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 in over 10 countries. Samuel built the app on his own as one of several projects during high school. The platform targets individuals managing money for the first time, such as teenagers receiving their first paycheck or adults who were never taught financial basics.
Samuel said he was motivated by a gap he saw in traditional education. "We spend years learning subjects in school, but a lot of students graduate without knowing how to manage their own money," he said. He wanted to create something accessible to anyone, regardless of background. To date, MontoEdu offers more than 40 beginner lessons covering budgeting, saving, credit, and investing, and it saves each user's progress so they can work through the material at their own pace.
The app's launch comes as Oregon addresses financial literacy through policy. In 2023, state lawmakers passed a law requiring high school students to complete a half-credit personal-finance course for graduation, beginning with Samuel's class, the class of 2027. However, most adults never faced such a requirement. 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. That figure is largely unchanged since the previous survey in 2021, meaning 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 will not help adults who have 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 considered people who are more comfortable in another language or who do not speak English at all, making the entire app available in other languages and adding a built-in translation tool. The app includes calculators for savings, interest, and loans, plus 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, canceled two of them, and 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 intends for MontoEdu, available at 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."
The app's traction highlights a growing demand for accessible financial education, particularly as schools and states begin to mandate personal finance coursework. For industries focused on consumer finance and education technology, MontoEdu demonstrates how a student-built tool can reach a global audience and address a persistent literacy gap that affects adults and young people alike.
