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Visualize investing as circumstances, growth, and inflation rates change
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View overall net contributions to investments
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total growth with interest and contributions
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Inflation Adjusted Dollars
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Form for adding new investing blocks
Inspiration
Planning for the future is difficult and there aren't that many tools out there that give you a big picture view. Also, many prospective investors don't understand compounding growth until it's too late. To remedy this, I've created a new tool that anybody can use to plot out their investing future with anticipated increases in contributions, changing rates of growth, and changing rates of inflation. This tool will help users become more financially literate and inspire them to invest sooner. In the words of a certain man from Omaha, Nebraska, "Start Early". Compounding interest is the reason his value has tripled in just the past 20 years.
What it does
This tool lets users plan out their investing future by visualizing investment values at points in the future and what it will be worth in year of calculation dollars decades from now. You can use this tool to plan for changes in expected annual growth, changes in inflation which in previous years has been below 2% but may be around 3% for the near future, and changes in expected contributions per year. All those together make a powerful tool for visualizing your investing future and how your money compounds.
How we built it
I built this using React and google charts library with annotations. I deployed the production app by building it and hosting it on github pages for the public to use
Challenges we ran into
I wanted to use this hackathon to practice and hone frontend development skills. I got the opportunity to practice more react development and learn about the google charts library. One challenge that costed a few hours was getting annotations on charts (a key feature in this app) to work properly. As a result I had to read quite a bit of documentation and change my charting library.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Working application in a short period of time that improves upon existing smaller compound interest tools that have a lot less functionality. My tool is much better for users as they can adjust their investing windows and also account for inflation. Other tools only allow setting of one rate, one contribution per unit time, etc. Also the user interface and visualization is prettier.
What we learned
Gained a lot of practice with frontend development. My experience is mainly in backend and that's what I've mainly contributed to in previous hackathons so this was a great learning opportunity to practice more, especially with react.
What's next for Compounder
Adding more investing tools like the ability to anticipate big income windfalls or withdrawals for reasons like starting a business, buying a house, paying for college, etc. Also improving the user interface so it's nicer and easier to use.
Try it live here!
https://adchungcsc.github.io/index.html
Source Code here!
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