AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
About a decade ago, North Carolina native Mary Esposito began knitting to pass time, as health issues kept her from physical activity.
Read more Bojangles debuts 2 new breakfast items, but they won’t stick around.
A year later, her entrepreneurial tendencies took over, and she created a business, Purple Pear, to sell handmade scarves and hats.
It started as a way to allow her to continue buying yarn and crafting materials. But it turned into something more.
Esposito, now 23 and a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, considers herself an artist first. With Purple Pear’s more than 350,000 Instagram followers, it’s not a stretch to say that art is what Esposito is most known for.
But it’s not the only thing she’s known for.
More than 58,000 users follow another of her Instagram accounts, Money with Mary (@moneywithmary1), where she posts content to educate Generation Z, and particularly young women, about finance and investing — topics she knows something about.
Over the years, Esposito has grown an initial investment of $2,500, which came from profits from Purple Pear, into a six-figure portfolio. As of July 30, her individual brokerage account and Roth IRA were valued at $230,000, she said. That’s in addition to bonds and cryptocurrency investments, plus a simplified employee pension IRA and cash management account, together valued between $40,000 to $50,000.
Purple Pear wasn’t the only way Esposito was making money. She had “side hustles,” pet-sitting and dog-walking, which gave her time to listen to podcasts. One from the Motley Fool plugged a book, “The Motley Fool Investment Guide for Teens.” She checked it out from the library.
“I’ve never been a math person. I’m always a humanities, liberal arts person,” Esposito said. “But the way that they showed the mathematical breakdown of the power of compounding and all of this stuff, it just clicked.”
That book gave her the context to dig deeper into finance.
“I realized that the more I invest, the more that I can have the financial freedom to pursue the activities and the hobbies that I enjoy,” Esposito said.
At age 18, she created a Money with Mary TikTok account to connect with other women and girls around her age who were interested in investing. Then she realized she could also use social media to introduce more people to personal finance.
“There’s a different kind of specialness that comes from putting my content out there and it just happening to land on someone’s feed through the random algorithm, and they have no interest in investing or finance,” she said. “But then from that one video, maybe it piques their interest, and then these steps ensue, and all of a sudden they’ve started their financial journey.”
Now, she makes multiple posts each week that Esposito describes as “edutainment” — educational entertainment.
Speaking about topics such as 401(k)s, budgeting, investing and saving money — that’s the education side.
The entertainment component, the way she keeps eyes on her content, comes partly from Esposito’s tendency to knit, without looking, while talking to viewers, and partly from her appearance. After all, Vampy Violet lipstick by Elf Cosmetics and spiked choker necklaces aren’t part of the Wall Street uniform.
Read more Rihanna Stuns in Barely-There Carnival Costume With Jewels, Body Cutouts
“At the end of the day, it’s social media. The algorithm rewards content that is engaging and that people actually enjoy watching,” Esposito said.
Esposito continues to invest, increasing her principal amount monthly. For that, she has needed more money.
She sells handmade plushies on Purple Pear, and she monetized her social media presence.
Esposito gets some money from organic views, but most of the social media revenue comes from brand deals, where she helps to “bring visibility” to products and services offered by institutions such as fintech companies in exchange for compensation. She also does affiliate marketing and is paid when someone takes her recommendation and uses her referral link.
Unlike other creators, Esposito doesn’t charge people to access her content.
“There is this misconception that a lot of financial influencers are trying to scam you, and I do think that there are always going to be some bad apples and people with ulterior motives,” she said. “But I don’t sell any courses or digital products as of now.”
Despite her lack of professional certifications or career in finance, people should trust Esposito, she said. She only talks about her own experiences and accomplishments, and she backs up her claims. There’s a link to her Roth IRA investment strategy in her Instagram account, which anyone can see for free.
She also doesn’t consider herself an expert, and she’s open about her mistakes — following Reddit trade advice and opening a Roth IRA but not investing the money into stocks and securities, to name a couple of examples.
Now, she takes advice from several sources. Her investment experience and historical stock performance inform her decisions, along with websites including The Motley Fool and Investopedia, and the Carolina Financial Well-Being Center at UNC, which she helped establish as a student.
Esposito will work at the center during the upcoming semester, leading financial literacy workshops on topics such as budgeting and investing, and meeting with students individually to provide more personalized advice.
Whether it’s teaching UNC students about finance or creating videos for Money with Mary followers, Esposito’s goal is to educate and empower her peers to be able to have the financial freedom to have the lives they want.
For Esposito, that means having the funds to make crafts, travel — she plans to stay in a Bali villa for a couple of months — keep a flexible work schedule and eventually buy a home in Raleigh, where she grew up.
“I don’t think that there are enough people, even within the educational system, explaining to us, there are more options than you think. You don’t just have to go down this particular route. You can build your own business. You can invest,” Esposito said. “And even if you weren’t brought into those conversations in your childhood, here you are now, and here I am now, and here we can have this conversation.”
Read more House committee recommends sanctions for Rep. Edwards. Read the report, his response