If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the decision of where to invest your hard-earned money, you’re not alone.
Investing your money is one of the most powerful ways to build wealth—but before you even buy your first stock, you’re faced with one of the biggest questions: Which investing platform should you choose? Should you go with a financial advisor? Trust a robo-advisor to do the work for you? Or should you DIY your investments through an all-in-one platform? Each option has its own set of pros, cons, and hidden pitfalls—and I’m breaking it all down for you in this episode.
Today, I’ll walk you through the three main investing routes, expose the sneaky fees that could cost you thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) over time, and help you decide which option is the best fit for you. Plus, I’ll share my personal recommendations, including the platform I don’t recommend for most people. Stick around to the end, and I’ll give you my favorite tool for getting started—without the stress, confusion, or financial bro jargon.
Here’s what you need to know to get started:
DIY Investing: Full Control, But Overwhelming for Beginners
DIY platforms like Fidelity, Vanguard, and Charles Schwab give you complete control over your investments with low fees—but that control comes at a price: confusion and overwhelm.” Without clear guidance, DIY investors can end up making costly mistakes or worse—not investing at all.
Robo-Advisors: Simple, but Lacking Education & Personalization
Platforms like Betterment, Wealthfront, and Robinhood automate investing decisions for you based on your answers to a few questions. They use algorithms to invest for you, making it easier to get started. The downside? You’re not actually learning how to invest—many users still don’t understand their portfolios after years of use.
Financial Advisors: Valuable, But Watch Out for Fees
Working with a financial advisor can be valuable—especially if you’re nearing retirement or have a unique financial situation. However, not all advisors are created equal, and many charge outrageous fees. Tori warns against advisors who charge a percentage of your portfolio (often 1–3%), calling out firms for predatory practices: “If you or someone you love is with Edward Jones, please get out. They are scamming people.” Instead, she recommend working with fiduciary advisors who charge an hourly fee instead of a percentage.
The Emotional Side of Investing Matters More Than You Think
Investing isn’t just about numbers—it’s about mindset. One of the biggest risks isn’t picking the wrong stock, but freaking out and pulling your money out at the wrong time. Neither robo-advisors nor DIY platforms offer emotional support, and many financial advisors lack empathy for women investors.“The average financial advisor is what the finance industry looks like: male, pale, and stale.”
Tori’s Recommendation: A Smarter Alternative to Traditional Investing
Instead of using high-fee advisors or confusing platforms, Tori recommends Stock Market School—an investing platform built to educate users while they invest. Unlike other platforms, it offers coaching, accountability, and real education, so users understand what they’re doing—without unnecessary fees.
Notable quotes
“Every day you don’t invest, you are losing money, because you’re losing valuable time.”
“Investing is a long game. Do not let Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or any other rich dude’s antics derail your financial future.”
“If a financial advisor is charging you 1–3% of your portfolio, run the other way.”
Episode at-a-glance
≫ 01:32 The Challenges of Getting Started
≫ 02:31 DIY Investing Platforms
≫ 08:37 Robo-Advisors Explained
≫ 18:03 Financial Advisors: Pros and Cons
≫ 32:24 Introducing Stock Market School
Resources mentioned:
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How to Plan for a Recession:
https://herfirst100k.com/financial-feminist-show-notes/plan-for-recession/
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Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
Today on the show, we are talking all about investing: exactly where to do it, how to pick an investing platform that’s right for you, and all of the mistakes you’re making right now that are losing you thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Let’s get into it.
Hi, financial feminists. Welcome back to the show. I am thrilled to see you as always. My name is Tori. I’m a multimillionaire, a New York Times bestselling author, and I have helped over 5 million women save money, pay off debt, start investing, start businesses, and feel financially confident. And here on this show we talk about how money affects women differently. We talk about how to fight the patriarchy by getting rich. And today on the show we are taking one of the most requested topics, which is investing generally, but specifically, how do I choose the platform that’s right for me?
We’ve talked about investing a lot of times on the show, everything from retirement accounts to exactly how to pick your investments and more. And I will just say right off the top, if you’re listening to this episode today, the day it came out, we are doing a live, free investing workshop all about the secrets of the stock market, how to overcome some of the narratives you’ve been believing that have kept you from investing or kept you from investing consistently.
