Teen's Free Finance App Bridges Money-Skills Gap as Oregon Mandates Personal Finance Course

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. The app, which Samuel built on his own, provides more than 40 beginner lessons covering budgeting, saving, credit, and investing, and it saves each user's progress so they can learn at their own pace. Its significance extends beyond its growing user base: it arrives as Oregon prepares to implement a new graduation requirement that will make financial education mandatory for high school students, and as national surveys show that most adults lack basic financial literacy.

Oregon lawmakers passed a law in 2023 requiring high school students to complete a half-credit personal-finance course for graduation, beginning with Samuel's class, the class of 2027. That requirement will help future graduates, but it won't reach adults who have already finished school. According to the FINRA Investor Education Foundation, which tested more than 25,000 adults on financial-literacy questions, only 27% answered at least five of seven correctly in results released in April 2025—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. Samuel built MontoEdu for those adults as well as for students, aiming to serve anyone managing money for the first time, such as a teen with a first paycheck or an adult who was never taught the basics.

"We spend years learning subjects in school, but a lot of students graduate without knowing how to manage their own money," Samuel said. He wanted something anyone could use, regardless of their background. To that end, he made the entire app available in other languages and added a built-in translation tool, addressing the needs of people who are more comfortable in another language or who don't speak English at all.

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. Such practical outcomes illustrate the app's potential to translate financial knowledge into behavior change.

Samuel plans to continue uploading lessons through his last year of high school, and he 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 project's implications are clear: as Oregon's mandate takes effect, MontoEdu offers a scalable, no-cost resource that can complement formal instruction and reach adults who missed out on financial education, potentially narrowing a persistent gap in money skills.