Vivian Tu, 28, started her career on Wall Street after college. When she switched to a job in tech, her new co-workers started asking her for financial advice. Eventually, she took her money tips to TikTok, where she quickly amassed over a million followers for her funny, approachable advice on everything from investing to student debt to tax write-offs. After a year of running her channel, @YourRichBFF , in her free time on weekends, she finally quit her day job to work on it full-time. Here, she talks about side hustles, how she makes money as a “finfluencer,” and why she wanted to save up $100,000 in cash before she went out on her own.
How did @YourRichBFF get started?
I’m an accidental influencer; I never meant for this to happen. When I left Wall Street for a job in tech, all my new co-workers were like, “Can you explain to me how to rebalance my 401(k)? Which health insurance did you pick? I’m just going to copy yours.” Almost as a joke, I was like, “Oh, I’m going to start a financial literacy channel, and you can send all your questions there.” And I never got around to it, because I was busy at my full-time tech job.
Then, when COVID hit, I started seeing all this — for lack of a better term — shit on the internet. People were giving advice about putting your stimulus checks in Tesla calls or random cryptocurrencies that I had never heard of. And seeing that made me angry, because I knew that a lot of people don’t have financial literacy education and aren’t going to know better. And they’re going to be like, “Oh, this helpful person on the internet told me to invest in this thing.” No! That person is a 15-year-old in their mom’s basement. Don’t do it!
In my first video, I basically just said, “I do not have any get-rich-quick schemes. There’s some real shady advice on the internet. Don’t listen to it. If you get a weird feeling in the pit of your stomach, run. If you actually want to learn how to be better with your money, and learn the tips that I learned when I got to Wall Street, hit me with a follow.” I was really hoping to get, like, 20 followers. And then, in the span of 48 hours, I had 100,000 people following me. And I was like, “Oh shit, I have to make content now. A lot of content.” Since then, I’ve put out a video every single day.
Who taught you about personal finance? A lot of people on Wall Street aren’t necessarily great with their own money.
I grew up in a Chinese immigrant home, and my parents always taught me to save. My parents even kept the plastic bags we got from the grocery store, just in case. So I’ve always been good at budgeting, because I’m quite frugal in that way.
When I started my career on Wall Street, my mentor and my boss at the time was the only other woman on the team. She was about 15 years my senior, and she also came from a Chinese immigrant family. She grew up in Kansas, without much money. Her family owned a Chinese restaurant. And she was incredibly bright, went to Stanford, and ended up working at JP Morgan. I think she saw some of herself in me. And I’m so lucky to have her in my life, to this day. She was the person who asked me, “Are you putting money into your 401(k)?” And I was like, “My 401 what?” I didn’t know what she was talking about. But she had a very intimate knowledge of my finances because she was my boss. So she broke it down for me. She was like, “You should not be spending more than X amount on rent. You should be contributing at least this much to your 401(k).” She hadn’t saved when she was in her 20s, and she wanted to help me avoid the mistakes that she’d made. I credit a huge portion of my understanding to her.
Once your channel started blowing up, how did you start to monetize it? And was there ever a conflict between your side hustle and your day job?
I started to monetize a few months in. But because of the nature of my full-time job, which was in the tech-media space, I was very cautious about it. I flagged […]
Protected by Patchstack