So before we even dive into this episode, I don’t want you to miss out on that, so go to the link down below. You can also go to herfirst100k.com/secrets. And if you’re listening to this not on the Thursday it came out, we are probably doing this workshop very, very soon. We do it on a pretty regular basis and you can also get the replay. So sign up anyway. It’s free. There’s no reason for you not to sign up. I would love to be able to teach you live or on that replay. So again, herfirst100k.com/secrets.
One of the biggest hangups, though, when it comes to investing is the getting started part, right? And when you get started investing, there seems to be, before you’ve even made any decision, a million decisions to make. Before you even decide, “This is what I’m going to invest in,” or, “This is the type of account I’m going to open,” you have to just figure out, where am I going to invest? Not only the stocks and the companies. The actual platform or the actual experience of investing. Do I DIY it? Do I use a robo-advisor? Do I go with a financial advisor? Is there something else out there?
So today, we’re going to talk about exactly what these things are, the DIY, the robo-advisors, the financial advisors, the pros and cons for each one. And if you stay till the end of this episode, I’m going to give you my absolute favorite tool for learning how to invest. The platform that I use. The platform that I recommend for actually getting started investing. So stay tuned for that.
Like I said, there are three basic ways to get started investing. The first is what’s called the DIY route. That’s pretty obvious, what DIY means, right? Do it yourself. But we’re investing on our own. We’re making our own investment choices. We’re deciding where and how to invest. So these DIY platforms are places like Fidelity, Vanguard, Charles Schwab, right? The DIY platforms themselves are some of the most reputable companies in this industry. They’ve been around for dozens of years, sometimes decades and decades. And if you talk to your dad about investing or you go to a financial blog about investing, this is who you’re going to hear. You’re going to hear the Vanguards and the Fidelitys discussed, and you probably know or have heard of these companies. Maybe your company’s 401(k) has used one of these companies, or again, some well-meaning person in your life who maybe knows a lot about money has told you that this is where you should invest.
Let’s talk about the pros of the DIY platforms. The biggest pro is that they are the lowest cost. There is very, very few costs associated with this platform because you’re doing it yourself. If you washed your car yourself, that is the lowest-cost option. If you cut your own hair, that is the lowest-cost option. You need scissors. I will set out a bucket and a mop, but that’s all you need, right? If you’re going to wash your own car, you need a bucket and a mop and some soap. If you are cutting your own hair, you need probably scissors, and please, dear God, a mirror. And that’s the thing with the DIY platforms. Because you’re doing it yourself, these are the lowest-cost platforms. There are no management fees, and we’ll talk about what management fees are in a little bit, but these platforms are really known. Their bread and butter is low fees.
The second pro to a DIY platform like a Fidelity or a Vanguard or a Charles Schwab is that you have full control over your investments, because you’re calling the shots. This is your investment accounts that you are DIYing. You are doing it yourself. So the investor, you, can choose your own investments within your accounts, so your own stocks, your own ETFs, which is exchange-traded funds. Those are the groups of stocks. We’ve talked about that on the show before. And you have complete control over when and how you invest and what you choose.
So with the pros with DIY, we’re looking at the two big ones. Lowest-cost, it’s cutting your own hair, and full control over your decisions. For the average person listening to this show, that is you. I’m going to tell you that these platforms are probably not the right fit for you, and here’s why. Here are our cons.
The first is that you are DIYing your own investments, and if you feel like you have enough knowledge to go in and make investment choices for yourself, great. The average person does not. And what happens if the average person gets recommended one of these platforms… And this is probably you. You’ve logged into your Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab account and looked at the very, very complicated interface. You probably hit the bail button. You were like, “I don’t know what I’m doing. This feels super complicated.” And instead of investing, you’ve probably just opted out.
The very mission of these platforms, is to get you investing. It’s low cost. It’s full control. That’s great. But for the average person, especially the average woman, no one has sat down with you and told you how to invest. No one has sat down with you and been like, “Here’s what these graphs and charts mean, and here’s how to navigate this super-confusing platform.” My not-so-conspiracy conspiracy theory is it’s almost like these platforms are confusing on purpose, because if they confuse you, you then have to go pay one of the Charles Schwab advisors to do it for you, and some of them are free, so okay, maybe it’s free advice, but they’re meeting with tens of dozens of clients every day.
