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Inspiration
The best time to start saving money is now! With so many years before retirement, students and young professionals are in the best position to start saving. We wanted to show young adults that even a little bit of money saved now can grow their wealth exponentially. This is the magic of compound interest. As Einstein said, "Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world." However, we recognized that there was a problem - 48.2% of young Canadians have not started saving for retirement. Many are citing reasons such as "needing to pay off student debt" or "not having enough money to invest." But we wanted to show that even a little bit saved - from the cost of a cup of coffee - can grow your wealth enormously!
We hope Finlit can encourage individuals to be more conscious of their spending, start saving and realize that every little bit counts!
What it does
People always say "I wonder how much I spend on coffee" and joke about what they could do with all the money they spent on coffee, Now with Finlit, you can see just how much those 8 coffees a week are costing you a month! We calculate what that coffee money could be worth had you invested it for 10, 20 or 50 years instead - and the results are shocking enough to motivate young adults to start investing!
We assumed the rate of return as 6%, a cup of coffee as costing $2.50, and 4 weeks in a month.
We will show you the dollar amount of what you could have earned had you invested the money instead and also what you could have done with that money you saved - from buying a Google home to buying a new phone!
How we built it
Challenges we ran into
Accomplishments that we're proud of
What we learned
What's next for FinLit?
Finlit would love to one day be able to connect to an individual's credit card, so that it can automatically track an individual's spending at specific businesses such as Starbucks or Chatime. We noticed that many individuals in our age group are very brand loyal to brands such as Starbucks or Chatime and spend almost $100 a month on these expenses. We'd like to encourage young adults to be aware of their spending and also see how much their wealth can be impacted if they had a stronger saving's discipline. We would like Finlit to be customizable so that users can input which business (Starbucks, Uber etc.) that they'd like Finlit to track and show just how much their spending in that category is impacting their wealth.
Afterwards, we would like to partner with budgeting apps such as Mint and have Finlit act as a feature on those apps to help individuals realize not just how much money they are spending, but how much they can grow their wealth.
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