Gen Zers are investing their way out of the 9-to-5

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.