Building wealth: Can you hack your way into making more money?

In today’s day and age, everyone is trying to get ahead financially. But what are the best ways to do it? With nearly 80% of adults seeking financial advice from social media, in which 74% of that content is filed with either ‘dangerous’ or ‘unregulated’ financial advice according to a study by MoneySuperMarket, how can people build their wealth and do it safely? Is there such a thing as a ‘wealth hack’ and can people actually do them? The short answer is yes! We get into it.

In this week’s episode of Money Glow Up, our host Tiffany Aliche speaks to Vivian Tu, Founder and CEO of "Your Rich BFF", about the good and bad of financial literacy on social media and the reality of seeking legitimate advice on how to build your wealth. “It’s important to vet who you’re following, who you’re listening to, and know that they’re not going to encourage you to do something that could get you into a lot of trouble,” Tu stresses.

As for hacking herself into wealth, Tu reveals some of her favorite tips and tricks everyone could and should do in order to build their wealth.

Together with Yahoo Finance, Tiffany Alice creates a space to share real and inspiring money stories, learn financial fundamentals, and build your future. Step into the classroom with Money Glow Up every Thursday at 12pm ET with Tiffany Aliche—aka The Budgetnista—to jump-start your financial journey.

Money Glow Up is produced by Lauren Pokedoff, with this episode co-produced by Rachael Lewis-Krisky.

Video Transcript

I'm back.

It's me, Tiffany, the Bista Ali, your favorite financial educator and host of Money Glow from Yahoo Finance.

We help you with the misunderstandings that you might have about money, honey.

Yes.

As a financial educator, I feel like it's like my duty, my job if you will to help me with some of the financial questions that you might have and you might feel alone in answering them.

You're never alone.

I'm here.

This episode, we're gonna talk about money hacks.

True, false someplace in between.

Can you really hack your way to wealth?

We're gonna see.

And did you know that 80% of y'all get your financial education from social media?

80% back in my day.

We used to watch television.

Yes.

The tube.

Some of y'all are too young to understand what I'm talking about.

But here's the thing.

It has made financial education really accessible because anyone can go online and learn more.

Now.

This is a good thing, but it's not all good.

Here's why because Money Supermarket found in their new survey that 74% of the financial videos that y'all watch were lies fallacies on shoes.

Yes.

74%.

That means that 10 year old that you got the top, the stock tips from, uh, they didn't know what they were talking about.

So, what does that mean?

Does that mean that we have to listen to stuffy stockbrokers on Wall Street?

Does that mean that we're relegated to listening to 10 year olds?

Talk about your stock tips and for those things to be untrue.

No, there's somebody in between some bodies.

I'm one of them.

But also my special guest that's coming to the stew today.

The woman, the myth, the legend Vivian too.

Yes, she is my BFF.

She's your BFF.

She's the Rich BFF.

Yes.

And your favorite ex Wall Street girly.

Vivian, not only is a financial expert and educator, she's a New York Times best seller.

She is a speaker and she has blown up all over social media.

I know you've seen Vivian because I've seen Vivian.

We've all seen Vivian.

OK. And I also want to congratulate Vivian on her new second season of her show Net Worth and Chill.

Yes.

She just got renewed.

It is via Box media and PS and Vivian is going to come into the, to us with us today and talk to us about wealth hacks and her favorite ones.

So let's be on our best behavior and welcome Vivian to the studio.

Hey, Vivian.

Hey, Tiffany.

Thanks for having me.

No.

Thank you for coming.

So one we met at the White house, which sounds very bo no need to flex.

And so I've known you for a little while now and everybody knows that you are.

Everyone's rich DFF.

So I want you to come in the studio with me today because I wanted to talk about wealth hacks.

And it's like your jam.

What exactly is a wealth hack?

Like, what would you say?

Like a money or wealth hack is?

I say it's a piece of information that most people don't know about that can dramatically improve or help you grow your wealth.

And that's what I really love about you.

And I think this is where we all came to fall in love with you because we all love a great wealth hack, but it's getting co opted and we're seeing people hack in such a way that it's like, isn't that even a hack or?

