What Does a Finfluencer Actually Do?

There’s no subject under the sun that isn’t covered by a social media channel or at least by a blog. Lifestyle, music, food, beauty, and fitness rank among the most popular subjects. Most of the subjects are hip and appeal to many people, but not all of them – like the subject of financial planning, for example – are Instagrammable per se. That doesn’t bother Lucerne native Angela Mygind, better known as Miss Finance. The finfluencer provides her mostly female audience with information about saving, investing, and retirement planning in a lively way that’s easy to understand.

Angela Mygind has no formal training in finance. All of the content that Miss Finance publishes she taught herself. “Some time ago, I lost a lot of money on a financial product that was recommended to me,” she says. “At that point I recognized that I had to learn about finance myself.” So, she began to research. “And I realized that it’s really not that hard at all.” Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and Mygind – like most people – suddenly had a little more free time on her hands. She used that time to bring Miss Finance to life. That was two-and-a-half years ago.

Today Miss Finance runs a blog, a podcast, an Instagram channel, and a LinkedIn channel. Mygind also regularly writes columns for a Swiss daily newspaper and teaches courses on finance. She does all that alongside her job as a project assistant at an international corporation. Sometimes it can get very stressful, she says. “Fortunately, my weekly job workload is very flexible and oscillates between 30% and 60%. Nevertheless, my work-life balance is not so great,” she confesses with a chuckle.

That’s because Mygind devotes a lot of her time to Miss Finance. “I answer every question sent to my channels. That’s around 30 a day on Instagram alone. I also receive a lot of requests for events or cooperations from companies. I write the blog posts, create the Instagram posts and stories, and record the podcasts, and three times a year I teach a seven-evening course.” For the time being, Mygind doesn’t want to give up her job to concentrate full-time on Miss Finance. “I’m a typical Swiss and prefer to keep my day job to cover my fixed costs.”

The content that Miss Finance publishes is primarily aimed at women. It’s important, Mygind explains, to address women directly on this subject: “Women tend to be less interested in financial topics and often also feel intimidated by everything connected with the subject. That causes them to lack adequate knowledge. Then women prefer to delegate financial matters to men, following traditional role models. But it doesn’t have to – and shouldn’t – be this way.” To get women more interested, Mygind says that she tries to present financial planning as a lifestyle topic and to tie it into everyday life, making it indeed a little Instagrammable after all.

“Eighty-one percent of my Instagram subscribers are women, and my podcast audience is also 80% women. But men also view and listen to my content. My blog actually gets read more by men,” Mygind explains, mainly because most of her readers come across her blog via the Google search engine, she adds. “And men simply Google financial topics more frequently than women do,” she says.

The content published by Miss Finance is designed for novices. It delivers tips on how to save money and information on ETFs, third-pillar retirement planning, and budget planning. “When somebody tells me that she or he has started to invest, that’s the nicest feedback I can get,” Mygind says, because that’s where the sticking point often lies, she explains. Simply getting started. “Women in particular often get stuck in analysis paralysis. Before they buy a financial product, they want to thoroughly understand it from A to Z. That is basically a good thing, but can also become too extreme,” Mygind says.

This is where Miss Finance tries to step in. “A fundamental tenet of social media is that people follow people,” Mygind says. Unlike a company, finfluencers can approach the subject of money in a much more personal way. “I have made a lot of mistakes with my finances over the years. I can talk about those mistakes to help my audience avoid them.” That creates the trust it takes to overcome prejudices. “Many people still believe that investing is just for the rich and that the stock market is evil. I want to change those dogmas,” she says.

Thanks to finfluencers like Miss Finance, many people have begun to take their finances into their own hands and to invest their money, but there’s no guarantee that this will yield profitable returns, particularly not in the current tough stock-market climate. But Mygind says that she hasn’t received any panicking feedback thus far: “The maximum that people write to me is that they are taking a break from investing for the time being. I try to convey a long-term approach to my audience. It’s normal for the stock market to drop once in a while.”

“Finfluencer” is still a relatively new term. In Switzerland in particular, there are few finfluencers with a big following thus far. “There’s no competitive rivalry,” Mygind says. “On the contrary, there is a very good dialogue between us. And the whole thing is still in its infancy. The more finfluencers, the better, in my opinion. Because the more we talk about money, the more we all benefit.”