Freedom Finances

Landing Page
Personalized survey for new users
Dashboard featuring AI-powered suggestions and an interactive graph
Want to use one of our suggestions? See how it improves your repayment timeline
See up to 24 months of transaction history from your bank

Our Mission

Our mission is to ensure that regardless of background, every individual has the tools to pursue financial freedom and stability. By making our application free, easy to use, and completed with help tips, Freedom Finances challenges the traditional banking industry by prioritizing accessibility and transparency.

What Inspires the Creators Behind Freedom Finances?

With all of our team coming from immigrant or working-class families, we wanted to address the unique problems facing our shared backgrounds. Student loans and debt repayment can be complicated and easily confusing. We asked ourselves: How can we help students like ourselves and many others improve their financial literacy?

How We Built Freedom Finances

To personalize your experience, we implemented the ability to log in to your bank (using Plaid API), and connect up to 24 months of transaction statements to be analyzed by our algorithm. Once your expenses are categorized and summarized by our use of OpenAI 3.5-turbo, our application will present you with personalized suggestions indicating ways to improve your debt repayment plan. Using an interactive graph visual, you can see how we can improve your debt repayment timeline by selecting one or more personalized suggestions. Whatever your goal is, we will help get you there.

Challenges & How We Overcame Them

Gabby: When it comes to creating an easy-to-use tool, it was unexpectedly difficult to take our vision for a simplified user experience and put it into the webpage. A lot of research into design principles and front-end development went into the final design.
Cole: My biggest challenge was interacting with Plaid API for the first time. I found documentation very helpful in my navigating how I implemented this functionality into the application.
Pranavsai: As a first time hacker and a person who has never used React before, I went from learning the basics to being able to make my own components and UI. Throughout the process, I was faced with the challenges of the elements not being in the place I needed them to be, to overcome them I had to find new ways to place elements. I also had to use a lot of reference materials and communicate with my team to help me learn how to implement my ideas into the project
Peter: As a first-time hacker, I found the project to be challenging in certain aspects. Learning to react and CSS for the first time was definitely an issue I faced as I did not know what components even were or how to move different front-end sections through the user interface. I overcame this by communicating with my team for help when I needed help as well as watching YT vids and attending different workshops.

What Makes Us Proud About Freedom Finances

Each creator of Freedom Finances is so proud about how our work can make a difference. It has the potential to influence how financial institutions interact with underrepresented communities. We hope to see it fostering trust and engagement in a sector that has been historically difficult to navigate.

What We Learned

With two first-time hackers in our group, there was a lot of time spent learning the key foundational skills for full-stack web development. Peter and Pranavsai used React.js for the first time, and had fun finding different ways to design the UX. Cole interacted with Plaid API for the first time, and Gabby had her first opportunity at using generative AI in a project.

What's Next?

In the future, we plan to implement a feature that connects users with community resource groups, providing support and guidance on debt repayment strategies. Our goal is to create a collaborative space where users can not only improve their financial literacy but also receive personalized advice from experts and peers. We also plan to incorporate the Production environment for the Plaid API, instead of the Sandbox environment.

https://github.com/colemaring/Freedom-Finanaces

Built With

Submitted to

ShellHacks 2024

Created by

Interacted with the Plaid Transactions API and the OpenAI 3.5-turbo API. Performed data augmentation and formatting.

Private user
I helped design our easy-to-use user experience. Then, I translated our vision into front-end code using React.js. Finally, I worked on the algorithms that are used to calculate the debt projection in our graph.

Gabrielle Pariag
First-generation honors student at the University of Central Florida. SWE Intern at General Dynamics Mission Systems.
Implemented the front-end design for the pages while also adding special elements and effects for more visual appeal to the site using React.js, Bootstrap and other dependencies. I have also worked on the creation of jsx components to the site to have all the required sections.

Pranavsai Gandikota
Sophomore at UCF studying Computer Science. I love doing hackathons
I helped design the front-end portion of the code to create a well functioning and aesthetic client experience. I used React.js and Bootstrap to create different custom UI pages/screens for the different routes. While implementing different working custom js and jsx features throughout the project.

Peter-Karl Jackson