Finance
Gen Zers are investing their way out of the 9-to-5
The finance guru Dave Ramsey famously said that if Americans wanted to build wealth, they should give up their morning coffee. But spend any time in certain corners of personal-finance Instagram and TikTok and you’ll see women indulging in sleek caffeinated beverages. They swirl whipped cream on their tall iced coffees, brew black-sesame-matcha lattes, and show off hot chocolate and pastries as they promote strategies to save, invest, and make the most of their credit-card points. These women talk openly about being rich and wanting to help other women become rich too.
One of those influencers is Tori Dunlap, the founder of a financial-education company called Her First 100K. She aspires to get as many young women as possible investing and to debunk the notion that in order to build wealth they need to deprive themselves of things they enjoy. In a video on Instagram, she considers Ramsey’s advice, then erupts into a scream. “It’s not the latte that’s keeping you from saving money,” she wrote in the caption. “It’s the systemic oppression.”
Just a handful of years ago, Dunlap, who was born in Tacoma, Washington, was working a job in marketing and dealing with a toxic boss. Thanks to an emergency fund she’d grown, she was able to quit and start focusing on building Her First 100K — named for Dunlap’s goal of amassing $100,000 in wealth, which she achieved by the time she was 25 by budgeting and investing.
Now, Dunlap, 30, has over 2 million followers on Instagram, hosts a top-rated US business podcast, and is the author of the best-selling book “Financial Feminist.” She also launched a platform called Treasury, which says it has helped women invest over $80 million in the stock market. Alongside creators like Mrs. Dow Jones, Simran Kaur, and Rachel Rodgers, Dunlap is a leader of a new wave of personal-finance education focused on teaching Gen Z and millennial women the fundamentals of earning, paying off debt, and investing, using a savvy blend of traditional financial advice, irreverent social commentary, and high-travel memes. You can think of it as financial education for the “lazy-girl job” generation — those who decry the corporate hustle and seek out low-stress jobs that don’t take over their lives. In one video, Kaur, the New Zealand-based creator of Girls That Invest, does her makeup in front of a mirror as she discusses how she’s using her investment earnings to build her own trust fund to live on. The message? You too can invest your way out of the 9-to-5 life.
If you ask these women, however, they’ll say the trend has nothing to do with being lazy and everything to do with giving women the tools they need to take control of their financial destiny. “We’re taking something very inaccessible and making it accessible,” Dunlap said. If men can use their financial savvy to get rich, then so can women. And in a world where many Gen Zers and millennials expect to be working well past retirement age, the advice is finding an eager audience.
On the first day of her first full-time job out of college in 2018, Haley Sacks was asked to fill out her health insurance and 401(k) contributions. “I really wanted to make a good impression, so that night I went home and did what any self-respecting millennial would do,” the New York native said. “I looked on YouTube for information, and I was really taken aback by what I found.”
Nearly all the financial-education content geared toward women focused on home-economics fare like saving and budgeting, she said. Meanwhile, the content she actually needed, which explained the fundamentals of investing, not only was “very dry” but seemed primarily made with a male audience in mind. “I couldn’t really find anyone who was teaching money the way that I wanted to learn it,” Sacks said. “So I became her.” Now, six years later, Sacks, who goes by Mrs. Dow Jones on social media, has 1 million followers on Instagram, where she posts pop-culture-inflected videos on topics like how to predict layoffs at your job and why the Cartier Love bracelets Kylie Jenner is famous for wearing may not be a good investment.
People like Sacks and Dunlap aren’t the first female celebrity personal-finance experts. Sacks pointed to Suze Orman — the pioneering personal-finance guru, author, and TV host — as someone who “walked so all of us could run.” But until recently, women looking to wrap their heads around the intricacies of high-interest savings accounts and low-cost index funds had scant few options that spoke directly to them. Personal-finance education in US high schools used to be rare — though it’s gotten better in the last few years with half of US states now mandating it. And women-specific financial-education literature tended to focus less on investing in real estate or negotiating a higher salary than on learning how to curb one’s spending on supposedly “frivolous” items like coffee, manicures, and haircuts. The message, Dunlap said, boiled down to: “Men get to be millionaires by making more money and being the fullest version of themselves. The way to become a millionaire for women is to basically hate your life.”
