Finance as Entertainment: The Rise of the Finfluencer

Finance has always had its performers. The radio hosts promising to “make you a millionaire.” The call-in shows offering bite-sized fixes for complex problems. The cable TV personalities pounding tables, flashing charts, and shouting tickers. Each era found a stage. Today’s stage is smaller – a phone screen – but the reach is larger than ever. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram reels have turned money talk into entertainment. Different platform, same formula: make finance feel simple, urgent, and maybe even fun.

The underlying problem hasn’t changed either. Finance is boring. Budgets, compounding, withdrawal rates…none of it lights up the dopamine circuits. That’s why the successful advice-givers, from bestselling authors of the 1980s to viral influencers of 2025, all share one trait: they inject personality into dry mechanics. They turn spreadsheets into soundbites, or rules of thumb into taglines. And audiences eat it up.

But here’s what’s new this time around: people who once tuned out are paying attention. A generation that skipped past bank commercials and rolled their eyes at financial literacy lectures is now scrolling through money tips for hours. Finfluencers, good and bad, have cracked something traditional finance never managed – they’ve made younger audiences care about money. That’s not trivial. For decades, the challenge in personal finance wasn’t just teaching people the mechanics, it was convincing them to care in the first place. Social media has solved the attention problem. The open question is whether it can solve the accuracy problem.

The Upside: Curiosity at Scale

It’s easy to dismiss finfluencers as shallow or reckless, but that ignores the shift they’ve created. Millions of people who might never pick up an investing book or sit through a seminar now know the difference between a Roth IRA and a 401(k). They’ve heard about credit scores, compound interest, debt paydown strategies – often for the first time – not from teachers or financial institutions, but from a stranger with a ring light.

There’s real value in that. Money has always felt intimidating, and for younger generations, the wall between “people who understand finance” and “people who don’t” has been thick. Social media cracks it. The casual tone, the humor, even the absurdity makes finance approachable. In a strange way, the same mechanisms that spread silly memes also spread the building blocks of financial literacy.

This accessibility is what separates the finfluencer era from the book tours and call-in shows of the past. Those earlier formats mostly reached people who were already leaning in. Today’s algorithms shove money content in front of people who didn’t ask for it, which means the pool of learners is wider than ever.

The Downside: Performance Masquerading as Advice

The real risk of the finfluencer era isn’t just the occasional bad tip. It’s the scale and speed at which misinformation circulates, reshaping how millions of people think about money before they ever meet a professional. The tone is casual, the delivery entertaining, but beneath it often sits advice that’s incomplete, misleading, or outright false. Once those ideas take hold, they’re difficult to unwind.

That’s why this isn’t just an annoyance on the margins anymore. The conversation has moved to the center. Professionals now find themselves in the position of having to unteach as much as they teach, correcting viral myths before real planning can even begin. And it raises a new challenge: if bad advice is being distributed with skill and charisma, shouldn’t good advice be prepared to meet it with the same energy?

The CFP Board clearly thinks so. In July they announced a campaign aimed squarely at the issue of online misinformation, making it clear that the problem is too pervasive to ignore. Their guidance isn’t just about compliance or brand protection; it’s an acknowledgment that financial professionals have a role to play in pushing back. The Board is calling out the specific patterns that dominate the social platforms – oversimplified promises, exaggerated success stories, and strategies packaged to feel universal when they are anything but. The underlying message is simple: the public is being trained by social media, whether we like it or not. If professionals want to remain trusted guides, they have to step into that arena and offer a counterweight

The Balance: Hook vs. Depth

It would be easy to frame this as a simple choice: social media either sparks curiosity that leads to responsible learning, or it spreads bad ideas that mislead people. But the truth is more complicated. There’s a spectrum of voices online, and not all of them fit neatly into “good” or “bad.”

Plenty of non-licensed creators are giving useful, practical advice on budgeting, debt management, or saving habits. These are areas where clear, approachable communication can make a difference, and where professional designations aren’t required. At the same time, there are licensed professionals who push products, oversimplify planning strategies, or recycle outdated talking points – proof that credentials aren’t a guarantee of quality.

That’s part of what makes this landscape difficult to navigate. To regulators, “financial advice” is a defined term with compliance boundaries. To the public, it’s not. A TikTok about how to track your spending feels like advice. A reel about Roth IRAs feels like advice. And in the absence of clear distinctions, all of it gets lumped together.

What this creates is not just a best-case or worst-case scenario, but a messy middle. Some of the most effective communicators online are doing real good in making financial basics accessible. Others are exploiting the same reach to push half-truths or outright scams. And in between sit millions of viewers, trying to sort out which is which.

That nuance matters, because it shifts the question away from “should we trust finfluencers or not?” and toward something harder: how do we help people separate substance from performance, regardless of the source? We dig into that in our next article, How to Tell Sound Advice from a Sales Pitch.