Save It!

Hack UIowa project by Philip Kiely and Griffin Mareske - a chatbot for slaying personal savings goals. Winner, Best Fintech/Insuretech Hack.

US savings rate in decline

According to FRED data, personal savings as percent of DPI (that is, how much people save as a percentage of their after-tax income) was 3.5% in July 2017. The average savings rate over the past 58 years is 8.3% of DPI, over the last 10 years we saved an average of 5.5%. Today's low savings rate, especially given our relative economic strength, is a cause for concern. Conventional wisdom, such as this article from TIAA, suggests 20% as a responsible personal savings rate.

Save It! "Nudges" towards saving more

“A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.”

― Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Through both a website and convenient text messaging interface, Save It! makes it easy to set and track savings goals until you have enough socked away to buy anything.

The Website

The website is hosted on GitHub pages, so you cannot actually interact with the chatbot. View the design here

Installing

Setting this up is appropriately convoluted. Here's the step-by-step to how we started building this:

Requirements:

• Python 3 or higher
• Pip
• A Twilio account with a phone number set up (we had a free trial)
• Some way of exposing the server to the internet (we used [ngrok](https://ngrok.com))
• Virtualenv (recommended)

Install required libraries:

pip install flask twilio textblob word2number

Install text corpora data for nltk/textblob:

python -m textblob download_corpora

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/gmareske/saveit.github
cd saveit

Start up ngrok:

ngrok http 5000

5000 is the default port for Flask apps and we have not changed that.

Ngrok will, in the terminal window, give you a url under the Forwarding section (ex: http://********.ngrok.io/). Write this down, it will be useful for setting up the Twilio text messaging.

Run the server:

python main.py

Lastly, change the phone number setting in your Twilio account so that when a message comes in, there's a webhook for the ngrok url (obtained above). See this blog post by Twilio for more details.

This should put you all ready to go. Connect to localhost:5000 in a web browser or send a text to the Twilio phone number.

Images