I couldn’t really find anyone who was teaching money the way that I wanted to learn it. So I became her.
Haley Sacks
On one level, these influencers are offering well-trodden financial advice packaged for a new audience: Dunlap’s book has sections on building an emergency fund, getting out of debt, and investing for retirement. She said women comprise 95% of her audience. “We joke that it’s largely girls, gays, and theys,” she said. Sacks, who calls herself a “zillennial finance expert,” said that her content is aimed at people of all genders but that women tend to gravitate to it because of the person who’s talking. “We all have the same message,” Sacks said. “It’s sort of like finding the right trainer who motivates you.”
These influencers do break from tradition in a few key ways. Citing high interest rates, rising home prices, and a booming stock market, Sacks and Dunlap have made the case for renting instead of buying. In “Financial Feminist,” Dunlap recommends readers focus on building a three- to six-month emergency fund before paying off debt so they’re prepared for a layoff or dangerous home situation. Sacks recommends young people job-hop to keep up with inflation and cost-of-living increases if necessary. “You should be making 15% more every single year,” she said. “And if you’re not making that at your current job, then you should change jobs.” (Research from the Economic Policy Institute indicates that since 2007 US employees have received an average wage increase of 3.9% a year.)
Rita Soledad Fernández Paulino, a California-based money coach and creator focused on women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ people, said their goal is to help people become “work-optional” by leveraging their investments. “I like the idea of everyone working because they want to and not because they have to,” they said.
Leah Sheppard, a professor of management and associate dean for equity and inclusion at Washington State University’s Carson College of Business, sees this wave of financial education as a reflection of an awareness among Gen Zers and millennials that the boomer-era version of the American dream — where you work your way up the ladder for 40 years at a single employer and put away enough to retire — no longer applies to them. “Young people are thinking, ‘When will I get to a place where I don’t really have to worry about money?’” she said. “If they’re thinking, ‘Traditional employment is not working well, I don’t want to start a business’ — well, what’s the other way? And it’s probably getting really smart about how you save money, taking the money that you are saving and investing it and building wealth.”
I like the idea of everyone working because they want to and not because they have to.
Rita Soledad Fernández Paulino
Sacks sees it as a matter of young people wanting to take the future into their own hands. “You have to be more self-reliant now than our parents ever had to be,” she said.
Kyla Scanlon, the author of the 2024 book “In This Economy?”, sees the interest in financial-education content on social media as symptomatic of a curiosity about alternative revenue streams, spurred by the rise of fintech apps like Robinhood and populist financial movements like crypto and GameStop. “People are looking at the market. They’re looking at different income sources, Airbnb, the gigification of everything — and then just how do you have passive income outside of traditional income?” Scanlon said.
For young men, this often takes the shape of riskier investments like sports gambling, crypto, and meme stocks. Young women, on the other hand, are turning to more tried-and-true tactics.
In a survey of 2,000 adults conducted in July 2023, Fidelity Investments found that Gen Z women were more likely to say they participated in the stock market than any other age group, with 71% of women ages 18 to 26 saying they had invested, compared with 63% of millennial women and 57% of boomer women. These figures dovetail with an uptick in the percentage of people under 35 who held stocks and retirement accounts in 2022 compared with 2019, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, though the Fed doesn’t break these figures down by gender.
Whether the goal is to retire early or to job-hop your way to a six-figure salary, this wave of financial advice departs from the “lean-in,” “girlboss” flavor of feminism that dominated conversations about women and work in the 2010s. “We’re just more disillusioned with corporate,” Dunlap said. “We’re more disillusioned with the way we make money.”
Instead, it’s advice for a generation of women who see their experiences reflected in memes like the “lazy-girl job.” “The lazy-girl thing is just like, ‘Oh, give me a little bit of rest in addition to my work,’” Dunlap said. “I think that’s completely reasonable.”
I can have wealth too. You can have wealth too. It’s not a you problem; it’s a we problem.
Rita Soledad Fernández Paulino
But talking about this stuff in public as a woman or queer person can be fraught. Dunlap said she gets “called every insulting thing you can call a woman on a daily basis” and has been on the receiving end of death threats. She said people aren’t used to seeing women talking in public about money, and especially not about being rich. “We have different expectations for how men and women should behave, especially around money,” she said. “Women shouldn’t want it. You should be grateful for the things you have.”