But also like is that legal?

Am I going to go to jail?

I am literally.

So what do you make of that?

Have you seen some really egregious ones, some really, really bad ones.

So I don't know if you saw these headlines about the chase bank glitch.

Don't say glitch.

That is not a glitch that is called check fraud.

And that was really frustrating for me, especially being a young woman of color because what we saw and let's be real people of all backgrounds, all nationalities, all ethnicities, they commit crime at the same amount of rate.

But like we saw in particular communities of color really jumping on this bandwagon and not only jumping on once they would commit check fraud, they would then encourage others to do the same and say I was able to get free cash out of an ATM.

And one, I think that stems from one, a lack of financial literacy.

But two, sometimes when there aren't as many options for you, like something like that really does feel like a lifeline right now, especially knowing that everybody's pockets are feeling a little tighter.

But I think it's really important to have creators.

Like you mentioned, like so many people are getting their information on social media.

It's important to vet who you're following who you're listening to and know that they're not going to encourage you to do something that could get you into a lot of trouble.

I wonder why people think that that's ok. And like, do you think that people who fall for those kind of hacks?

Is it because they don't have access to proper financial education?

Yeah, I mean, I think a huge part is and I like, I want to believe truly in the good of humanity.

I do think some people are not provided the education that they need to make sound financial decisions.

I do also want to acknowledge that there are tons of people out on the internet that are preying on people who are going to do things like this.

Um just because they know that there is a subset that is likely to fall for this, especially when people are taken advantage of and then are having a hard time coming back from it.

How would you say this would bring up a little light teacher, teacher?

This feel like a lot.

Yeah.

Well, first and foremost, if something feels too good to be true, too easy to be true, it probably is.

But what I really encourage people to do with my content, your content and everybody's content that they're consuming is if we say something and it makes you feel a little weird in your stomach, just use the sweet old Google machine and double check our other reputable sources writing about this and saying that it is a, you know, verified thing to do.

Does Yahoo Finance agree that a backdoor Roth Ira is a thing.

Does the Wall Street Journal agree that certain financial decisions are going to be sound?

Does Bloomberg have report reporting that essentially verifies what you're hearing online because let's be real.

You and I we are not reinventing the wheel.

Like there's no new personal finance information.

It's truly about how are you explaining it, repackaging it and like showing it to a new audience so that they understand it for the first time.

But like I'm not making up rules, the rules are made up by the IRS.

The rules are made up by, you know, the US government.

So we want to make sure that anything that you see online can be verified by a number of other reputable sources.

I love that.

So, they're the only ones to say it then and if they're 15.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, also, like, maybe don't take advice from people who've never been in that position.

Like, it's crazy to me that people are like, well, when you're trading, like, this many stocks and you're watching these certain charts, I'm like, have you actually ever worked in finance?

Because as someone who had to pass three licensing exams just to click a button just to pick up the phone, it's not that easy.

There are hedge funds who have billions of dollars of resources, who can't get it right.

What makes you think that, you know, someone who's doing 15 minutes of research is going to be able to cherry pick the perfect stock.

You're not forget about the bed, right?

So for folks, like I would love you because I mean, you're the queen of wealth hacks.

So give me your top three or your most unique three lay, some really juicy ones on me.

Ok.

Number one, let's be time travelers.

Ok.

So we're kind of heading into the end of the year 2024.

And if you're like, oh man, I didn't get to max out my Ira or my Roth Ira.

Do you know that you can continue to contribute to this year's Ira or Roth Ira?

Limit well into next year, you have to do it before tax day.

So if you have a traditional Ira and say, you know, you make contributions up until April, what is it?

18 15th, whatever it is, you know, look up the tax date day.

But if you contribute before then you can actually still take that as part of your deductions against your adjusted gross income for your current tax year to get a benefit to you.

If you're contributing to a Ira, you're not going to take any tax deductions on the front end.

But every single year there is an amount that you can contribute to these retirement accounts because they're so powerful right now.

It's $7000 a year and it is not a oh, if I didn't do seven this year, I can do 14 next year, it's use it or lose it.

