Your Rich BFF Vivian Tu on Money Advice Podcast

Vivian Tu can still recall her first big money lesson.

Growing up in the suburbs of Baltimore and Washington DC as the only daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, the pressure to succeed was constant. “All of the family’s expectations were riding on me,” she says. Tu’s parents prioritized her education, and so they bought the smallest home in the best school district since it was “critically important” that she attend the best public school in the area. And while they taught her about the importance of budgeting and saving, Tu says there were rarely conversations outside of those basics.

Then, one day, she went to the mall. She and a friend each purchased a pair of ripped Abercrombie & Fitch jeans. “These were the most beautiful jeans that 13-year-old me had ever laid eyes on,” Tu says. She left the shopping bag in the living room, where her mom ultimately found it. “You would’ve thought I had done the most atrocious thing that had ever been done.”

Tu was lectured about how irresponsible it was to spend that money, which Tu estimates was $25, on a pair of jeans — ripped jeans, no less. She used her only defense: her friend got the same pair, too. “My mom looked me in the eye and said, ‘Well, your friend’s dad is a lawyer and your parents aren’t millionaires.’ That was a very real moment where I realized my family is different.”

Now, Tu gets paid to impart these lessons. The finance expert, who currently lives in Miami, shares her money advice with millions under her pseudonym, Your Rich BFF. Her book, “Rich AF,” was also a New York Times bestseller. And on Oct. 9, Tu is premiering the second season of her podcast, “Networth and Chill,” in partnership with Vox Media and PS, and sponsored by Marshalls.

Season two will include candid money conversations with a variety of finance experts, celebrities, and entrepreneurs, including Live Tinted founder Deepica Mutyala, Period movement founder Nadya Okamoto, and hairstylist Chris Appleton. Each interview will feature the transparency followers have come to expect from Tu. “I tell people, ‘This is how much money I made every single year since 2012.’ And people are shocked that I’m willing to share facts and figures,” she says. “That is what this podcast is.”

Tu didn’t arrive at this success overnight, of course.

After graduating from high school, she attended the University of Chicago on a partial merit scholarship. Her parents saved to cover the remaining tuition costs. Tu knew she had to choose her major wisely: “I did not have the luxury of choosing whatever major I wanted to be. I had a couple of career paths I could go down where that quarter-of-a-million-dollar degree would be worth it.”

Tu double-majored in public policy and environmental science with a concentration in finance. When it came time to get a job, she followed the lead of many of her peers who went to work on Wall Street. “I thought, if it’s good enough for my friends, it’s good enough for me,” she says. “I don’t wanna act like the career for the rest of my life was decided due to peer pressure, but it kind of was.”

Tu landed an internship at J.P. Morgan that turned into a full-time job trading industrials, materials, and energy stocks. For her parents, the job felt the achievement of the American Dream. “They felt like everything had worked out perfectly,” Tu says, “and then it didn’t, because a couple years later I ended up leaving.”

She decided to pivot careers, accepting a role in strategy sales at BuzzFeed, much to the concern of her parents. “Immigrant parents do not like risk.” The decision sparked a fight with her mom, who didn’t quite understand what the job would entail and envisioned her daughter leaving her fancy finance job to “write quizzes about what kind of cheese you are.” Tu’s parents would come around, however, when the risky media career would end up outearning that fancy finance job.

A few years in, Tu had the idea to start sharing her money tips online, at the suggestion of her friends and colleagues who were always asking her for advice. She made it a 2021 New Year’s resolution to start a social media channel. “I thought my seven friends would follow the account and then I wouldn’t have to repeat myself. As it turns out, more than seven people watched my content.” By the end of the first week, she had 100,000 followers on TikTok.