Other women BI spoke with said they faced harassment. “There’s a certain group of men who just don’t like women,” Scanlon said. But for the most part, the influencers stressed that their content was resonating with the people it was supposed to resonate with. “The comments section on any video is a mess, but it’s also the most supportive, lovely thing,” Dunlap said. “So many women, championing me, championing each other, championing themselves.”
The experts BI spoke with all had their own ways of describing the movement. Fernández Paulino said they see themself as belonging to a community of people who approach money and finance in a way that acknowledges the systemic issues that interfere with people’s wealth and wellness — such as the economic effects of structural racism and transphobia, or the fact that American women weren’t allowed to own a credit card or take out a mortgage in their own name until the 1970s. “For me, it’s like, I can have wealth too. You can have wealth too. It’s not a you problem; it’s a we problem,” they said.
Dunlap invented her own term to describe it: financial feminism. “It’s this idea of getting yourself financially to a point where you are stable, safe, and you have enough wealth to have options, and then using that wealth as a tool to make an impact,” she said. In other words, she wants to help women navigate the economic systems we’re all swimming in, so they can help other women by changing those systems from within.
Emilie Friedlander is a journalist and editor from Brooklyn, currently based in Philadelphia. She co-hosts The Culture Journalist, a podcast about culture in the age of platforms.
Before seeking a new referendum MPS needs to rebuild trust in the community through completing state audits, putting in place controls to prevent overspending and routine reports to the public.
For MPS Superintendent Brenda Cassellius, who just wrapped up her first year leading Milwaukee’s public school system, her tenure has been punctuated by some very big numbers.
The first is $252 million. That is the amount of new spending voters narrowly approved in an April 2024 referendum to support operations in Wisconsin’s largest school district. Just months later, MPS was rocked by revelations the district was months behind in filing key financial reports to the state, which led to former Superintendent Keith Posley’s resignation.
The second is $1 billion. MPS faces a deferred maintenance backlog exceeding $1 billion. The district’s enrollment has declined 30% over the last 30 years, leaving many schools at less than 50% full. That, in part, is driving a plan to close some schools and to improve others to help lower costs.
The final is $46 million, the deficit MPS was running for the 2024-25 school year, an unexpected shortfall which has led to hundreds of staff layoffs.
Getting the district’s accounting, budgeting and financial reporting back on track has dominated Cassellius’s first year at MPS. In an April 15 interview with the Journal Sentinel’s editorial board, she talked in detail about the challenges putting that into order and progress she sees in restoring transparency into its operations.
State funding and aging buildings create budget nightmares
Cassellius says state needs to keep up its share of school funding
In an interview with the Journal Sentinel editorial board, MPS leader Brenda Cassellius says budgets and buildings are her two top worries.
Cassellius said the on-going budget crisis is her top concern. She said the state’s failure to live up to its share of funding is exacerbating MPS’ budget woes. A group of school districts, teachers and parents filed suit against the state Legislature and its Joint Finance Committee claiming the current state funding system is unconstitutional and prevents schools from meeting students’ educational needs.
Funding for special education is especially critical. About 20% of MPS students have disabilities, almost twice the share of the city’s charter schools, and the average of 14% across Wisconsin.
“What’s keeping me up now, you know, is really just the budget crisis we’re in, with not only this year but multiple years going out without additional state aid, we’ve been not getting funding for what our needs are for our students, and particularly our students with special needs,” she said.
Although the state budget increased special education funding to a 42% reimbursement rate, the actual rate has been about 35%. Another component to the budget headache is the age of MPS buildings. The average age is 85 years-old compared to 45 across the nation.
“We have just kicked this can down the curb or kicked it down the street or whatever you call it for too long. And it’s time that we really take on a serious conversation about the conditions of the learning environments in which we send our children,” she said. “Particularly in Milwaukee Public Schools, we serve the most vulnerable children. Children who have language barriers, children who have disabilities, children in high-concentrated poverty.”
What needs to happen before MPS seeks another referendum
Voters need to be comfortable MPS has made tough budget decisions
In an interview with Journal Sentinel editorial board, Brenda Cassellius said voters will need to see budget improvements before seeking more spending
Cassellius said MPS will definitely need to go back to voters for a new referendum in the future. In addition to the 2024 measure, voters approved an $87 million plan in 2020.