So the biggest con for DIY platforms, and the reason I do not recommend them for the average person listening to the show, is that you got to make your own decisions. And the average new investor, the person who’s listening to the show right now, you, you do not have somebody guiding you on how to navigate these platforms, how to make smart investing choices. It doesn’t mean you can’t. There’s plenty of people who are so good at investing for themselves. But I don’t want you to sign up for one of these platforms that has been recommended and then hit the bail button and not invest at all.
The second con, I’ve already alluded to, which is these platforms are fucking confusing. I am a financial expert. When I log into my Schwab account, I’m just like, “How do I go to my account and just buy investments?” And for some reason, that takes 17 steps. It’s so confusing, and there’s so much information that I don’t need that just bogs the experience down and overwhelms me. And again, I’m a millionaire, I know what I’m doing, and these platforms are still confusing. So that’s the second thing is the interface is not intuitive. It is extremely difficult to navigate. You’re like, “Should I short this stock? Do I buy options?” It’s so confusing.
For the average person, especially the average person who is beginning on their financial journey, who is a newbie investor or who has been investing for a while but doesn’t know what’s happening, DIY platforms are not the place to go. They are cheap, which is great. You get full control over your investments, fantastic. That’s our first option of where we can invest: an ideal option if you’re looking to save money, but not an ideal option if you’re trying to figure out where to actually get started.
Let’s talk about our second option: what’s called the robo-advisor. So robo-advisors are exactly what they sound like: advisors that are robots, but they’re not robots. It’s using technology to make investing decisions for you. So these platforms include places like Betterment, Wealthfront, Wealthsimple, E-Trade. Robinhood has a version of a robo-advisor.
So what’s happening with these platforms is that an investor comes in and they answer some questions about their life, how old they are, their risk awareness or risk tolerance. And for most people that come in, especially most women, they’re like, “I don’t want anything risky. What does that even mean?” Which is a bad answer, by the way, but we’ll talk about that in a bit. Or what’s the age you expect to retire? Where do you live? What are your goals? And then they’re going to start choosing investments for you.
The pros with these platforms. Let’s talk about that. The first, biggest pro by far is that it’s helping eliminate the overwhelm to get you started. Everything we were talking about that’s a negative about the DIY platforms, the confusing interfaces and not knowing what the fuck you’re doing, robo-advising mostly solves that. It’s getting you started. It is taking over for you to hopefully make, in theory, educated investing choices on behalf of you. These platforms use algorithms to manage your investing portfolio based on what you’ve said you want. So that’s the biggest pro to these platforms. If you’re looking really to just get started, they can be a really great tool for you because they’re hands-off. They’re providing this structured investment plan with minimal effort.
We’ll talk about in-person financial advisors as our third option, but one of the pros of robo-advisors is that they’re much cheaper than a financial advisor. Now, you don’t get the person-to-person touch, typically, but you’re paying way less money, either in a percentage fee or a retainer or an hourly rate. So we’re looking at typically a quarter of a percent to half a percent in fees. The pros of the robo-advisor: these are algorithms that are in theory providing smart investment choices on behalf of you. So it’s helping eliminate that overwhelm, get you started. You’re paying less in fees than you would to sit down with somebody as a financial advisor. And they’re automated, so you don’t have to worry about it.
However, robo-advisors are also not the place I recommend, and here’s why. The first con to robo-advisors is that there’s very limited personalization here. Some of these robo-advising platforms, most of them, are making decisions about your hard-earned money based on your answer to eight questions. They’re managing your portfolio and its performance and your literal money based on the answers that you gave to questions you don’t even understand. Yes, of course you can answer your age, you can answer how much you make, but you probably can’t answer what your risk tolerance is.
For the average person, especially somebody who’s young, your risk tolerance should actually be really high. The reason they’re asking that question in the first place is to figure out, how aggressive should your portfolio be? How much of your money should be in stocks compared to bonds? So if you say that your risk tolerance is high, which is in theory what you want to say, what I would say if I was in my 20s, that’s a good thing, right? Okay. I am saying that I want the vast majority of my portfolio in stocks. That’s what we want when we’re younger so that we can allow the money to gain as much for us while we have more time.
But the average woman getting asked what your risk tolerance is, you and I are both going to say, “Nothing. Nothing. I don’t like risk. I want dependable outcomes.” So we end up typically fucking ourselves over because no one has sat us down and actually told us what that question is really asking, which is: how okay are you with stocks compared to bonds with a potentially risky investment but higher reward compared to the other? No one knows how to answer that question.
