Fortune · Justin Lambert—Getty ImagesGlen Luke Flanagan 7 min readThese days, Erika Kullberg spends most of her time explaining personal finance to 21 million followers on platforms including YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and her podcast. But back in 2016, freshly graduated from Georgetown Law, she was anything but a finance guru.“The day I graduated, if you’d asked me how much I had in student loans, I couldn’t have answered,” says Kullberg. “It felt like Monopoly money when I was taking out the loans.”Upon learning that she had $200,000 in student loans, she set a firm goal of paying off the entire balance in two years—and managed to pull it off early. The 34-year-old attorney has since become one of the most recognizable personal finance influencers on the internet, known for her tagline “I read the fine print so you don’t have to.”“I went down a rabbit hole of trying to find and learn as much as I could about paying off debt, good money tips, all of that, and that’s what kicked off my passion for personal finance,” says Kullberg about her student debt odyssey.Fortune interviewed Kullberg to get her best tips on how Americans can better manage their money in 2025, learn what she sees as the biggest mistakes the members of Gen Z are making with their finances, and gauge what the insatiable appetite for her content says about the state of personal finance education today. Let’s dive in.Kullberg notes that too many young Americans learn nothing about personal finance in school, and probably don’t get much education on the topic at home, either.“I grew up in a military family,” she says. “My dad was in the Air Force, my mom is Japanese. In Japanese culture it’s kind of improper to talk about money.”She says that while she learned at home about the importance of saving money, there wasn’t much discussion of how to make your money work better for you.“The other side of the equation is just as important,” Kullberg says. “How do you grow money? How can you do things like negotiating raises?”One of the big recommendations Kullberg has for members of Gen Z comes down to a foundational concept of personal finance—budgeting.“A lot of Gen Z flinch at the word budget because it seems restrictive, overbearing,” Kullberg says. “But I’ve come up with a fun way to make budgeting not so restrictive.”Here’s what she recommends. Record all of your spending from the past 30 days on paper, grab highlighters in three different colors, then code your discretionary expenses as follows: Green for purchases that brought you joy. Yellow for purchases you’re lukewarm about or don’t really remember. Red for purchases that brought no happiness. “For the red ones, get rid of those completely,” she says. “Green can stay, yellow you should question. That’s an easy way to budget.”Another tip she offers for Gen Z consumers is to avoid buy now, pay later (BNPL) apps.“If you’re buying something no
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