Prospera

This is the Prospera home page, where users can integrate their financial standings to receive a score.
Oh no, looks like Foxy isn't having a good day! Learn how to increase your financial standing with Foxy's chat or resources!
Foxy gave financial advice for the user!
Meet Foxy! Our user friendly finance friend! These are the different looks of Foxy throughout our website.

Inspiration

After our team experienced firsthand how financial literacy impacted some of our immigrant parents, we wanted to help other immigrant families with limited resources feel empowered to start their financial journey correctly while balancing the challenges of adjusting to a new place. With Prospera, we made it easier by avoiding overwhelming statistics and instead using Foxy, a friendly avatar that visually represents their financial status. By analyzing income, spending, and dependents, Prospera provides personalized scores, actionable tips, and guidance to help users improve their financial habits and boost their FICO scores.

What it does

With Prospera, we focus on simplicity:

Personalized Financial Score: Based on income, spending, and dependents to track progress.
Foxy, the Friendly Avatar: Visually represents users' financial status with no confusing statistics.
Actionable Tips: Step-by-step guidance to improve financial habits and boost FICO scores.
Interactive Finance Q&A: Ask Foxy questions and get helpful financial advice.

Prospera makes financial literacy accessible and stress-free!

How we built it

We built Prospera using React and Vite for a fast, smooth user experience, with Tailwind CSS for clean design. We utilized OpenAI's API to power Foxy, our chatbot, which scrapes user data like household income, spending, and number of dependents to create a personalized financial plan.

Our unique scoring system helps low-income immigrants by evaluating:

Income Score: Based on household income relative to local poverty and median income. Spending Score: Reflecting how much income is used for expenses, encouraging savings. Household Size Adjustment: Adjusting for financial strain based on family size. As users improve their financial habits, Foxy—our friendly avatar—changes to a happier version, providing a visual reward and motivation to keep improving. This way, users can see their financial progress in a simple, engaging way, without feeling overwhelmed by statistics.

Challenges we ran into

During the development of Prospera, we encountered several challenges that required collaboration and problem-solving.

Merge Conflicts: One significant hurdle was dealing with merge conflicts, as multiple team members were simultaneously editing the header and financial calculator page. This required careful coordination to resolve overlapping edits and ensure a smooth integration of everyone’s contributions.

OpenAI Integration: Integrating OpenAI into our code presented difficulties, particularly with accessing the API key. This issue prevented Foxy from successfully scraping user-provided information for personalized financial guidance, necessitating extensive debugging to resolve.

Scoring Mechanism Development: We also faced challenges in creating our own measuring score for financial health. This sparked debates about how to effectively scale specific information and data in our calculations. We had to ensure that our scoring mechanism fairly represented users’ financial situations while remaining relevant and actionable. This involved discussions on normalizing household income, spending, and household size without introducing bias, as well as determining appropriate weights for each component of the score.

Through collaboration and persistence, we were able to overcome these challenges and create a robust platform that effectively serves our target audience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We take pride in how we prioritized user experience throughout the development of our financial website, Prospera. We recognize that finances can be stressful and confusing, especially for immigrants navigating a new environment and system. To address this, we created Foxy, a friendly and user-friendly avatar that visually represents users' financial states. Foxy not only helps users understand their current situation but also provides valuable tips and resources to guide them on their financial journey. By focusing on making financial literacy accessible and engaging, we empower users to take control of their finances with confidence and clarity.

What we learned

Throughout this project, we learned valuable lessons that enhanced our skills and teamwork. With two of our team members being first-time hackers, we gained insights into how to push a manageable project within a tight 36-hour timeframe. This experience taught us the importance of effective time management and collaboration. We also learned how to integrate OpenAI into our platform, which was a significant technical achievement. Additionally, we gained experience in designing engaging avatars and user interfaces using Figma, enhancing our ability to create a visually appealing and user-friendly application. Overall, this project not only expanded our technical knowledge but also strengthened our problem-solving and teamwork skills.

What's next for Prospera

Looking ahead, we aim to enhance Prospera by making the resources provided by Foxy downloadable in a pamphlet format. This will allow users to access important information and resources on their local devices, making it easier for them to refer to the materials whenever needed. Additionally, recognizing that our platform is catered to immigrants, we plan to implement multiple language options to break down language barriers. By offering the app in various languages, we can ensure that more users feel empowered and supported in their financial journeys, ultimately fostering a more inclusive and accessible experience for all.