Before doing that, she said the district first needs to rebuild trust in the community through completing required state audits, putting into place controls to prevent overspending and routine reports to the school board and public about finances.
“I don’t think that the voters are going to want us to bring something forward until they feel comfortable that we have done the cleanup that is necessary,” she said. “And we’ve built the trust that we have the sufficient controls in place.”
In the interim, she’s hoping the state will meet its constitutional responsibility to adequately fund public schools.
“What the public expects is you know where the money is, you’re spending it as close as you can to children, you’re getting good on the promise around art, music, and PE, and the things the public said they wanted to fund,” Cassellius said. “And they want their kids to have so that they have a quality education and an excellent education in Milwaukee Public Schools, and that they had the right amount of staff that they actually need. In the school to be safe and to run a good operation.”
Rebuilding finance staff in wake of $46 million in overspending
MPS is rebuilding school finance staff in wake of reporting lapses
In an interview with the Journal Sentinel editorial board April 15, MPS superintendent discusses accountability for district’s financial problems.
The $46 million budget shortfall from the 2024-25 school year started coming into view last fall and was confirmed in mid-January. Cassellius noted that in addition to hiring a new superintendent, MPS also parted ways with its comptroller and CFO.
“We are really rebuilding the personnel and staff of the finance department. That is what’s critical, is having the right people in the right seats doing the work,” she said. “Also critical is making sure that you have the right controls in place. The audit findings found that we did not have proper controls in place and now we have those proper controls in place and when we find things we put new SOPs in place and that is what any business does.”
Identifying that shortfall, though painful, was the result of better accounting.
“Being three years behind in auditing means that you don’t have full sight on your actual revenues and expenditures. And so we have now full sight of our revenues and our expenditures and that’s why we were able to see this new deficit of $46 million,” she said. “And we still continue to work with DPI on those processes to make sure that every month we’re doing monthly to actuals and doing those accounting, reporting that to the board. In a way that is consumable to the public that they can understand.”
Jim Fitzhenry is the Ideas Lab Editor/Director of Community Engagement for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Reach him at jfitzhen@gannett.com or 920-993-7154.
Property markets move in cycles, and with interest rates rising and other pressures like high fuel costs, some markets are clearly slowing down. Many first-home buyers who have only ever seen markets going up are conditioned to think that when purchasing, competition is always intense and decisions need to be made quickly.
In those times, buyers often feel they need to act fast, stretch their budget and secure a property at almost any cost. But things have definitely changed.
In a softer market, the dynamic shifts. Properties take longer to sell, competition thins, and it’s the vendors who begin to feel pressure.
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For buyers who understand how to navigate that change, the balance of power quickly moves in their favour. The opportunity is not simply to buy at a lower price. It is to negotiate from a position of strength.
If that’s you right now, these are the key skills first-home buyers need to take advantage of in softer market conditions.
The most important shift in a soft market is psychological. In a rising market, buyers often feel like they are competing for limited opportunities. In a softer market, the opposite is true. There are more properties available, fewer active buyers and less urgency overall. This gives buyers options.
When buyers understand that they are not competing with multiple parties on every property, their decision-making improves. They are more willing to walk away, compare opportunities and avoid overpaying. Negotiation strength comes from not needing to transact immediately. When that pressure is removed, buyers are able to engage more strategically.
One of the most common mistakes first-home buyers make is continuing to apply strategies that only work in rising markets. Auction urgency is a clear example. In strong markets, auctions often attract multiple bidders and create competitive tension. In softer conditions, properties are more likely to pass in, shifting the process away from a public bidding environment into a private negotiation.
This is where leverage increases.
Private negotiations allow buyers to introduce conditions that protect their position. These may include finance clauses, longer settlement periods or price adjustments based on due diligence. Opportunities that are rarely available in competitive markets become standard in softer ones.
The Board of Visitors Finance Committee met Thursday and approved a 3.6 percent average increase in tuition, a 4.8 percent average increase in meal plan costs and a 5 percent increase in the cost of double-room housing for the 2026-27 school year. The approval was unanimous amongst Board members, though some expressed resistance to the increases before voting in favor of them.
