There’s a line Vivian Tu, AB’16, repeats in nearly every financial advice video she posts for her followers—all 6.5 million of them—across Instagram and TikTok: “I’m Vivian, your rich BFF, and your favorite Wall Street girly.”

Before she was the internet’s BFF, Tu, who spent two years at J.P. Morgan and later worked in ad sales for BuzzFeed, was giving money-management advice to her own friends. “They were all smarter than me,” she remembers thinking, “but it was so amazing to me that they didn’t understand even the most basic financial concepts.”

She realized she had a knack for breaking down complex topics in funny, relatable ways, a skill she brings to her growing media operation, which includes social media, a podcast, and two books. Rich AF: The Winning Money Mindset That Will Change Your Life (Portfolio/Penguin, 2023) covered the basics of saving, budgeting, and investing, while her new title, Well Endowed: The Secrets to Strategic Spending, Building a Financial Foundation for You and Your Family, and Creating Lasting Generational Wealth (Harper Wave, 2026), prepares readers for the next season of their financial lives, with advice on marriage, children, and retirement. Her comments have been edited and condensed.

Many people feel too anxious, uncomfortable, or embarrassed to talk about money. Where does your comfort with the topic come from?

Bluntly put, I’m new money. I didn’t grow up with it. I have two Chinese immigrant parents. And in the Chinese culture, one thing that’s different from American culture is that talking about money is quite common. When you would go to Thanksgiving at your family friend’s house, if they had a new TV, immediately the parents would be like, “How much was that TV?” I found it strange that other cultures didn’t have these conversations.

If you grew up with generational wealth, there’s a little bit of a hush-hush country club mentality. Whereas when you’re new money and tacky—I don’t have those same social handcuffs. I’m going to talk about whatever I want to talk about. Whoever likes it will stick around, and whoever doesn’t, won’t. But I think a lot more people needed to have this conversation than were willing to admit it.

You have an inclusive perspective about wealth. You’re unafraid to want it, but you clearly want other people to have it too. How did that mindset emerge?

For a long time, especially in my early career, I had a scarcity mindset—and it came from a rational place, let’s be clear. When I interned at J.P. Morgan, they hired three interns for my desk and only one of us was getting a job. So I was raised in an environment where it did feel like for me to get a win, someone else had to take an L.

That said, I think I had this idea from my parents that the harder you work, the more you will succeed. It did feel that way in college, for a while. But then it became clear in the real world, the workforce, it’s not about being the smartest person in the room. You have to have connections. You have to network. Your dad has to know somebody else’s dad. It didn’t necessarily feel like a meritocracy anymore.

I came to the conclusion that I want to do well, because I work so hard and I deserve to, but it doesn’t necessarily need to come at the expense of someone else. And we all have enough room to win. My ethos now is that I hope the more time you spend with me, the better you become, whether that’s smarter, richer, or feeling more stable. I want to leave people better than I found them.

Is there a money-related topic you’ve changed your mind about?

Prenups. I think they are a very powerful financial tool. When I was younger and just dating for fun, I always thought a prenup is what you get if you don’t trust your partner and you think you’re going to get divorced. But when you get married, the government will write you a prenup, and you’re just going to have to live with the terms they assign you.

I don’t care if you’re left, right, or center—you probably don’t trust the government to know you and your partner as well as you know you and your partner.

A prenup is a way to, essentially, have relationship insurance. You buy health insurance, car insurance, home insurance, and you don’t plan on getting sick, getting into a wreck, or having your house blow away in a tornado, but you still do those things to protect yourself.

What’s the best financial decision you’ve ever made—and the worst?

The best, and I got this from my mentor, was to invest early and often. When I got to J.P. Morgan, I knew what I was doing in my actual day job, trading on behalf of these billion-dollar hedge funds, billion-dollar asset managers. But I didn’t really know how to manage my own money. One day my mentor asked me, “Are you contributing to your 401(k)?” And I was like, “Yeah, a couple dollars.” She was like, “Are you joking?” She came over, made me log in to my employee portal, and changed all of my allocations.

I was so annoyed she had done that, because I realized my paycheck was smaller every two weeks. But looking back, that was how I built some of my wealth very quickly.

She really set me up for success, and had she not changed those allocations, I might not have what I have today. I was able to make some bigger career leaps because I had a nest egg, and I knew that I was safe. Those investments really did provide me a parachute.

