- Tori Dunlap runs Her First 100k, which aims to improve women’s financial literacy.
- She told Insider women often feel excluded from investing communities like WallStreetBets.
- Dunlap’s own investing strategy focuses on long-term wealth creation through index funds.
For investing influencer Tori Dunlap, financial advice can have a radical political role.
“A financial education is our best form of protest,” she told Insider. “We won’t have any sort of equality for women or other marginalized groups until we have financial equality.”
That realization led to Dunlap launching Her First 100k, a project providing personal finance advice to women in December 2016. It has since grown into a nine-person operation producing blog posts, videos, and podcasts.
Dunlap uses her @herfirst100k TikTok account to give her 1.7 million followers investment advice, saving tips, and memes. She also runs the Financial Feminist podcast, which she uses to expand her ideas beyond TikTok’s 60-second format.
“I love TikTok for its brevity, and I love it for its audience,” she said. “But there’s so much nuance to personal finance, especially when we’re talking about how money affects women differently, and you can’t always do those stories justice in 60 seconds.”
Her First 100k aims to make investing more accessible for women. Dunlap described her audience as "95% female, or female-identifying."
"Women are told that investing isn't for them," she said. "Money-saving advice for women has traditionally been about making cheap meals, or stopping buying Louis Vuittons. For men it's about real estate, cryptocurrencies, or the stock market."
"Women in my community told me that they've gone on subreddits trying to better understand investing and have been told that this space isn't for them. It's 2021 and that's still happening," Dunlap added.
One of Dunlap's original aims was to turn her own first $100,000 into financial independence. She shared the three main components of her investing strategy with Insider.
First, she said beginners should always remember investing is a long-term process, and thus get started as soon as possible.
"Time is more important than money," she said. "Even if it's just $20, putting money in the market as soon as you can is so important."
Secondly, Dunlap believes it is important to remain level-headed when presented with high-risk opportunities.
"A lot of the investment strategy that gets the most excitement almost feels more like gambling than true investing," she said. "But investing shouldn't be sexy or super glamorous - it's just consistency, letting compound interest do its thing."
Many accounts on Dunlap's own platform of choice, TikTok, as well as other social media like Instagram and Reddit, promote volatile stocks that can just as easily log big short-term gains as they do losses.
"A lot of the stuff you see on TikTok is day trading, or promoting the hottest stock right now," Dunlap said. "That shouldn't be close to the majority of your portfolio - it's not how you build long-term wealth."
Lastly, Dunlap said retail investors should strongly consider passive selection through index funds. She puts the majority of her money into these vehicles and owns only two stocks (Bumble and Shopify), no bonds or cryptocurrencies.
"My big investment is just in index funds - I have used them to become well-diversified," she said. "I'm 99% invested in funds and stocks - I have nothing in bonds yet because I'm young and so I'm OK with that level of risk."
"Crypto is something that I'll dabble in soon," she added. "It's something my audience is asking a lot about as well, because there's a huge education gap between men and women not just for investing, but also for cryptocurrency."
For Dunlap, everything comes back to that gap. She said she plans to continue running Her First 100k even after achieving personal financial independence.
"Right now, systemic oppression is part of the personal finance experience," she said. "My goal is not just to educate people, but to allow them to take action."