Amplify: A zillennial’s financial literacy journey from TikTok to the bank

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Sierra Bein is the author of the Globe Climate newsletter and a content editor at The Globe and Mail.

When I was growing up I had a whole plan that I would have a house and a husband by the age … I am right now.

Spoiler alert: At 26, I have neither.

Most of my friends have come to the same realization as me: The world we live in is not the same one our parents lived in when they were our age. To get the same things they had, we need to be smarter with our money and make it work harder for us.

Growing up, many of us had little if any formal education around money. Luckily for my youngest sister, by the time she was in high school, her curriculum offered personal finance classes. My quasi-lessons came from my parents, both first-generation immigrants, who learned things the hard way as young adults in a new country. They shared those lessons, about interest rates and credit cards, with their parents at the time, and then with me. But even with that passing of knowledge, our experiences are different.

These days, we’re seeing a 30-year high in inflation, record-high housing prices and the near certainty of rising interest rates in the coming months. Costs for food and electricity are climbing, and I’ve put off thinking about having children because I wouldn’t be able to afford them anyway.

Mainstream media informs us about what’s happening, yet it feels increasingly harder to find solutions to financial problems for people my age. But leave it to zillennials, that generation wedged between the millennials and Gen Z, to find answers to their own problems.

My social media feed is flooded with advice from people my age on how to manage side hustles, multiple incomes, passive incomes and most applicable to me – how they invest all of it to make those dollars go further.

I see most of these conversations on TikTok – tutorials, tips and insider glimpses into how people manage their money. The social media platform is also where I learned that investing is the only way to keep up with the rate of inflation – otherwise, your money is basically losing value as the years go on. It dawned on me, that’s exactly what I was doing. In my early adult years, I simply dumped my savings into a TFSA and left it there. I thought this was enough to save for my future. Then, during the early days of the pandemic as I was spending more time online taking in all this financial literacy content, I decided to give my savings another look.

But I wasn’t inspired by all the advice I came across on social media. The cryptobros and NTF-pushers felt too volatile; the DIY routes felt a bit closer to what I wanted, but I wasn’t keen to jump into the deep end right away. I knew that I could find valuable information through Reddit threads, more TikTok videos and of course reading infinite resources online, but I was new to this and had so many questions. I wanted some help. So I called up an advisor at my bank and we talked about the things I didn’t know.

We set up some mutual funds to start. Because I care about my portfolio being in line with my personal values, we found some socially responsible investments (SRIs).

Now, almost a year after that initial conversation, I’ve set up investments in a pension, and I have an RRSP and a few more mutual funds on the go. Eventually, I’m planning to move to self-directed investing.

I’m not here to say that I’ve become the most experienced investor out there. I learned from the resources available to me – and to you, too. I was lucky to also be able to learn from my colleagues here at The Globe. I was even involved in creating our Green Investing 101 newsletter course, with valuable input from knowledgeable reporters.

But on this journey, I did learn a few things about myself. I know that for those who weren’t raised with financial literacy it can be a bit scary to get started. And I have to acknowledge that it can be even more intimidating to wade into investing, a male-dominated field, as a woman. (I’ve since learned that women are better investors then men.)

For now, I’m a pretty cautious investor – despite advice that I’m the ideal age to take risks. I think I’ll go down that road when I have more to wager. I’ve also discovered that since I started investing in mutual funds, I read the news differently – I spend more time learning about the world, how news events affect my investments and trying to grasp the complicated realities of the economy.

No matter where you get your information, it’s important to do what feels right for you. And learn from my mistake – don’t let your savings just sit there, losing value with each passing day. I feel empowered that I now have a plan for my money, and even if I’m still learning as I go with bumps along the way, as financial literacy expert @moneywithcass says on TikTok, that’s a lot better than doing nothing.

What else we’re thinking about:

Reading the news has made me cry more than a few times. I actually consider it one of my admirable traits. Even though I work in media, maybe I haven’t been totally desensitized. The last story that made me tear up was about the water emergency in Iqaluit, Nunavut. My emotional reaction might seem weird to some people, but can you imagine waking up and smelling fuel in your tap water? I can’t, because I’ve never had to worry about whether my water is drinkable or not. Nobody should.

Inspired by something in this newsletter? If so, we hope you’ll amplify it by passing it on. And if there’s something we should know, or feedback you’d like to share, send us an e-mail at amplify@globeandmail.com.