Now, worst financial decision I’ve ever made. This is a fun one. When I was in college, I had this rinky-dink credit card. When I started working I was like, “Oh, I’m big-time now, it’s time for the really good credit cards.” I got all of the cards that have some heft when you throw them down on the dinner table, and I thought, “Now that I have these good credit cards, I don’t need this crappy one from college,” so I closed down that card, and I saw my credit score drop by 60 or 80 points the following day.

As it turns out, even though it was a crappy card, it was my longest line of historical credit, and length of credit history is one of the criteria that you’re graded on. There was absolutely nothing I could do but just wait it out. Unfortunately, that was a lesson I had to learn the hard way. I hope other people can learn from my mistake.

What’s something about working on Wall Street that people wouldn’t expect, and something about being a content creator that people wouldn’t expect?

Working on Wall Street is less glamorous than people think. On shows like Industry, they’re partying and doing drugs and going out. That wasn’t what I was doing. I was at that desk at 5:45 in the morning, and then I would go home and go to sleep immediately. There are some glitzy things—you get taken out to a couple of really nice steak dinners, and you make good money—but mostly it was a grind.

I think there’s a lot of misplaced rage, especially in the current socioeconomic climate. I promise you, the 22-year-old financial analyst is not your enemy. I have nothing but respect for the people who do it, because I know how hard it is.

For being a content creator, I would say creating the content you see is only probably 20 percent of the job. I am very much thinking about search engine optimization, writing copy, writing scripts. I’m spending time to write the book or outline things for my podcast or come up with pitches for TV shows, or I’m working on my app, Ask Dolly. Most of the stuff happens behind the scenes.

Do you feel like there’s a divide between your private self as Vivian and your public self as Your Rich BFF?

My personality online is very similar to my personality in real life. I’m still chatty, I still overshare, I still do all those things. But I am so grateful not to be a lifestyle creator or influencer because I know the people who do that work, and I don’t think I could do that. I don’t want to have to share every single thing I do. Every meal I consume does not have to be photographed.

I’m grateful that I get to educate and that people see me as a form of edutainment versus someone whose life they need to know every detail about.

What’s been most challenging and most rewarding about becoming a public figure?

The worst part, if I’m honest, is that I can’t be a normal person in public. I always joke with my husband that I can’t pick my nose in public anymore. But the negatives certainly are outweighed by all of the great positives.

The most rewarding is when I get to meet BFFs in real life, especially when I go on tour. I will never forget this: I was speaking at the University of Delaware, and at the end of the event, this woman ran up to me and said, “I had a $5,000 medical bill, and because of a video you made, I applied for charity care at the hospital, and they wiped the entire bill. I just want to let you know you saved my life.” It makes me tear up a little bit now.

Sometimes it feels like the work I do is so ridiculous. I put videos on the internet. When you just say that part, it sounds stupid and inconsequential. But to hear from somebody that their life was positively changed in a way that is going to dramatically improve both their emotional and financial health, that’s huge. I’m so proud that I get to do that.

People will tell me, like, you’re the reason I have a Roth IRA, you’re the reason I asked for a raise. It feels like the work I do is impactful. It has meaning. And I don’t know if I’ve ever had another job that made me feel that way.

Maroon memories

Favorite class: Easy. Clayton Harris III, AM’21 [lecturer in the Harris School of Public Policy], Process and Policy in State and City Government. He was not only my favorite professor but also my thesis adviser, so I have to give him a huge shout-out. He taught me a new way of thinking.

Daily bread: I don’t even know if this still exists, but in Hutch there was the pizza place that sold the breadsticks? There was one class that I and a couple of my roommates took, and after that class, we would always go get breadsticks and then talk about what we had learned or do the assignment. I remember sitting at those tables and just being with friends, and it was a lot of fun.

Feed the soul: I lived a block away from the Med, and I kid you not, I ate there probably four to five times a week.

Study spots: If I’m pretending to study, I’m on the A level, I’m chatting with friends, I’m eating chips. I don’t know if that’s even allowed, but I was definitely sneaking chips in the library. If I’m actually studying—like, it’s finals week, I am not messing around—fourth-floor stacks. There was one window that I would always sit at because it was so far back, and I knew there was no cell service.

Steel sharpens steel: I do think that UChicago made me a more critical thinker, because when you’re surrounded by that caliber of student, it forces you to question your beliefs. Having debates in class, a lot of perspectives that I never would have considered were thrown in my face. I had to acknowledge that other people are allowed to be smarter than you and you may have to think about things more deeply. I just loved it, and I’m grateful.

I’m grateful that I get to educate and that people see me as a form of edutainment versus someone whose life they need to know every detail about.