LoanLight

We present, LoanLight, the perfect site where you can calculate how long it'll take you to pay off your pesky student loans!

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Inspiration

The first thing that came into our minds once we decided we wanted to do something FinTech and related to education, would be something to help students pay for their college or university tuition. Initially, we wanted to develop a site to help high schoolers save up for college, but we decided to switch to helping college students pay off their debts. It is common knowledge that college is quite pricey and difficult to pay back once you’ve graduated, so we thought of something that can help people get a realistic sense as to how long it will take to fully pay back their loans. Thus, LoanLight was born.

What it does

LoanLight helps graduated college students get a sense of how long it will take to pay off their college debts. It includes a few spots where an individual can input their loan amount, the interest rate of the loan they took out, as well as how much they pay a month. The program then generates an output either stating, within the next month you can finish paying the loan, how many months you need to pay the loan, or if you’re basically stuck with the loan for the rest of your life.

How we built it

We began by brainstorming ideas, and once we developed a plausible idea, we mapped it out using a Google Slide. We utilized a template from Loopple to kickstart our website and, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the Visual Studio Code Live Share Extension, recycled elements to craft the website that you see now. We used Canva for the graphics and logo.

Challenges we ran into

Ironically, our first challenge was what to name our creation, eventually we mashed some words together and came up with LoanLight! We also had a bit of trouble creating the Visual Studio Code live share extension and linking the domain to GitHub but we realized our mistakes soon after and we resumed our work rather uneventfully. Another obstacle we faced was linking the JavaScript to the HTML but we quickly sorted that out. Our final obstacle, which wasn’t much of an obstacle, was what to name our team. We solved that problem by mashing our names together into “Albecryuel.”

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This project was the first time that our team had registered a domain, so we were glad we could figure that out! It was also the first time any of us have uploaded projects to GitHub, as a former member used to help us upload them and register our domains. Additionally, we’re super proud of how our site looks professional and crisp despite the short time limits. Last, but definitely not least, we are the most proud of how cohesively we worked together!

What we learned

We learned how to register domains, link domains to GitHub (and create GitHub repositories), and most importantly, how to work well together!

What's next for LoanLight?

We are striving to add more diverse inputs. When it comes to factoring things such as paying back student loans and even loans in general, there are different factors we do have to consider that go far beyond the parameters that are listed on our site. We only had a couple hours to develop this, so we weren’t able to incorporate every single factor that exists when it comes to paying back loans. In the future, if we have time to come back to this project, we will definitely be increasing the amount of parameters that the user can input. We would also want to make it more interactive and help to save money to pay back the aforementioned loans rather than being a glorified calculator.

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