Britt Baker’s pals in California requested for a memento after she graduated from Harvard Business School in 2016: the best investing advice she had ever heard.
Indulging them, Baker, 37, began a money club in her home room in Fairfax, California, which later evolved into her current financial education firm, Dow Janes, which has almost half a million Instagram followers. However, she claimed that the knowledge she shared at those early club gatherings wasn’t genuinely derived from business school. It originated with her parents and grandparents, who taught her the value and principles of prudent money management from an early age.
Baker claimed that not all of her peers had the same luck. In fact, studies have indicated that a large number of American parents are unlikely to teach their females in particular how to handle money outside of stocking a piggy bank.
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Students in public schools would learn how to read their pay stubs, balance their checking accounts, use credit cards responsibly, save money for the future, and stay away from frauds in the financial literacy program.
According to a 2024 Fidelity survey, almost half of Americans reported their parents never talked to them about money. Furthermore, 22% of female respondents to a 2021 CardRatings.com study said they had never gotten early financial education from their parents, compared to 15% of male respondents, indicating a considerable gender imbalance in this area. According to a 2024 PNC Investments poll, female respondents were less taught wealth-building techniques than their male colleagues when they were younger.
Due to these educational disparities, women in the United States, particularly those in Generation Z, have poor levels of financial literacy. However, in recent years, social media-savvy financial professionals like Baker have worked to reverse that by providing easily available financial education information.
Their involvement has increased since American customers, particularly those who are new to managing their finances, are in dire need of direction due to the unstable stock market and the international unrest around Trump’s tariffs.
President Trump has further strained international trade relations with his tariff agreements.
Finance education accounts, such as Dow Janes, repackage complex economics concepts for the general public on Instagram using a variety of formats, from infographics to popular memes. Special interest subjects like Trump’s tariffs and the prospect of a recession have gained increased attention in recent months.
According to Baker, the objective is to increase the visibility of finance-related material.
According to Baker, the more people discuss money, the better, as it becomes less serious. It’s like, “Oh, I’m going to research this high-yield savings account that I heard about from an influencer.”
“They’ve heard it mentioned so many times, so it’s less scary,” she said.
The majority of Dow Jane’s social media and YouTube posts are what Baker referred to as “building block content,” which covers everything from budgeting to raising credit scores. Those items are freely available to everyone.
However, the startup provides a 12-month financial literacy course called Million Dollar Year for individuals seeking more individualized coaching and guided learning. The program, which costs $4,000 and is 50% off for individuals who sign up after watching a Dow Janes webinar, is a self-study video curriculum, according to Baker, and includes fill-in-the-blank workbooks that break down financial ideas into manageable chunks.
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The main source of income for Dow Janes is Million Dollar Year, which is augmented by sporadic live events and Zoom retreats all year round. Although Baker would not reveal the company’s financial information, she did say that she and co-founder Laurie-Anne King work full-time at Dow Janes.
According to Baker, “We truly hold your hand through the entire process.” Participants do their individual homework, attend weekly coaching calls and office hours, and participate in a monthly attitude call when they practice self-compassion and positive thinking in the face of financial setbacks.
According to Baker, it goes beyond simply knowing where and how to set aside money for emergencies. Rather, by repairing their relationship with money, Dow Janes helps its members change their long-standing patterns.
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Meg Collins, a 72-year-old program participant, felt that the psychologically informed approach was what was lacking from the financial courses she took before to discovering Dow Janes.
“I’m understanding why I’m purchasing things, what the triggers are for me,” Collins said, adding that she is no longer just keeping track of her expenditures.
Collins found that she faulted her father for not teaching her everything he knew about investing and saving, which was a lot, during a program exercise in which she addressed a letter to Mr. Money. She then accused the educational system of not keeping up with her.
Collins stated that although the males will meet and discuss investments in one way or another, young women are not often included in these discussions and are left behind.
According to financial educator Berna Anat, this trend of women lacking financial agency has historical roots.
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The author of Money Out Loud: All the Financial Stuff No One Taught Us and a self-described financial hype lady, With her beginner-friendly financial content, 35-year-old Anat hopes to inspire people—particularly first-generation women—to accumulate long-term wealth.
As a finance influencer, Anat earns between $65,000 and $125,000 year, mostly from speaking engagements and brand agreements.
The Bay Area-based entrepreneur is open on social media about the fact that she lacks a business degree and any credentials in finance. However, she has amassed over 100,000 Instagram followers over the years and introduced finance material to a younger audience than most money experts usually target.
According to Anat, who is a first-generation daughter of Filipino immigrants, she is aware of the challenges that women like her have experienced in the past when trying to achieve financial independence.
“We couldn’t even get our own credit cards like a generation and a half ago,” she remarked. Women have a lot of catching up to accomplish, not because we’re less skilled with money, logistics, or math, but rather because we were purposely and systematically prevented from understanding money, accessing our own money, and gaining financial empowerment.
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.
Goldin, who was just awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, has knocked down conventional wisdom by studying women s roles in the labor market over 200 years.
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 yearshave pushed for broader classification of finfluencersas 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.
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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@HerFirst100Ktalk 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 recentAdvisor 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.
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Retailers including Walmart and Mattel are raising prices to cover extra costs imposed by President Trump s tariffs on foreign imports.
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.