And really, the second con is tied to this as well, which is these platforms are fishing for you rather than teaching you to fish. The amount of people in our community… We have millions and millions and millions of women who I have taught how to invest, who I have taught how to pay off debt and save money, and I get this all the time. They’ll come to me. They’ll message me on Instagram and the DMs. They’ll email us. And they’ll go, “You know what? I started with X platform, Betterment, E-Trade, whatever, a couple of years ago, and it was so great to get me started, but I have no idea why they’re making the decisions they’re making. I have no idea what any of this means still. I’ve been investing for five years, which is great, but I still can’t define a stock. I don’t know why they’re choosing the things they’re choosing, and I’ve handed my hard-earned money over to this platform and just trusted that it’s going to work.”
And that’s one of the issues is they are fishing for you rather than teaching you to fish. And that sounds good temporarily. That sounds good to get you started, and it is. If you just want to get started, great. That’s a great place to do it. However, I need you to understand these things. This is not something we can just completely opt out of. You can’t just say, “This robotic algorithmic thing is going to handle my money for the next 40 years.” I don’t know. That feels bad. I need you to know what’s going on. I don’t need you to know everything. I don’t know everything. I’m the first to say I don’t know everything about money. None of us do. But I need you to know enough to figure out if they’re making the decisions that are right for you. And so that you can show, whether it’s a dinner party or a conversation with your dad, or just as you’re managing your money as you age, with some knowledge that you can speak to, some understanding of what’s going on.
The final con with robo-advisors. It’s a robo. It’s an algorithm. There is nobody sitting down with you, typically, and having a conversation like you and I are having right now. No one is giving you the advice. No one is helping counsel you. No one is helping with your emotions when Trump does something crazy stupid and the stock market underperforms. No one is educating you about how this works, and no one is helping manage the emotional side of the stock market, which frankly, people don’t talk about enough. Everybody wants to talk about the gains and if your investments make money and the strategies to become a millionaire, and all of that’s great. We’ve talked about it on the show before, but we’ve also talked about the emotions of money and how that has a way bigger impact on how successful you are at managing your money than if you’ve picked the right stock.
But the traditional finance industry that has built these robo-advisors, that has built these DIY platforms, doesn’t want to talk about the touchy-feely of it all, when in actuality, that is the biggest determining factor between whether you’re a successful investor or not, whether you understand that this is a long game or not, whether you understand and manage those spikes of emotion when the stock market does go down or when it underperforms, or again, when someone in our government does something extraordinarily stupid that tanks the stock market. And that’s what you’re missing with the robo-advisor. That’s what you’re also missing with the DIY platforms, typically.
Now, some DIY platforms will allow you, again, to meet with somebody like the Schwab advisors, but that leads me to financial advisors. When we come back, we are talking about your third option for investing, financial advisors, and you’re going to want to stick around for this one because I got a lot of hot takes. So I’ll see you back here in a second.
Welcome back to Financial Feminist. I’m thrilled you’re here. As we come back from this break, we’ve talked about two of the places you can open up an investing account: DIY platforms like Fidelity, Vanguard, Charles Schwab, and also robo-advising platforms like E-Trade or Betterment or Wealthfront. And again, I’m not naming every single option here, but you get the idea.
DIY, the pros: you’re doing it yourself. You’re saving money. The cons are, fuck, you’re doing it yourself, and it’s very easy to get overwhelmed in these platforms. Robo-advisors are great to get you started. They’re taking over for you, and they’re typically less in fees than a actual financial advisor, but the cons are that they’re fishing for you rather than teaching you to fish, and offering typically no in-person or even virtual person-to-person support, not just on the financial side, but also on the emotional and psychological side.
So let’s talk about financial advisors. This is one of those questions that, again, everybody wants to message me about. Should I work with a financial advisor? And let me talk first about financial advisors in general. Financial advisors are the default financial professional that people think of. So when people think, “I need to do something about my money,” or, “I have questions about my money and I’m struggling,” whether that’s with saving or debt or investing or something else, they think financial advisor because that’s all people know. That’s not a knock on people. That’s just like, “That’s what the industry has said.” It’s like, “You need help? Your option is a financial advisor.”
But not all financial advisors are made the same. There’s two big differences in financial advisors, and it depends on the advisor. And if you are going to work with a financial advisor, I need you asking these two questions. These are two questions that are not only going to completely determine the success of this relationship with a financial advisor, but also determine how much money you will either keep or lose throughout the course of your lifetime.