So if you, you know, if you're still before tax day, make sure to take care of last year and try to maximize what you can because those tax benefits are going to pay dividends for you later on.

I like that.

So it's like girl, it's not too late.

OK?

So that's number one, number two, number two.

OK.

So I'm assuming most everybody watching and listening to this are not retirees, however, we should all be members of a ARP, ok?

So I know it stands for American Association of retired persons.

So people are like, ok, so you have to be like a senior citizen.

You have to be older.

Um A RPS membership is actually open to anyone over the age of 18 and there's some fun stuff, right?

Like you can get discounted amusement park tickets, like Universal and Walt Disney World.

You get flight discounts.

You got hotel discounts anywhere between 5 to 15% everything from the motel six all the way up to the Waldorf Astoria.

So something for everybody.

But you also get, you know, discounted oil changes, discounts on restaurants, discounts on rental cars.

And here's the really important part, especially if you are in the phase of starting a family or getting married or starting to think a little bit more about those life changes.

There's some massive financial discounts.

You can get 20% off setting up a trust and will through a trust and will serve provider.

You can actually get a analysis of your student loan debt and they will essentially help you craft a plan on how to pay it down as well as if you are eligible for any forgiveness based on what you do for a living.

PSLF what have you and you will get discounted pet insurance, home insurance, health insurance.

You name it like a ARP.

Has it.

Oh my God.

Let me find out.

I'm going to be AAA RPO head.

I love that.

I like third one.

Lay.

These are great.

Yeah, the third one is a little bit more of an amorphous one.

But you should be negotiating everything, everything, everything, everything.

And I say this as something as simple as I came home on a flight the other day and my TV, screen on my flight wasn't working.

I went and said hello, airline.

I'm very disappointed I was on this flight.

This is my name.

This is my seat.

My TV wasn't working, you know, who just got 5000 points dropped into their account.

Me and I was at a store the other day, I was buying a pair of shoes.

They were beautiful and I said, hey, this pair has a scuff on them.

Can you check the back and get me another size eight?

The sales associate comes back and he's like, hey, I'm really sorry, but this is our last size eight and I was like, ok, I still want these shoes.

I need them today.

But can you give me a discount because there's a scuff on them?

You and I both see the scuff.

I got 10% off the shoes.

You sound like my mom.

I'm not going to lie when we was kids.

Like that was her favorite thing.

She'd be like, oh, yes, not a little thing.

The really big moments in your life are also important to negotiate.

I'm talking medical bills when you're buying a car and when you're buying a house, these are going to be some of the largest expenses in your life.

And we talk so much about scrimping and saving.

Don't buy the latte, don't buy the avocado toast.

You know, it's pretty normal to be able to say, ah, I got my home for $50,000 under asking.

Do you know how many lattes you need to save, to not drink, to save $50,000?

Just put on your big boy, big girl pants for 10 seconds.

Have that uncomfortable conversation and really, really work on negotiating because when you find out that you can save 56 figures in some of those really key pivotal moments, it makes all the little stuff more accessible to you.

So you can have your little joy in the day.

But you got to come ready to play and ready to show up and show out when it comes to the negotiation table.

For those bigger moments.

I love that.

Oh my gosh, Vivian, this is getting so good, but just hold that thought because we're going to take a quick break, but you don't go anywhere.

We're going to pay some bills and we're going to be right back and we are back and back with more BFFBFF to you.

That is then.

So you have so many amazing hacks and I'm sure you have some heartwarming stories or fun ones where one of your hacks really helps someone.

Can you see her something that happened that made you be like, oh my God, I'm so great.

Yeah.

So there is a website called Missing money.com.

And it's a government that works in co ordination with the US government because there are times where you will have money owed to you that you barely even know about or have forgotten about whether it's old security deposits on buildings that you rented in, whether it's insurance payouts, anything like that, um, money that is owed to you that you don't know about or have forgotten about.

I had a BFFDM me and say, hey, remember that video you posted about Missing money.com.

I went onto this website and I typed in my name and I didn't realize she was like, you know, my late partner passed away and I had no idea that he had a life insurance policy and she told me she was like, because of you, I'm about to receive a life changing sum of money, literally getting chills.

