When advisor Natasha Howe was living in Los Angeles, a lot of the women in her friend group were social media influencers. One of her friends, model and influencer KT Lordahl, had a $250,000 check on her dresser.

“She said, ‘I’ll get to it one day,’ and I’m like, ‘What if it bounces? You have to cash that right away. If they gave you the check at the time when they have the funds there, and then you wait two years later down the line to deposit it or one year, it could expire, the cash wouldn’t be there when you go to cash it, it’s not yours anymore,’” Howe said.

She convinced Lordahl, who has over 1 million followers on Instagram, to invest in a money market fund paying 5%, and she was amazed at the results.

“She used to have this boyfriend who was day trading, and she had this bad taste in her mouth—that investment accounts were extremely risky and aggressive, and you can lose all of it in one day,” Howe said. “Which you can, if you’re buying penny stocks, or you don’t know what you’re doing.”

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Once Lordahl began seeing the interest payments, she warmed up to the idea of investing and gave Howe $100,000 of her net worth to invest in exchange-traded funds. Howe started educating her on ETFs, stocks and bonds, and that she didn’t need to own a lot of bonds because of her age. At 22 years old at the time, Lordahl had a long time horizon for investing.

Lordahl started referring her influencer friends to Howe, and Howe began talking to others about putting their money to work in the markets rather than letting it sit in checks. Now, she works with several influencer clients, some focused on entrepreneurship and others on health and wellbeing.

That includes Allegra Paris, creator of Allegra Paris Bikini Body, who has over 200,000 followers on Instagram. Paris has seen huge success building her brand and audience, and makes money doing collaborations with companies for Pilates and weightlifting. Paris faced a similar problem to Lordahl: she was uncertain about how best to manage her newfound wealth.

“I was nervous about it, but I trusted her,” Paris said. “She’s just taught me how to make money with the money I had sitting around, not only putting it in money markets but also ETFs and structured notes, corporate debt.”

Howe also educates her on different asset classes and other investing topics.

“She’s kind of held my hand through all of it, and taught me why I should be doing all of this,” Paris said. “She’s definitely made me money, and she’s educational about it.”

Howe partners with Paris to host financial-focused Pilates workout events at Paris’s studio in Miami, where Howe is now based. Paris leads the fitness portion of the event, while Howe organizes a post-workout financial session to answer attendees’ questions about finance and investing.

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Howe also hosts rooftop networking events for female professionals and quarterly dinners for successful entrepreneurs.

She said her influencer clients have different needs than her other retail clients. For one, they don’t have 401(k) plans through previous employers; most of them don’t even know about retirement accounts.

“They’re starting at the bare minimum with just a checking account and just letting it sit there,” she said. “They have no idea about compounding interest or investing in the S&P 500.”

When she works with an influencer, How said she creates an Excel spreadsheet and has them input their income sources, all recurring expenses, liabilities and assets. Howe can then pull together a full financial picture to determine the influencer’s actual net worth and see what they have to put toward investment accounts.

“If you leave it in your checking account, you’re going to see it there. You’re going to spend it all, and then you’re going to be left with zero at the end of the month, whether you make $1 million a month or $10,000 or $5,000 a month,” Howe said. “You have to have a game plan for the amount of money that you bring in each month. And if you don’t have that in place, it really doesn’t matter how much money you make. I see people who are in corporate America, and they have more in their investment accounts or in savings accounts than my influencer friends who are making millions and millions of dollars. It just depends on having the right foundation set up.”

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Paris said being an influencer is similar to being a professional athlete, where you have a few high-earning years, and then the income stream fizzles out.

Howe said it’s more like being a celebrity, and that it can become a long-term career if you stay consistent with content creation.

“You could do it your whole life, but a lot of women don’t plan to, probably, do it into being a mom, having kids and so on,” Paris said.

In a 2023 report, Goldman Sachs predicted that the content creator economy could grow to $480 billion by 2027, up from $250 billion in 2023. Social media influencers earn their money through direct branding deals, advertising revenue shares and subscriptions, donations, and other direct payments from followers, the report said. However, only about 4% of global creators bring in more than $100,000 a year.

After studying marketing and business administration in college, Howe got a job a Siebert Financial, a publicly traded financial services company, working on a call campaign. During that time, she would get paid a flat fee for each person she sent to a broker for a portfolio overview.

“That’s where I realized I don’t like just a salary-based job,” she said. “I like the potential to make more. If you put in more work, it’s all about what you want to make out of it.”

Howe, 31, has stayed at Siebert and now manages over $250 million in client assets and serves as vice president of wealth management.

She hopes to build up her own social media brand in the coming months, providing financial advice through social channels such as TikTok and Instagram.