Working in a team of three developers, we were tasked with working collaboratively to create a retirement calculator which gives the user an estimate of when they can comfortably retire and how much they will have. This calculator was made using vanilla JavaScript and incorporated test driven development.

Self Financial is a successful fintech business dedicated to helping thousands of people begin their financial journey with a Credit Builder Account.Problem StatementSelf, Inc's users are primarily people who do not have a credit history and are looking to take charge of their financial future. The challenge was to create a user friendly and intuitive retirement calculator in which these users can input their income, savings, and other financial data in order to decide if they are saving enough money for their targeted retirement age.

The team met weekly to discuss how best to approach the problem. In order to have the most accurate calculations, we consulted with a professional CPA to have them review our calculations. This data was then translated into JavaScript format using functions. The calculator contains the essential factors of age, annual income, income increase, savings, expenditure, assets, desired retirement age. I was tasked with helping to write the JavaScript functions, and since I have extensive CSS experience, I styled the site using SCSS.

With a variety of choices for retirement calculators, Self Financial wanted to stand out with ease of use, design, and accurate calculations. Competitive market analysis proved that these retirement calculators were often well developed, but could also be overwhelming with the amount of inputs needed by the user. Since the target audience of Self's calculator included millenials and older Gen Zers, our team opted to keep the inputs at a minimum. It was also important to include tooltips so that the user could hover over the text in order to understand what each input meant.