And I cried when I got that message because I was like, what did it take for me to make that video to be able to change somebody's life and have her and her kids feel so much more financially confident because she took the three minutes to try it.

I mean, there's nothing like it, there is nothing like it.

That's why we do the work.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, it's fun and everything else but stuff like that makes you say like, you know what, I'm going to fight another day, I'm out here.

I know you actually started on Wall Street.

Right.

And was it really hard?

I mean, there's a reason why you left?

So, what was that experience like for you?

Yeah.

It was a really challenging environment.

I mean, from start to finish.

Right.

Like, I think people don't even know the back story of how I got that job, which was when I was in college.

Like, you have to apply for internships.

Your junior year.

My junior summer, I interned on this desk, there were three of us myself and two young men and they looked us in the eye day one and said there are three of you in one seat.

So it was very literally like eat or be eaten.

And so I did my best and I vied for that spot.

And fortunately for me, I ended up getting it.

So imagine I already had to like kill two people just to get this job.

Um But once I get there, it is a very tough environment.

First off, there was only one other woman like just from jump.

Like I didn't have anybody to ask questions much less for a tampon if I needed one.

And she took me under her wing.

And I'm so grateful because she was the only other woman, the only other person of color on the trading desk.

And she taught me everything I knew.

And we had a tough but amazing year and a half together.

But then it was a point in my career, the head of the desk got let go big shake up.

A bunch of people got fired, brought in a bunch of new people and it was a very different environment than the one I had joined.

Um the people that I was like, this guy is going to be a sponsor.

This guy is going to be a mentor.

This guy is going to make sure that I get that promotion and that raise and like, do all of these things for me because I curried all of this goodwill with them.

They didn't exist anymore.

And I got reassigned to a new manager and this new manager, I mean, he just hated me to hate me.

Like he didn't like that.

I was a girl.

He didn't like how my nails c click clack on the keyboard.

And you know, I've told this story a couple of times.

It makes me sad every time I have to tell it.

But like I came to work one day with a long cardigan and he touched his hands together and looked at me and said, is that a kimono and bowed?

And I'm like, what in the punch you in the throat?

So I was like, ok, well, I have two options right now.

I want to punch this man in the throat, but I also wanted to cry because when you're the lowest person on the fee on the food chain, I can't be like you horrible racist jerk.

I can't say that at work, but I wanted to.

And so I, you know, scurried over to my original manager's desk and I said to her, I said, I'm quitting today and she looked me in the eye and she said, don't be an idiot.

You don't have another job lined up.

So I was like, true fair.

And she helped me find my next job.

And that's why I pivoted out of Wall Street into tech and media.

And I can't emphasize this enough for everybody listening.

Your manager is so critically important to your job success, your career fulfillment.

If you have a manager who is also a sponsor, a K A, someone who's going to be in that back room that you cannot get access to pounding a table saying, wow, Tiffany is so talented.

She deserves a raise, she deserves to get promoted.

She deserves to be given all of these new territories for her sales, you know, region, whatever she deserves all of these things like you will succeed.

If you don't have that, you will flounder.

And I knew when I had it and I knew when I didn't and that was the time I had to leave.

So then how did you make this transition into your rich BFF?

And also was this like a slow build or was this this kind of rocket ship by the seat of my pants?

Is how I did it?

No, I left Wall Street and I went to buzzfeed and I worked in tech and media.

I was a digital media strategy salesperson.

And I had no idea what I was doing.

I was very lucky the person who became my first manager, there was my first manager's best friend and I got that job.

Not because I deserved it, but because I had the network.

And my original manager went to B for me and said, this girl will do whatever it takes.

She can learn anything in 30 minutes.

And she's incredibly hard working.

So my first manager at buzzfeed took a flyer on me and she taught me what AC PM was, taught me what it meant to do.

Sales taught me what the products at Buzzfeed were.

And within two years, I was one of the top sellers.

And by my fourth year at the company that the end of that year I had made $625,000.

