There's personal finance guidance for every demographic except the one that needs it most. Influencers like Caleb Hammer provide the spectacle of watching someone's financial life fall apart in real time. Investopedia is technically useful, but it reads more like a legal document written by someone's grandfather. And you've got Khan Academy, which has some decent material buried under a layer of content that feels like homework.
And you have a loosely connected ecosystem of 40 and 50-year-olds telling students and young professionals to save more money, recording cringy Instagrams from their beach houses, having already made their millions.
What doesn't exist, at least not in any meaningful way, is a source built for the person who just got their first paycheck from a summer job. The college junior who just made $8,000 over the summer and feels unbelievably rich, ready to blow it in three short weeks.
The 22-year-old who made $35,000 in an internship and has absolutely no idea what to do with it. The student who's about to file taxes for the first time and doesn't know that a refundable tax credit could put $1,000 back in their pocket. Or the recent college graduate who has landed their first professional job, received a benefits package, and cannot tell whether it's written in English or a forgotten language.
Young people are starved of content and education that both reaches them where they are, in a language they understand, and has their best interests at heart. One-off advice videos suggesting opening a Roth IRA or avoiding credit card debt are helpful, but they are neither comprehensive nor structured.
Even worse is the content on TikTok promoting get-rich-quick schemes, sports betting, crypto scams, or other misinformation from "finfluencers" who really want to promote their latest pump-and-dump.
AWM Financial exists to be the bridge for the individuals ignored by traditional financial planning infrastructure.
The firms with a quarter-million minimum seem miles away from a young professional whose only concept of six figures is how many things are broken between their apartment and their car, which is older than them.
Our target demographic is anyone from the moment they have money — from their earliest job, first paycheck, or a summer internship, to their first full-time position, and through their late 20s and early 30s, when they reach the next stage of their financial journey. It's the stage of life when financial decisions are made for the first time, often with no real guidance, and when the compounding effect of getting it right — or wrong — is at its most powerful.
What makes the gap so strange is that it's not due to a lack of demand. Talk to any college senior who just signed their first offer letter. They're overwhelmed, not indifferent. Information is either too complicated, too generic, or coming from someone who has no idea what it actually feels like to make choices under real financial constraints in this decade. Being told to max out your 401(k) when you're trying to figure out how to cover rent hits differently when your dad's 63-year-old financial advisor pesters you from the golf course.
The other reason the gap exists is structural. The financial services industry has very little incentive to care about young people. The standard advisory model is built around a fee on assets under management, typically one percent annually. You need meaningful wealth for that math to work for an advisor. A 24-year-old with $40,000 in savings is not a priority client — or usually any client — no matter how much potential they have.
And while influencers like The Money Guys, Erin Talks Money, and good old Dave Ramsey exist, they often offer more reactive advice and commentary, and still aren't as approachable as they need to be.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure, and building strong, repeatable habits now is the key to financial freedom.
If every high school senior had it driven into their heads that $25 per week, starting at graduation, could compound to over $1.5 million tax-free by retirement, the next generation would be granted more flexibility and security to pursue their passions earlier in life.
Upperclassmen in college know how important it is to save and make good financial decisions, but they struggle to access quality information tailored to them. To accomplish our mission of financial clarity for the next generation, we must begin by persuading the youngest in our demographic to care about our content. A high school senior with a summer job doesn't care about long-term saving.
The philosophy is simple: personal finance isn't complicated because the concepts are hard. It's complicated because nobody explains them in a voice that sounds like a peer, on a platform actually used, in a way that respects the reality of starting the financial journey. Through articles, podcasts, social media content, and newsletters, we will teach the basics of personal finance that the next generation was never taught.