The rise of social media has done something remarkable for financial education: it made investing feel accessible to millions of people who never had a seat at the table. That’s genuinely good.
But it also created something else: a crowded, noisy, and often dangerous landscape where anyone with a ring light and a strong opinion can position themselves as your financial advisor. And right now, that landscape is about to matter more than ever.
An estimated $84 to $90 trillion in wealth is expected to transfer from older generations to Millennials and Gen X by 2045. Whether that wealth grows, holds, or quietly erodes will depend in large part on the quality of decisions made by the people receiving it. And right now, many of those people are getting their financial education partly from social media.
The data tells a sobering story. According to a 2025 CFP Board study, nearly 3 in 5 Americans (57%) say they’ve made regrettable financial decisions based on misleading information they found online. These aren’t hypothetical risks. They’re outcomes people are living with right now.
And younger investors are bearing the brunt of it. Among adults under 45, 64% report making regrettable financial moves based on online content, compared to 45% of those aged 46 to 54. A five-year longitudinal study by the Oliver Wyman Forum, tracking 300,000 investors, found that nearly half of Gen Zers who acted on social media stock recommendations said they lost money or were negatively impacted.
The Trust Paradox
What makes this particularly complicated is that the next generation knows something is wrong.
The Charles Schwab Modern Wealth Survey found that while 72% of Gen Z rely on social media for financial advice, Gen Zers simultaneously rank social media as the least trustworthy source for that type of information. They’re using it anyway, not because they trust it, but because it’s accessible. Personalized financial guidance has historically been hard to find and even harder to afford.
This is the trust paradox: a generation inheriting unprecedented wealth, hungry for financial clarity, turning to the only channel loud enough to meet them where they are, while privately knowing it might cost them.
For families navigating the Great Wealth Transfer, this is the real risk hiding in plain sight. It’s not market volatility or tax exposure. It’s the gap between the wealth being passed down and the decision-making framework needed to steward it well.
What Actually Works
The same CFP Board research that documented the damage also pointed clearly to the solution. Three in four respondents said they would act on a financial advisor’s guidance without needing to verify it elsewhere. That compares to just 37% who would trust financial advice from social media.
The next generation doesn’t need more content. They need credible relationships. They want someone who has seen multiple market cycles, has a documented process, and has something real at stake. They want a framework for making decisions, not a trending video telling them what to buy this week.
What We Believe at Security Properties
We built Security Properties around a simple conviction: institutional-caliber investing shouldn’t come with institutional-sized bureaucracy. The same discipline that governs how the world’s largest endowments and family offices allocate capital can be made accessible to serious individual investors, with full transparency, without the noise, and without the pressure tactics.
That matters especially when wealth changes hands. The investors we work with have spent decades building capital carefully. The next generation deserves a partner who will meet them with the same rigor and seriousness, not a platform optimized for engagement.
Our approach isn’t built on market timing calls or trend chasing. It’s built on:
- Conservative, transparent underwriting: We normalize uncertainty. We explain our reasoning, including what could go wrong and how we’ve accounted for it.
- Off-market deal access: We source opportunities that institutional investors can’t reach on their own and that individuals rarely see.
- Long-term alignment: We invest alongside our investors. Our interests are structurally aligned, not just stated.
- Matching capital to opportunity: We don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. We match investor profiles, timelines, and goals to the right opportunities.
We don’t promise the best returns you’ve ever seen. We promise a disciplined, documented, transparent process and a team that will tell you the truth about a deal even when that means walking away from it.
The Real Question
The financial internet will always be louder than the right answer. That is the nature of the medium. But it fills a vacuum, and the vacuum is one families can close themselves.
If you are receiving wealth, the most useful question is not “what should I invest in?” It is “who do I trust to help me think about this, and why?”
If you are transferring wealth, the question is different. It is: have I given them any way to answer that?
Trust is not inherited. It is observed and built over time. Your children cannot evaluate a sponsor, a process, or a track record they have never seen. So take the time to invite them onto the investor calls. Talk through what the quarterly reports actually mean. Let them sit through a quarter that came in under projection and watch how it gets explained. Introduce them to the people managing the capital while you are still in the room to say why those relationships were worth building.
We welcome that. When our investors bring the next generation into these conversations, the questions get better, and the decisions get better with them.
The wealth will transfer on schedule. Whether the judgment goes with it is the part you control.