The Committee heard from Jennifer Wagner Davis, executive vice president and chief operating officer, and Donna Price Henry, chancellor of the College at Wise, about reasons for the raise in tuition and rates. According to Davis and Henry, salary increases for professors and legislation passed by the General Assembly contribute to tuition and rates increases.
The Finance Committee, chaired by Vice Rector Victoria Harker, is responsible for the University’s financial affairs and business operations, and the Committee manages the budget, tuition and student fees.
Changes in tuition vary between schools, with the School of Law seeing at most a 5.1 percent increase, the School of Engineering & Applied Science seeing at most a 3.2 percent increase and the College of Arts and Sciences seeing at most a 3.1 percent increase in tuition for the 2026-27 school year.
For the 2026-27 school year at the College at Wise, the Committee also unanimously approved a 2.5 percent average increase in tuition, a 3.8 percent increase in meal plans and a 2 percent increase in the cost of housing.
Last year, the Committee approved a 3 percent average increase in tuition, a 5.5 percent increase in meal plans and a 5.5 percent increase in the cost of housing for the University.
Davis cited increased costs as the primary reason for the approved increase in tuition. She said that the budget that could be passed by the General Assembly for June 30, 2027 through June 30, 2028 could increase professor salaries — University professors receive raises via this process. Davis said that the Senate and House of Delegates have separate proposals dealing with the pay increases that are currently unresolved, with House Bill 30 raising salaries by 2 percent and Senate Bill 30 raising salaries by 3 percent.
Davis said every percent increase in faculty salaries costs the University $15 million annually, and the Commonwealth will increase funding to the University by $1-2 million to help pay for that increase. According to Davis, the most common way to stabilize the budgetary imbalance caused by raised salaries is through tuition raises.
Beyond the increase in salary, Davis cited the minimum wage increase, inflation and Virginia Military Survivors & Dependents Education Program as increased costs to the University. VMSDEP is a program that gives education benefits to spouses and children of disabled veterans or military service members killed, missing in action or taken prisoner. Davis said that the program is “partially unfunded” and could cost the University somewhere between $3.6 to $6 million, depending on how many students qualify for the program.
Davis spoke on other contributing factors to the increase in tuition, specifically collective bargaining — which allows workers to bargain for better wages and working conditions.
“If we look at other institutions or other states that have collective bargaining, [collective bargaining] does put an upward pressure on tuition,” Davis said.
Prior to Thursday’s meeting, the Committee heard the proposal for tuition increases from Davis and Henry April 6 in a Finance Committee tuition workshop with public comment. During the tuition workshop, tuition increases ranged from 3 to 4.5 percent for the University and 2 to 3 percent for the College at Wise. Both increases approved Thursday are within the ranges originally proposed.
Meal plan costs, on average, will be increasing by 4.8 percent in the upcoming academic year. Davis said that the University has been expanding dining options with the opening of the Gaston House and new locations for the Ivy Corridor student housing that is still in progress. She also said that the University has been taking steps to increase the availability of allergen-friendly food options.
Davis shared that the 5 percent cost increase in housing is due to the expansion of student housing in the Ivy Corridor. Davis also said that there will be 3,000 new units added to the Charlottesville housing market by 2027, of which 780 beds will be for University housing. Davis said that she hopes the Ivy Corridor housing would “free up” the city housing supply by having more students live on Grounds.
Board member Amanda Pillion said she was “concerned” about how tuition increases would harm rural families — she said the constant increases in cost could make a University education out of reach for middle-income Virginians.
“This is the second governor I’ve served under. Both times I’ve heard affordability, affordability, affordability,” Pillion said. “We need to really be conscious of the fact that … there is a large group of people that [are middle-income] that these increases [in tuition and fees] are really tough for.”
The Committee also approved a renovation for The Park — an 18-acre recreational hub in North Grounds — which will cost $10 million. As part of the renovation, The Park will include a maintenance facility, storm water systems and a maintenance access route. Davis said the renovation will address safety and security issues for the 200 people that use The Park daily. According to Davis, the University will use $2 million of institutional funds and issue $8 million of debt to fund the renovation.
The Finance Committee will reconvene during the regularly scheduled June Board meetings.
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