The first question to ask your financial advisor: are you a fiduciary? A fiduciary is a financial professional who is legally obligated to act in your own best interest. And now you’re thinking, Tori, why isn’t everybody legally obligated to act in my own best interest? Why wouldn’t they? Well, because a lot of people are out here to scam you, and a lot of people are out here to just make money even at the expense of you. So a lot of financial advisors, and I’m putting that in mocking air quotes, are out here who are not fiduciaries. And not every person who’s not a fiduciary is a bad person or is a bad advisor. However, they have no legal obligation to do right by you, which means that they can recommend you things that you don’t actually need but that make them a really high commission.
So you’ll see financial advisors, especially on social media, talk about things like indexed universal life-insurance policies, which are complete scams, or how you don’t need a 401(k) because 401(k)s are stupid and you should just invest in this life-insurance thing. If a financial advisor is telling you to invest in life insurance over the 401(k), you don’t have a financial advisor, you have a life-insurance salesman. And if you ask the question, “Are you a fiduciary?” and they don’t give you a straight answer, which is, “Yes, I am,” or, “No, I’m not,” they’re probably not a fiduciary. If they’re doing the like, “Oh, well, you don’t really need to be a fiduciary, because I have this, buh, buh, buh…” No. Bad idea. So that is our first question before we even consider the pros or cons of working with a financial advisor. Are they legally obligated to act in your own best interest? Are they a fiduciary?
The second question to ask is, “How do you get paid?” How do you, the financial advisor, get paid? How am I going to pay you for your services? Because there’s financial advisors out there who manage your portfolio for you and take 1%, 2%, 3%, three and a half percent of everything you make in the stock market. Now, you are going, “But Tori, 1% is not that much, right? 1% is not that much.” Okay, but we all hope we’re millionaires someday, or multimillionaires. The average person that is my age, I’m 30, is going to need millions of dollars in order to retire comfortably, and 3% of a million dollars is a lot of money, especially when nobody else are charging those kind of fees. That’s a really, really high fee.
So we really don’t want to work with financial advisors that are charging us a percentage of our portfolio, especially the person listening to the show. When you start getting into high-net-worth people, and I mean five-plus million dollars, there’s some case to be made for these wealth managers who are taking a percentage. But for you and I, no. That does not make sense. That does not make sense. It’s an extremely high amount of money for non-commiserate benefit. And I’m going to call you out by name. Edward Jones. You are scamming people. Because they charge 3.5% the last time I looked. They also charge you a fee if you want to leave them. They charge you a $75 fee if you want to take your account away. If you or somebody you love is with Edward Jones, please get out. You are spending so much of your hard-earned money for little to no return. Don’t do it.
So our two questions before we consider the pros and the cons of a financial advisor. Two questions. One: are you a fiduciary? Are you legally obligated to act in my best interest? And two: how do I pay you? What is your pay structure? Let’s talk about the pros and cons, and I’ll talk more about what we want to look for when it comes to paying the financial advisors in a second.
The biggest pro to a financial advisor is you’re sitting down and you’re talking to a real-life person, who, again, assuming you’ve done your due diligence, is a credible person. So you’re getting these tailored investment strategies based on your individual goals, your risk tolerance, your financial situation, and hopefully it’s not just eight questions that you told an algorithm. You’re actually having a conversation about your life, about your children, about your retirement age, about whether you’re a homeowner or not, about the things you actually truly care about and how you want to use money as a tool to build a life that you love.
One of the additional pros of a financial advisor, the second pro, is that they’re providing comprehensive planning for you. So they can potentially provide not just investment strategies and investment advice. They’re giving you estate planning, so wills, trusts, et cetera, they’re helping you navigate taxes, and they might be even helping you think about retirement planning as you get closer to actual retirement. So I will say, if you are someone who is trying to retire in the next 10 years, actually, this is the biggest case where I recommend a financial advisor. You’re in your 50s and you’re trying to retire soon? I actually really do recommend a financial advisor, at least to sit down once or twice, because they’re going to help you with your personalized situation, make decisions about where your money should be, what different strategies you need to do, or decisions you need to make, as you get closer and closer to actually retiring.
