One in three post-primary students now say they learn about money from social media. This statistic, among several recent findings from the Money Advice and Budgeting Service, offers a stark insight into students’ attitudes to finance. They don’t carry cash, one quarter can’t use an ATM and 72 per cent get the bulk of their financial advice from TikTok – barely behind their parents, at 73 per cent. The ATM stat is low-hanging fruit for anybody looking to complain that “the youth” today don’t understand finance. But this isn’t so much a financial literacy problem or a simple change in how a generation learns about money, as a shift in what money has become.

For Gen Z, entertainment platforms are where they seek mental health advice, fitness and interior styling tips, so why not financial planning? During the pandemic, many young people encountered financial markets for the first time, often through apps on the same phones they used for social media. trading shares on Revolut, buying small amounts of cryptocurrency, or following investment tips on Reddit and TikTok.

Financial influencers or “finfluencers” also emerged, dispensing bitesize advice to their followers.

This guidance hit home because so much traditional advice felt out of joint for young people, both in how it imagines money and how it imagines the future. Prime Video’s Beast Games features 1,000 ordinary citizens competing in Battle Royale-style challenges for the chance to win a multi-million-dollar cash prize. The amount of money on the line is described by host Jimmy Donaldson as “generational wealth”.

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Beast Games is Prime’s most popular unscripted show. Donaldson – aka MrBeast – is famous for his clickbait philanthropy, moving between one video where 100 blind people have their sight restored and another where a teenage fan gets a sports car. The Guardian recently called the show vibeless. Others may feel it has a speculative “to the lifeboats” vibe that fits with the here and now. How can you save for a deposit if rent constitutes half your income? How do you plan for retirement when the future feels so uncertain?

MrBeast is the toxic extreme, but many online finfluencers offer solid advice for their audiences in a speculative economy. Often, this advice not only resonates but is also more diverse. While 75 per cent of professional investors are white men, with less than 5 per cent from minority backgrounds, social media allows for different perspectives.

Take the hugely popular HerFirst100k, aka Tori Dunlap. Dunlap was inspired to save and invest following the election of Donald Trump, when new legislation made having a financial cushion more important for her. “Money means choices, money means options,” she told her followers.

Dunlap introduces younger women to ideas like high-yield savings accounts and retirement funds, while also challenging some of the sexist assumptions about women’s spending. Purchases like nails and cosmetics are often described as “frivolous”, she argues, while discretionary purchases typically made by men, like season tickets, are not. Closer to home, @irishbudgeting (real name: Caz Mooney) gained popularity for reels that share easy budgeting advice – think feeding families or flat mates for €5 – or “cash stuffing”, the elevated return of old-school envelopes of money set aside for food, petrol and nights out.

Where bestselling advisers like David Ramsey may seem to infer debt is a moral failing, many new finfluencers take a more holistic approach. Recently, the Irish writer and influencer Rosemary Mac Cabe has pivoted from writing hugely entertaining money diaries on her Substack to documenting her journey out of mounting credit card debt. “FWIW there is nothing shameful or embarrassing about being in debt,” she told her Instagram followers last week. “We’re all living in a capitalist hellscape!”

This is all part of the appeal. As new technologies like ApplePay and cryptowallets are swapped out for cheque books and ATM cards, a new vocabulary including “financial trauma”, money anxiety and “debt shame” has emerged to name why some feel they are inherently “bad” with money in the first place.

It’s not as simple as young people learning about money in a different way. They’re also confronting a different economic reality. Delyanne Barros (@dellyannethemoneycoach) struggled with debt for years and assumed she was simply “bad with money”. She shared her journey to financial independence online. One of her TikToks debunks the bootstrapping myth: “This [economic] system doesn’t reward hard workers,” Barros writes in front of an ocean scene. “It rewards investment.”

In Ireland, as in many places, traditional financial advice still leads with lessons that worked in the past, in very different circumstances. But advice about steady, incremental savings or getting a foot on the property ladder early may not be much use for today’s students.

The old model of financial literacy assumed you would have a stable job, incremental savings, a property ladder and retirement with a pension. For many people in their teens, 20s and even far beyond, the reality looks quite different. It’s precarious employment, huge fixed costs before savings or investments and unpredictable markets.

This helps explain not only the popularity of social media advice but also the obsession with crypto, investment, side hustles and passive income. This generation is not delusional or financially illiterate; hedging and speculating is what the system demands of them. In the US, this looks like meme coins and retail trades. Here in Ireland, it might be a steady stream of advice on lucrative side-hustles, or whether you should move to Dubai to save for a downpayment.

There is a temptation to read these findings and call for greater financial literacy – to herd secondary school students into a classroom with a chalkboard and a big diagram of an ATM. But that won’t solve the deeper structural shift. Instead, we should be thinking about what kind of literacy they might need today. It might be less about extracting money from a great big hole in the wall and more about the great big holes in our economic system.

Rachel O’Dwyer is lecturer in Digital Cultures at NCAD and author of Tokens

© The Irish Times