FinLit is a live, mentor-led personal finance course for teens in grades 5–12, taught over eight Saturdays by Harvard student mentors at a 1:20 ratio. Financial literacy for high schoolers here means building something real: every fellow ships one finance project and defends it out loud to a mentor panel.
The short version, for parents comparing options and for students deciding whether it is worth eight Saturdays.
FinLit is a live, mentor-led personal finance course for teens and high schoolers in grades 5–12, run by Learn with Leaders as the Capital Minds Fellowship. It meets for eight Saturdays on Zoom, with Harvard student mentors leading small groups at a 1:20 ratio, and covers budgeting, income, credit, investing, company financials, entrepreneurship, fraud and taxes. Every fellow finishes by shipping one real finance project, a budgeting tool, an investment thesis, a fee teardown, a venture pitch or a scam detector, and defending it live to a mentor panel.
Most teen finance products are recorded lessons with a quiz at the end. Nothing is due, nobody notices if a student stops, and nothing gets built. This one runs like a lab: a room, a mentor, a deadline every week, and work that gets read.
Each of the eight Saturdays is a working session, not a lecture. It opens with a hook drawn from something students already argue about, moves into the concept, then into an AI lab where students build, then into mentor review where a Harvard student mentor reads the work in front of them and pushes back. Groups are capped at twenty students per mentor, small enough that everyone is expected to speak and show their work rather than watch. Mentors are current Harvard undergraduates, close enough in age to be believed and far enough along to be useful, and the same mentor stays with a group across the full eight weeks so feedback compounds instead of resetting. Sessions are recorded, so a missed Saturday is recoverable, but the recording is the backup and the live room is the course.
A student ships something small every single week, then folds that work into one capstone. Explorer fellows build a spending teardown, a dark-pattern audit of an app they use, a compounding model and a twelve-month money plan. Strategist fellows build a three-asset portfolio projection with a stress test, a one-page read of a real company's filings, a venture model with pricing and unit economics, and an investment or business thesis. Alongside the artefact, every fellow keeps an AI Workbook: what they prompted, what the model returned, and what they kept, cut or overruled. Week 8 is a five-minute live defence in front of mentors, graded on Judgment, Rigour, Clarity and Honesty, the same four axes used from Week 1.
Two tracks, split by grade, so a twelve-year-old is not sitting through discounted cash flow and a senior is not sitting through pocket money.
For middle schoolers who have money moving through their hands but no framework for it. Explorer starts from first principles: where money comes from, what a price actually signals, why a subscription is designed to be forgotten, and how compounding turns small consistent decisions into large outcomes. Students audit an app they use for dark patterns, take apart their own spending, build a compounding model and finish with a twelve-month money plan they defend. No prior finance or AI experience is assumed, and the reading load is deliberately light because the work is done in the room.
For high schoolers who want the actual mechanics: stocks, bonds, ETFs and real assets from first principles, portfolio construction and stress-testing, behavioural traps that cost experienced investors money, how to read an income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement, unit economics and pricing for a venture, and the unglamorous real world of fraud, contracts and taxes. The capstone is a venture pitch or an investment thesis defended to a panel, which doubles as a portfolio piece for applications and interviews.
Eight weeks, one artefact each week, one live defence at the end. Read the full week-by-week curriculum →
Judge the course by what students produce. Every project below was scoped, built and defended by a fellow. Browse The Lab →
A venture built around in-home care, with a pricing model, a market read and the objections a real investor would raise.
A student-run business concept taken from idea to unit economics, then defended on cost assumptions.
A logistics-flavoured venture thesis, argued from constraints rather than optimism.
A full portfolio allocation with a stated thesis per holding and a stress test on the downside case.
A deliberately bad portfolio diagnosed line by line, which is often the fastest way to learn risk.
A single-company thesis grounded in the filings, not the headlines, presented in five minutes.
The four questions parents ask first.
The application takes a few minutes: student details, grade, and the cohort and track you want. Seats are capped because the 1:20 mentor ratio is not negotiable, so cohorts close in the order applications arrive. Need-based aid and merit scholarships are available. Questions first? Email team@learnwithleaders.com.