Developing personalized finance tools for income management, savings optimization, and budgeting

In today's world, finance is an essential aspect of daily life. The flow of money is a requisite for survival and almost all individuals must make income, budget or savings related decisions every day. Given these keystone aspects of most people's lives, tools that alleviate some of the costs associated with these tasks should be incredibly popular. However, the personal finance tools available suffer from a number of deficiencies that seem counterintuitive given how broadly applicable they are. Most commonly used financial tools such as low-interest rate checking and savings accounts have not changed in many decades; home equity loan or credit card products involve high interest rates that are not available to many individuals; short and long-term savings accounts, retirement funding tools and checking accounts rarely pay any interest at all; and most budgeting software tools are tedious to set up and require frequent oversight and tweaking to maintain. Moreover, the tools are not widely utilized. An estimated 40% of households have no savings and omit savings from their budgets; the average credit card debt is about 9000; and 67% of Americans rely on financial institutions for loans with an average interest of 36%.