And I look back and I thought coming out of college especially that the only appropriate jobs for someone like me who went to a school like you, Chicago that costs a quarter of a million dollars to make the kind of money that I would need to make, to justify that cost to my parents were financier lawyer, doctor, maybe engineer.

And to know that I could make that money working, essentially eating what I killed.

I was a salesperson like a part of my pay was salary, but most of it was commission and to know that I was the top seller that I could do anything that these people who had been working in media for 1020 years could do.

I mean that's power baby.

So both of your parents, where were they born?

Both of my parents were born in Shanghai in China.

Both of my parents were, so we were you born in the United States?

I was born in the US, right?

So first generation, don't you sometimes look around and you're like, hey, hey, y'all thought that you were going to keep us out of this financial and then, you know, and we are killing it, right?

So what do you attribute to this shift this new face of financial education?

Because we're not wearing the Patagonia puppies, no shade but shade.

It's time to change.

That's not what's happening.

So why is it?

Do you think that people are just resonating with you so much?

You know, I think for a really long time, I was worried that because I didn't have a Patagonia puffy, people weren't going to take me seriously.

I mean, even when I first started creating content, um people were like, what does this girl know about investing?

I'm like, what do you mean?

Like, I am more credential than any of you idiots arguing on the internet.

And you don't know that because I'm, you know, I look like this, I'm young I'm an Asian woman.

I wear cute earrings like you expect me to literally your earrings are really cute.

Oh, thank you.

I was going to say look you like you expect me to have like khakis and a gray puffer on.

But I think ultimately that our identity has become our superpower because no one has spoken to women.

No one has spoken to communities of color.

No one has spoken to the LGBT Q community or people who grew up low income.

I mean, that demographic has served old rich white men for a very long time and they've always been taken care of.

They've always had access to the country club.

But for people like you and me to suddenly be this new face of like you could be my neighbor.

Like I could be anybody's best friend from college.

It's that accessibility because I don't want to yelp review from some stranger.

I want to know what my friend thinks about that restaurant and that is the power of having someone who isn't going to lecture you like a college professor.

But really give it to you straight like a friend.

I love that.

I love what we do if you love what we do and I know you do.

Well, first of all, I'm going to because the teacher in me is always like, let's recap what we learned from Vivian today, right?

Because we have, right.

So what I heard Vivian, you let me know if I'm on the right track that you actually can hack your way to wealth.

You know, there are some legitimate money hacks.

We have to be careful though who we get the information if it sounds too good to be true.

It probably is.

And that hacks don't have to always be these big overlying hacks like the hack that you gave me about that until April, you can still put aside money in your Roth Ira.

That's awesome because people really like, it's the end of the year, I've got to do something now, you know, the hack about negotiating and that negotiating could look different.

It could look, there's a scuff on your shoe, but it could also look like negotiating on your car, you know, and then the other hack that you gave me that a ARP, I'm an old young head hat.

I'm going to call it the old head, young head hack that hack was amazing, right?

So these are hacks that you can put into practice right away.

And also what I heard you say today is that there truly is a shift, a changing of the guard and that financial education, there are no more gatekeepers and that if you truly want to have access, you can, you want to be mindful who you listen to but know that you not alone unless you want to be.

And there are plenty of people like myself like Vivian and whoever you gravitate to that are out there to help you.

Did I get it right?

You got it perfect.

Did I get an A plus A plus plus and a gold star sticker?

I love that.

So thank you for coming on Money Glow up y'all.

You already know I am Tiffany, your favorite financial educator, the budget Nista.

And if you want any kind of financial hack that you want to have access to go head on over to get good with money dot com, you will never be by yourself.

Ok?

And if you want to catch money Glow, if you can every single week at 12 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Thursday, right.

You could catch us at Yahoo finance.com or wherever you let you listen to podcasts.

We are here again.

I'm Tiffany the Bins.

I'm your favorite financial educator.

And today's memorable quote, I will say that you can't hack your way to wealth, but it's the who and that who might be Vivian too.

Bye y'all.

Until next week, this content was not intended to be financial advice and should not be used as a substitute for professional financial services.