For the vast majority of teenagers, turning 18 marks a celebrated transition into adulthood, cushioned by family dinners, hand-me-down furniture, and a parent waiting by the phone to walk through apartment leases or decipher tax withholdings.
For the roughly 20,000 young Americans who age out of the foster care system each year, that milestone is often defined by sudden, staggering isolation.
The institutional support that once provided shelter, food stipends, and assigned social workers often ends abruptly when a youth turns 18—or 21 in states offering extended care. Overnight, teenagers are expected to secure housing, open bank accounts, balance paychecks, and avoid financial predators entirely on their own. There is typically no co-signer for a security deposit, no emergency loan when hours get cut at work, and no experienced mentor to explain the difference between a W-2 and a credit line.
“Compared to when my brothers left the house, it’s incomparable,” says McLain Larson, a Los Angeles high school student. “They’re virtually just cast out. A lot of these people don’t have that one phone number where it’s like, ‘Hey, I’m going to the bank. How do I open a bank account? Can you help me open a bank account?’ They are way too young, they don’t have the knowledge, and they don’t have the support.”
Larson set out to change that dynamic. In 2024, while still a high school junior, he founded Foster Financials, a grassroots nonprofit designed to bridge the severe financial literacy gap confronting foster youth.
He didn’t begin by pitching angel investors or writing business school case studies. Instead, he spent hours sitting down directly with teenagers who were preparing to leave the foster system, asking them one core question: What scares you most about money?
The answers he heard were grounded in immediate, day-to-day survival. These young adults were not interested in Wall Street investing strategies or retirement accounts; they were terrified of falling into debt, terrified of overdraft fees eating their rent money, and terrified of navigating bureaucracy without guidance.
Those raw listening sessions became the foundational curriculum for Foster Financials, which rapidly grew from community workshops into one-on-one counseling, career panels, and micro-scholarships.
Yet Larson quickly realized that in-person seminars alone had structural limitations. Rigorous academic research, including randomized trials conducted in Los Angeles County, revealed that traditional lecture-based life skills classes had virtually no measurable impact on long-term earnings or stability for foster youth. Worse, foster youth frequently shift between placements, move across county lines, or lose touch with social agencies, making consistent attendance at scheduled physical workshops almost impossible.
What foster youth actually needed was round-the-clock accessibility, practical decision-making drills, and a trusted guide.
To deliver that at scale, Larson built and launched the Money Academy, a free web platform built for youth ages 14 to 26 nationwide. Designed to be completely frictionless, the course requires no app downloads, no account registrations, and no personal identifying information—ensuring privacy and total accessibility on any smartphone or library computer.
Adapted from the FDIC’s Money Smart for Young Adults curriculum, the 11-module program strips out every assumption of parental support. Rather than listening to passive video lectures, users work through real-world simulations: “It’s the 17th and you have $58 left. What’s your move?”
On every single page sits an embedded, conversational AI tutor. A student can highlight any term, sentence, or scenario and ask for an explanation in plain language. The point, Larson notes, is to eliminate the shame factor: letting a 16-year-old ask the basic financial questions they might be too embarrassed or self-conscious to bring to a caseworker or an employer.
Because misinformation can trigger financial catastrophe for someone without a safety net, Larson engineered four distinct safety layers to prevent hallucinations. The system uses fixed crisis filters, input screening, and a secondary review AI that checks every response before the student sees it. Whenever an inquiry touches upon state-specific regulations, tax brackets, or benefit cutoffs, the AI refuses to speculate, immediately steering the student toward 211, certified tax volunteers, or professional legal aid.
The platform’s culminating module, titled “Aging Out: Your Money Launch Plan,” addresses critical survival milestones that conventional finance courses overlook entirely. It walks youth step-by-step through their federal legal right to leave state care with physical possession of their Social Security card, birth certificate, and official state ID. From there, it provides actionable pathways to secure education and training vouchers, subsidized housing vouchers, and continued Medicaid coverage.
Remarkably, by utilizing optimized architecture, Larson runs the entire nationwide web platform for less than $100 per month.
Yet for Larson, software is only half the battle. The emotional core of Foster Financials remains human mentorship.
“Building a connection—it’s more of a partnership for us,” Larson says. “That is what our peer mentorship program is. It’s more about building a pure connection and just having someone to fall back on. Every single person deserves to have that fallback, that community, that person that they can just go to.”
Overcoming skepticism as a teenage founder was an early hurdle. “The hardest part of starting Foster Financials would probably be being taken seriously as a junior in high school,” Larson admits. “I’ve always believed in myself, but others haven’t.”
Those reservations vanished as organizations saw the curriculum in action. Scott A. Henderson, co-founder of the Irvine-based social enterprise Doing Good Works, initially harbored serious doubts when booking Foster Financials for a client workshop.
“Upon hearing that you were still in high school... I was VERY reluctant to have you lead the session with the customer,” Henderson later wrote to Larson. “I’ve never been so thankful to say, I was wrong! Our world needs more young people like you, who are willing to stand in the gap for those who need support.”
Today, Foster Financials is actively teaming up with organizations like Coco’s Angels, speaking at institutions like Los Angeles Harbor College, and preparing a financial seminar for students participating in Camila and Matthew McConaughey’s Just Keep Livin Foundation.
While the long-term data for the Money Academy is still developing, Larson’s north star remains centered on individual transformation rather than vanity metrics.
“The thing that surprised me the most about working with foster youth would have to be just honestly the passion,” Larson reflects. “You go into a classroom full of foster youth, every single person is so passionate about learning. They don’t want to stop. They just want the opportunity to grow.”
“If that can happen with two kids, that is just enough for me,” he adds. “And if it can happen for thousands of kids, that’s also perfect.”
The Money Academy is available free to the public at fosterfinancials.org.
