Front-end Reducers: /public/reducers/**
  • Sketch drawings: /sketch/**

What's next for Wealthsimple Kids

  • Complete UI front-end components such as date picker, add quests, multiple child support
  • Create read-only front end with gamified UX for children
  • Education component to increase financial literacy
  • Integrate with Smart Home (such as Alexa or Google Home)
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