Just like we said, robo-advisors don’t provide emotional support, as a con. When you sit down with a real human being, they’re hopefully providing you emotional support. They’re helping you navigate not just the technical side of the stock market, but the emotional and the psychological side too. So financial advisors, again, pro: personalized advice, comprehensive planning, not just about investing, not just about the stock market, but about a bunch of different money-related things, emotional support. And especially, again, if you are someone nearing retirement, I think financial advisors are great. That is one of the unique situations where I actually really do recommend that you sit down with someone and talk to them.
My cons. We were talking about those fees before. One of the biggest cons for financial advisors are the fees, especially if they are charging you a percentage. Again, if a financial advisor is charging you a percentage of your portfolio, run the other way. You are looking for a financial advisor that charges you hourly. An hourly rate. So, “Hey, we’ll sit down for two hours and it’s going to cost $125 an hour.” That is the kind of financial advisor you want to work with. However, on average, if you are giving your money over to a financial advisor that’s charging you 1% to 3%, that is a lot of money. That is tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your lifetime. And again, it is not indicative or not guaranteed that you will make that money up. It’s not like if I was paying a service and it was slightly more expensive, but I knew that I could get a lot out of that service and that service was going to save me money or was going to be a quality service, yeah, I might consider paying it.
But here’s my stat for you. When I was researching for my book Financial Feminist, I found this stat that blew my mind. Only 25% of professional stock-pickers managed to outperform the everyday investor. So I’m going to take the jargon out of that. Only a quarter of professional financial advisors, or stock-pickers, the people who have degrees, have certifications, the people who should be good at this, are only better than you… Yes, you. The person who’s like, “I don’t think I know anything about money.” They are only better than you 25% of the time. I’m not about to pay somebody 1% to 3%, tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of my lifetime, I’m not about to pay them this amount of money when only a quarter of the time they’re going to be better than me and you. That’s not great.
So we’re not working with financial advisors who are charging that percentage fee. Definitely not. But if we are going to work with somebody hourly, which is what we do want, they still are pretty cost-prohibitive because the hourly fee on average is anywhere from $100 to $400 per hour, typically, average, $200 to $400 an hour. If you’re seeing this person a couple of hours every month, which feels excessive, but let’s say it’s two hours every month, that adds up. At the higher end, 400 times 12, you can do the math on that. That’s $4,800 a year.
I got one more thing to mention about financial advisors. So when we come back, we are talking more about financial advisors, the pros, the cons, and I’m telling you the platform that I recommend you invest. So stay tuned.
Hello. Welcome back from break. Okay, financial advisors. Let’s review the pros really quick. Pros: emotional support, personalized guidance. That’s great. Cons: fees. Fees are really expensive. So we want to prioritize, if we are going to work with a financial advisor, doing it hourly.
And the final con for me about financial advisors. There are plenty of good ones out there. There are truly are. I am not out here completely shitting on financial advisors. I think there’s plenty who are kind and empathetic and feminist, but there’s a lot out there who aren’t. The average financial advisor is what the financial industry looks like, which is male, pale, and stale, as some of my fellow financial coaches and experts say. The amount of times I have heard from women in our community where they go to a financial advisor with their male partner and all the financial advisor does is speak to their husband, their male partner. Doesn’t look at them. Doesn’t ask them how they’re doing. Doesn’t ask them what their goals are. It’s just a bro-to-bro meeting that happens so often. Or you go to the financial advisor and you talk about all of the reasons that you are scared about Trump’s impact on the economy and on your investment portfolio, and he said, “Oh, well, I voted for him. He has good economic policies.”
The amount of people in the finance industry who do not share your values, who do not actually treat you as a smart human being, who condescend to you… I jokingly call it, it’s your dad’s financial advisor friend named Steve. And some of the Steves are great. A lot of them aren’t. So when it comes to the traditional finance industry in general, it was not built for you and I. It was not built to be feminist. It was not built to be non-condescending and non-judgmental. It was not built without the jargon and without the gate-keeping. And I will say 99% of people listening don’t need a financial advisor. You just don’t.
So what do we do then, Tori? You just ran me through the three different options and you gave me some pros, but you gave me a lot of cons. So what is the best option out there? Well, there’s Stock Market School. Stock-market school is the investing platform that I built. It is not a course. It is not a workshop. It’s an actual investing platform. We built the technology for you to be able to invest and to learn step by step from me and my incredible business partners, who are fiduciaries, who are teaching you how to fish, teaching you how to invest in the stock market, giving you accountability and coaching. And we are never taking a percentage fee or charging you an additional fee every time you invest. We built the platform we wanted to see, and this is what I recommend to people.
