I learned about financial literacy only about a year ago. I was scrolling TikTok one evening and saw a video: if you invest $100 a month into S&P 500 from birth to 18, the compound returns could cover four years at Harvard. People called compound interest the 8th wonder of the world. That night, I believed it. I grew up watching my family do what most families around us did. We held tois on credit — big celebrations, the kind where you can’t show up looking poor in front of relatives — while paying insane interest rates that quietly drained our budget for months after. Nobody talked about it. It was just normal. That TikTok video broke something open for me. I started saving immediately. I sold NIS exam prep materials on OLX for 12,000 tenge each, ran targeted Instagram ads, and sent 50% of every sale straight to a deposit account at Otbasy Bank. I liked watching the number grow daily. I saved over 1.3 million tenge. Then I gave it all to my older sister. She was buying an apartment through the “Nauryз” subsidized mortgage program. I don’t regret it. The money went somewhere real instead of disappearing on things that don’t matter. But that whole experience made one thing clear to me: the problem wasn’t that people in Kazakhstan didn’t have money. It was that nobody taught them what to do with it. So I built a platform to start fixing that — AI-powered financial literacy workshops that reached 500+ students across Kazakhstan, funded by Verny Capital. You can visit my website via link https://money-smart-kazakhstan.lovable.app/ #FinancialLiteracy #Kazakhstan #Youth #EdTech #Agartu #KAEF