‘We’re living in a capitalist hellscape’: The people learning about money on social media |
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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