Money Map

For the Improvement of understanding of student finances

Made by Teddy Lee

My problem in daily life was that I have to manage much of my own funds for food, entertainment, and other expenses, but the interfaces the banks and other financial institutions had was unintuitive and unrepresentative and hid the larger picture behind many numbers. My idea is to create a graph similar to the google+ waves map that showed your accounts, your income, your spending, and other financial information in the macro, through circles proportionally big as the account, the micro, through information appearing when you hover over or click on a circle, and have a temporal aspect through a timeline which would position the expenses of the week selected as circles coming off of whatever account they came from. This would allow you, at a glance, to figure out how much money you have, where its going, how your spending changed from week to week, and where you could stand to save a little more. This data could come from sources like mint.com which track all your accounts at once. This is particularly important for college students as they are just now entering a period of new found financial independence and it would encourage accessibility to their financial information in order to have them make more informed decisions.

Created: September 15th, 2014

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My problem in daily life was that I have to manage much of my own funds for food, entertainment, and other expenses, but the interfaces the banks and other financial institutions had was unintuitive and unrepresentative and hid the larger picture behind many numbers. My idea is to create a graph similar to the google+ waves map that showed your accounts, your income, your spending, and other financial information in the macro, through circles proportionally big as the account, the micro, through information appearing when you hover over or click on a circle, and have a temporal aspect through a timeline which would position the expenses of the week selected as circles coming off of whatever account they came from. This would allow you, at a glance, to figure out how much money you have, where its going, how your spending changed from week to week, and where you could stand to save a little more. This data could come from sources like mint.com which track all your accounts at once. This is particularly important for college students as they are just now entering a period of new found financial independence and it would encourage accessibility to their financial information in order to have them make more informed decisions.