Kayden Samuel, a 17-year-old senior at Forest Grove High School in Oregon, has developed a free personal finance app called MontoEdu that is now used by more than 5,000 people across over 10 countries. The app provides over 40 beginner lessons covering budgeting, saving, credit, and investing, and it saves each user's progress so they can learn at their own pace. Samuel created the app to help individuals managing money for the first time, such as teens with a first paycheck or adults who never learned the basics.
The timing is notable: Oregon lawmakers passed a law in 2023 requiring high school students to complete a half-credit personal-finance course for graduation, starting with Samuel's class, the class of 2027. However, most adults never faced such a requirement, and national data underscores the gap. The FINRA Investor Education Foundation tested more than 25,000 adults on financial-literacy questions, and its results, released in April 2025, found that only 27% answered at least five of seven correctly—a figure largely unchanged since the previous survey in 2021. That means nearly three out of four adults failed to answer at least three questions correctly about topics like interest rates and inflation.
Oregon's new requirement won't help those adults, since they've already finished school, so Samuel built MontoEdu for them as well as for students. “A lot of people don't realize how much they don't know about money until they're actually making financial decisions,” Samuel said. “By then, even a small mistake can end up costing them.”
Samuel also had in mind people who are more comfortable in another language, or who don't speak English at all. He made the entire app available in other languages and added a built-in translation tool. The app includes calculators for savings, interest and loans, and a stock market game where users can practice trading with fake money.
One user, Aditi Sharma of Massachusetts, completed the budgeting lessons and then reviewed her own monthly expenses. She uncovered several underused subscription services and canceled two of them, then put another $20 per month into the savings calculator to see how much she could grow her emergency fund.
Samuel plans to continue uploading lessons through his last year of high school, and he intends for montoedu.com to always remain free. “It's great to see how many people are using the platform, but what matters most to me is whether they're actually learning something they can use,” Samuel said. “Even if someone just learns how to avoid a credit card fee or make a better budget, that's something that can help them for years.”