As hundreds of thousands tuned in to her videos, she began working on weekends to keep up with the content. There were times she would have a full face of makeup on at an unusual hour, having just done a television interview. That’s when her mom caught on to her newfound success. Caught in a lie about what Tu was doing, she recalls having to “filibuster so hard.” Tu, who already speaks at a rapid clip, began spewing every detail of the operation: the name, the timeline, all the details, including how she had already made $50,000 from it already. Tu’s mom was silent for a moment, then asked, “Did you just say you made $50,000?”

Though her parents initially viewed it as a hobby, if it was bringing in supplemental income, they approved. In fact, they were supportive. Tu remembers thinking, “What aliens have kidnapped my parents?” But there had been no alien invasion; she was older now, and wiser. They trusted her judgment. Tu says, “As someone who is an only daughter, I desperately want validation from my parents. I want to make them proud and happy. It was the nicest thing to hear, and it gave me that extra fire in my belly to prove them right. I needed to prove myself right.”

Eventually, Tu’s side hustle eclipsed her full-time job, and she found it difficult to balance both. Frankly, she was burned out. It was her now-husband who encouraged her to “take a big swing” and commit herself fully to Your Rich BFF.

So, she devised a plan: Tu set aside $100,000 dollars in a high-yield savings account and gave herself a year to do Your Rich BFF full time. If it didn’t work out, she would find another job in media. “It was the best decision I ever made,” Tu says.

It’s rare to encounter someone who loves what they do as much as Tu does, although she hedges that by saying, “I hate working and I love teaching.” Adding, “The highlight of my job right now is not choosing which thumbnail is going to get the best engagement. That doesn’t bring me any joy. The part of the job that actually brings me a lot of joy is sharing this information, spreading this wealth, and hearing people’s success stories.”

Though she receives thousands of messages from people struggling to pay rent, Tu says she’s received many more from followers who have started a retirement fund, saved an emergency fund, or negotiated a raise because of her advice.

This, in essence, is Tu’s “why.” She wants to democratize the financial advice that has for so long seemed inaccessible to many — by design. “For decades, the financial services system has never served women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, or people who grew up low income. It was a club and if you weren’t already rich, you could not get in,” she says. “I’m not gatekeeping these secrets anymore. I learned from mentors on Wall Street, and now I’m sharing it with everybody.”

It’s unfortunate, however, that when she did start sharing this advice, some didn’t find her credible or questioned her experience. “They weren’t trusting my word because I look the way I do, because I’m young, I have on cute hoop earrings or I dress a certain way,” she says. “For so long, men — older, rich, white men, in particular — have been catered to by financial services. You turn on the news or any sort of financial reporting, and everybody looks the same. They are old, they are white, they are men, and they’re wearing a Patagonia vest. And I don’t look like that.”

With “Networth and Chill,” Tu seeks out learnings from trailblazers typically underrepresented in finance, like women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and those who didn’t start out with a trust fund or safety net. And she really goes there, asking for specifics on how much someone makes, what they spend, and how they spend it.

But, according to traditional etiquette, isn’t that impolite? “It’s only tacky and gauche when we do it, right? Because I see guys on the golf course teeing off and smoking a cigar and they’re talking about their portfolios. They’re talking about their investment properties. They’re talking about how much their hedge fund paid them last year,” Tu says. “It’s not tacky when they do it, but it’s tacky when two young women talk about money? It’s tacky when two people of color talk about money? I don’t see why the rules for them are different than they are for us.”

After we end our interview, I realize I forgot to ask Tu about whether her parents listen to the podcast and if she also had to keep this news a secret from them. That may be self-explanatory, however, as they’ve come a long way. Tu says, “My parents joke, ‘If we’d known you would just become an internet person, we should have just started that YouTube channel a lot sooner.'”

Kelsey Garcia is the associate content director of PS Balance, where she oversees lifestyle coverage, from dating to parenting and financial wellness. Kelsey is passionate about travel, skin-care trends, and changes in the social media landscape. Before joining the PS team more than eight years ago as an editorial assistant, she interned at Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, among other publications.