After Britt Baker graduated from Harvard Business School in 2016, her friends back in California begged for a souvenir: the best investment advice she’d learned.

Baker, 37, indulged them, starting out of her Fairfax, Calif., living room a finance club that eventually became her present-day financial education startup, Dow Janes — which boasts an Instagram following of nearly half a million. But the wisdom she doled out at those early club meetings didn’t actually come from business school, she said. It came from her parents and grandparents, who instilled in her from childhood the importance and mechanics of managing money wisely.

Not all of Baker’s peers were so fortunate, she said. Indeed, research has shown that many parents in the U.S. are unlikely to teach their children, particularly their daughters, about managing money beyond packing a piggy bank.

More than half of Americans said their parents never discussed money with them in a 2024 Fidelity survey. Additionally, a 2021 CardRatings.com survey revealed a significant gender gap when it came to early financial education, with 22% of female respondents never having received such education from their parents compared with 15% of male respondents. A 2024 PNC Investments survey similarly found that at a young age, female respondents received less instruction about wealth-building strategies than their male counterparts.

These education gaps have led to low financial literacy rates among women in the U.S., especially those belonging to Gen Z. But social media-savvy money experts like Baker in recent years have aimed to change that with accessible financial education content.

Their engagement has surged as a volatile stock market and global turmoil surrounding Trump’s tariffs have left American consumers, especially those new to managing their money, desperate for guidance.

On Instagram, finance education accounts like Dow Janes use anything from infographics to trending meme formats to repackage complex economics concepts for public consumption. In recent months, special interest topics like Trump’s tariffs and recession threat have gotten more attention.

The goal, Baker said, is to get more finance-related content in front of more eyes.

“The more people are talking about money, the better, because it gets less serious,” Baker said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve heard about a high-yield savings account because of some influencer, so now I’m going to look it up.’

“It’s less scary because [they’ve] heard it mentioned so many times,” she said.

Dow Janes’ YouTube and social media posts consist mainly of what Baker called “building block content,” covering finance essentials from creating a budget to improving a credit score. Anyone can access those materials for free.

But for those looking for more personalized coaching and guided learning, the startup offers a 12-month financial literacy course, Million Dollar Year. Priced at $4,000 — discounted 50% for those who opt to join after attending a Dow Janes webinar — the program is a self-study video curriculum, Baker said, with corresponding fill-in-the-blank workbooks covering financial concepts “broken down into bite-sized pieces.”

Million Dollar Year is Dow Janes’ primary revenue stream, supplemented by occasional live events and Zoom retreats throughout the year. Baker declined to disclose financial details about the company, but she said Dow Janes is a full-time gig for both herself and co-founder Laurie-Anne King.

“We really hold your hand through the whole process,” Baker said. On top of completing their solo homework, participants attend weekly office hours and coaching calls as well as a monthly “mindset call,” wherein participants practice positive thinking and self-compassion when they’ve failed to meet certain financial goals.

“It’s not just, ‘How to save an emergency fund and where to save it,’” Baker said. Instead, Dow Janes encourages its members to shift their long-term habits by healing their relationship with money.

For program participant Meg Collins, 72, that psychologically informed approach was the thing she felt was missing from the series of financial courses she completed before finding Dow Janes.

Collins is no longer just tracking her spending, she said, “but I’m understanding why I’m purchasing things, what the triggers are for me.”

During a program exercise wherein Collins wrote a letter to “Mr. Money,” she discovered she blamed her father for not teaching her everything he knew about saving and investing, which was a lot. Then, she blamed the education system for failing to catch her up.

“Somehow or other, the guys will get together and talk about investments,” Collins said, but young women are rarely included in those conversations, and they fall behind.

This pattern of women not having agency over their finances is rooted in history, said financial educator Berna Anat.

A self-professed “financial hype woman” and the author of “Money Out Loud: All the Financial Stuff No One Taught Us,” Anat, 35, said she aims with her beginner-friendly financial content to empower people, especially first-generation women, to build sustainable wealth.

Anat makes anywhere from $65,000 to $125,000 per year as a “finfluencer,” or finance influencer, primarily through speaking engagements and brand partnerships.

The Bay Area-based creator doesn’t have any finance certifications or a business degree, a fact she’s transparent about on social media. But over the years, she’s built a following of more than 100,000 on Instagram and brought finance content to a younger demographic than most finance gurus typically reach.

As a first-generation daughter of Filipino immigrants, Anat said she is familiar with the obstacles women like her have historically faced in their pursuit of financial freedom.

“It was, like, a generation and a half ago that we couldn’t even get our own credit cards,” she said. “So there’s so much catching up that women have to do, not because we’re worse at money or we’re worse at logistics or math, [but] because we were structurally, purposefully held back from understanding money, accessing our own money and becoming empowered with our own money.”

Yet women tend to internalize that knowledge gap, leading them to adopt the identity of being “bad at money,” Anat said.

“We blame ourselves for not being as good at money as some of our male peers,” Anat said, “not remembering that a lot of these men have had generations of financial confidence and generations of secrets and knowledge being passed [down] in boys clubs, from father to son, grandpa to whoever.”

Anat acknowledged that “finfluencers” alone cannot and should not close that gap, given they are not held to the same legal and ethical standards as accredited financial planners, certified public accountants or tax attorneys.

Regulatory bodies including the Securities and Exchange Commission Investor Advisory Committee in recent years have pushed for broader classification of “finfluencers” as statutory sellers and investment advisors, which would in turn subject them to higher codes of conduct. However, many are still protected via regulatory loopholes, such as exemptions for those providing only impersonal advice not tailored to any particular client or issuing such advice for free.

Even “finfluencers” who are technically subject to Federal Trade Commission and SEC guidelines, Baker said, often simply don’t follow them and benefit from regulatory bodies lacking the bandwidth to rectify that.

After graduating from Cal State Fullerton in 2022, Alice Samoylovich, 25, felt she had a decent handle on her savings. But when she began hearing “finfluencers” like Tori Dunlap of @HerFirst100K talk about wealth-building strategies and investing, she thought, “Oh s—, I need to catch up.”

That feeling of panic worsened when she and her peers recently began seeing sharp drops in their 401k plans due to fluctuations in the stock market.

Everyone was thinking, “Why is that so much lower than it was before?” Samoylovich said.

As the daughter of immigrants growing up in Orange County, Samoylovich said she wasn’t taught much about money management: “It was only the kids of, like, the uber-rich get to get that education.” Even now, her friends rarely speak about finances.

But with the current administration “getting more and more into heated situations internationally,” and Gen Z falling further into debt with little prospects for home ownership or sustainable retirement, Samoylovich is fearful about the economic future of the U.S.

In a recent Advisor Authority study, 40% of surveyed Gen Z investors said they felt worried about their ability to pay their bills in the next 12 months, citing loans and debts as a competing financial priority. Additionally, 77% of the GenZers reported being concerned about a U.S. economic recession in the same time frame.

Anat said people have even started leaving comments on her years-old videos asking her to explain what stagflation is or how to prepare for a recession.

Given the widespread panic, she said it’s “all hands on deck” for online finance educators.

Baker has also seen increased traffic on Dow Janes’ socials, with the Million Dollar Year program’s enrollment on the rise and skewing younger than in previous years. (The startup’s typical demographic is women between 30 and 50 years old.)

Among Dow Janes’ 8,000 current program members, Baker said anxiety is mounting.

As for what they should do in the face of all this economic uncertainty, Baker said, “What we always come back to is, control what you can control.”

Maybe tariffs do upend the market, she said, but “if you’re investing for a long enough time horizon, generally, historically, the market is up over time.”