Tori Dunlap

I grew up with parents who educated me about money and I thought that was the case for everybody. I thought, okay, everybody knows not to overspend on credit cards. Everybody knows how to save. Everybody knows how to manage money responsibly. And as I got older, graduated high school, went into college and started having more conversations with people, I realized, of course, that wasn't the case.

Yeah. So it was a blog in late 2016. That kind of era, like mid 2010s was like the Tumblr blog era, if you can think back that far, right?

And especially not the case for most people that I was talking to in my generation and specifically women. So I was the friend all of my friends were coming to for advice and guidance around money. It shocks a lot of people to hear and may shock your audience to hear. I did not study finance. I technically didn't even study business. I studied marketing and theater in college.

Yeah. So that was what I thought was like, okay, I want to share my life as a 20 something woman, like how to navigate career, how to travel and how to do all these things. And I started to realize probably about a year or two in that I was like, oh, all of my topics have something to do with money.

Yeah, I would talk about traveling to Costa Rica, but I talk about negotiating our car rental or I talk about finding a cheap flight. Obviously, with a career, right, I'm working to make money and to hopefully have this sense of purpose or passion.

But Donald Trump got elected. So I graduated college in May of 2016, was trying to figure out the kind of person and the woman I wanted to be in this world. And five months later, the election happens and I'm coming into adulthood and really into womanhood. in a very different country than I think a lot of us expected. So I'm trying to figure out, how do I want to show up? What do I care about?

And again, I was becoming more political, becoming more educated about systemic oppression and the various aspects of personal finance that I was not seeing covered. Right. You think about Dave Ramsey, Susie Orman, these like very well-known personal finance experts. And very rarely do they talk about how racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia have anything to do with money.

What do I want my life to look like? And when you're the friend all of your friends were coming to for advice, and when you're also starting to see that your own financial background... is the reason you're able to have flexibility. You're able to quit the job that feels toxic and find a better option for you. You're able to travel. You're able to donate to causes you believe in.

And I talk about this in my book, Financial Feminist, but 80% of the personal finance equation is the systemic factors that you have no control of. Only 20% of the personal finance equation is how to get a budget together and making sure you're optimized in your Roth IRA. So I wanted to have conversations that were more nuanced.

You start to realize, oh, maybe money is my form of protest in this world. Maybe money is the tool and the resource I need to not only build the life that I love, but also to start shaping a world that I want to see. And so...

And during that time, I think a lot of the financial experts were starting to have those conversations post-2016 with Black Lives Matter in 2020, the resurgence of that movement. So I think it was really important for me to have those conversations be something that was not just You can't buy a house because you buy lattes. And it's like, no, what is the real reason?

I really became just so on fire about personal finance, but specifically, again, using money as a tool to shape your life into something that you love and to start shaping communities around you. So my work started as a side hustle.

So yeah, all of that started as a blog as I was trying to figure out my own voice too.

Her first 100K, this now global multi-million dollar business with employees and a podcast and a book, was the thing I was doing on the side of my nine to five in marketing. And as I was growing my own confidence as a leader and as someone who was

learning how to connect with people and educate them step-by-step about how to build wealth, I was also seeing in my own life, oh, when I have money, I have options. And so the rest is crazy now. I took it full-time after saving $100,000 at age 25, which was the origin story of her first 100K.

I was on Good Morning America, quit my job three weeks later, and now we have 3 million people who we're shaping and teaching them how to pay off debt and save money and start investing.

I'm just that person that set goals for myself from a very young age. I literally have joked in like the promotion of my book. I sat down when I was seven or eight and said, I want to write a book someday. Now, did I think it was going to be like a personal finance book? No, hell no. That was not the plan.

But for me, 100K was I was reading another personal finance blog and I saw someone write about their 100K net worth at 25. And I was probably 23. And I started doing the math and I was like, if I can increase my income by X percentage and if I can continue to save X percentage and if my investments perform like they're performing, I think I can hit this.

Yeah. So it was a blog in late 2016. That kind of era, like mid 2010s, was like the Tumblr blog era, if you can think back that far, right?

Yeah. So that was what I thought was like, okay, I want to share my life as a 20 something woman, like how to navigate career, how to travel and how to do all these things. And I started to realize probably about a year or two in that I was like, oh, all of my topics have something to do with money.

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