And yeah, I’m talking about my own product right now. I’m shamelessly plugging. I know. But I’m doing it because I’ve actually built something that works. I’ve actually built something with my team that I have seen thousands of women use to not only progress towards their goals to get their 100K and beyond towards their retirement accounts, but to actually become educated investors. They know what they’re doing. They know what all of these terms mean. And they’re also not spending hours a day doing this. They’re spending two hours or less per month on average managing and learning about investing.
I’m transparent. I like talking to you about the cons. There’s cons in my platform too. If you want something completely one-on-one, you want to sit down with a person one-on-one, it might cost you a little bit of money. We covered that before. But if that’s a really big priority to you, Stock Market School is probably not the place for you, at least not right now. If you don’t have any interest in managing your own accounts… And I’m going to call bullshit on this because you should. You really, really should.
And we just got a couple of Instagram comments about this where I’ve talked about this and people were like, “Hell no, I don’t want to look at it. I don’t want to touch it. I don’t want to manage it.” Please don’t be that person. Please don’t be that person. I want to teach you to fish. We’re not teaching you every single thing. We’re not turning you into a finance bro. You’re not going to have a CPA license at the end of this. Nor should you. But if you don’t care about looking at your own money and you don’t care about your own money’s performance and you just want to trust somebody else, yeah, Stock Market School’s not the best place for you.
And the final con is if you have a very, very unique financial situation. And everybody thinks you’re unique. I know you are. But I’m talking you just inherited a business with your family. Somebody in your family just died and you inherited a business. You inherited millions of dollars. Again, you are really close to retirement. That is when you should talk to a financial advisor.
But for the average person, Stock Market School is for you. We built it for you. We built it to be a non-judgmental, non-jargon investing platform, where you not only learn how to invest from me with live coaching and workshops and courses and masterclasses, but also the actual platform that looks nothing like one of these DIY platforms that’s fucking confusing. It is so easy to invest, and the amount of people who have come in and gone, “Oh my God, it’s this easy.” Well, yeah. When you build it like it’s easy, it is. We’ll link Stock Market School down below. It is, in my opinion, the best place to learn how to invest because I used all of your guys’ concerns and fears and questions and created this platform, which, by the way, has been featured on the front page of the business section of The New York Times.
If you’re not interested in signing up for Stock Market school right now, take our free investing workshop, herfirst100k.com/secrets. You’re going to learn the secrets of the stock market. You’re going to learn some of the myths you’ve been believing about the stock market and how to overcome them. We’re going to talk about ways to avoid losing money. It’s free. No reason to not show up. Herfirst100k.com/secrets.
To recap, there are pros and cons of every investing platform, including the one I’ve built, and it depends on your own situation. Personal finance is personal. It depends on what you want, what your goals are, how much money you do have, and also what’s important to you in terms of values: how you want to be spoken to, how you want to be treated, the accessibility in terms of this information being gate-kept or not. All of these are really important to consider when you’re starting investing.
But my last piece of advice for you that I have said so many times in our work and I will continue to say: do not let analysis paralysis keep you from progressing towards your financial goals. Do not feel like you must make the perfect decision because imperfect action is better than inaction every single day. And specifically when it comes to investing, every day you don’t invest, every day you’re not putting money in the stock market that you could be, you are losing money, because you’re losing that valuable, valuable time.
And we’ll do an entire other episode about this. We’ve talked about this before on the show with other episodes. We’ll link them down below. But I know the question after this is going to be, but what about Trump? Should I continue investing? Yes. No matter what Trump is doing, no matter what the stock market’s doing, no matter who’s President, we continue to invest. We stay the course. Do not let Donald Trump and the fear of what he might do, or Elon Musk, do not let the fear of what these two men might do cause you to derail your own financial future. Don’t let it.
I can’t wait to see you in the Stock Market Secrets workshop, whether that is tonight or in the future. Again, herfirst100k.com/secrets. I’m thankful you’re here. As always, thank you for supporting Feminist Media. Thank you for listening to the show, and we’ll see you back here very soon.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Researched by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video Engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Taylor Chou, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Claire Kurronen, Daryl Ann Ingram and Meghan Walker. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton. Photography by Sarah Wolfe. And theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound.
A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K community for supporting the show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirsthundredk.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
