Takeaways
- Social media influencer Sharif Ceasar is making a significant income by teaching personal finance principles and coaching content creators.
- Despite skepticism among some people about online content creation, Ceasar emphasizes the importance of adapting to change and encouraging the next generation to seek out legitimate educational content online while advocating for financial, time, and location freedom.
With more than 6 million followers across social media platforms, Sharif Ceasar is making his living – a very, very good living – by teaching people. In addition to coaching content creators on how to grow their brand online, he is also educating young people – and the not-so-young – on basic, yet essential financial literacy principles, including everything from building good credit to budgeting your money properly.
Making his first few hundred dollars after posting a short YouTube video at age 15 was a revelation of sorts for Ceasar. Soon after, he decided to take a personal finance class during his junior year of high school. That one course was the extent of his high school’s offerings on the subject, but he was hooked.
“This stuff seemed like it was actually going to prepare me for the real world,” says Ceasar. “It was not about the money. It was about what the money could give me.” He immediately dedicated himself to learning more about financial well-being, already thinking ahead to a career.
“I started preparing,” he says, asking himself: “‘What am I going to be doing five years from now? 10 years, 20 years?’ The dots were connecting: I need to focus more on this thing and just go all in.”
‘I Know I Can Teach Them Something’
At the start, not being a recognized professional in the field did not deter him. Looking back, he says, “I knew: I’m no expert. But I do know more than the average person, so let me teach that person so they can get to at least where I was.” All Ceasar had to do, he realized, was “teach that one person that’s a couple of steps behind me.”
Having dabbled in vlogs about school, friends, and his daily life, he moved on to starting his own YouTube channel focused on personal finance. Within three months, he had more than a million followers across several platforms.
One video he posted early on about stashing away spare dollar bills in a shoebox became among his most viewed pieces of content. And by monetizing his social media accounts with ads displayed alongside the content he shared, he was boosting not only on his visibility but also his own wealth.
“I was able to double my money by saving money,” he says about that video. “That’s a crazy return on investment.”
Very quickly, his thirst for knowledge began paying off in more ways than one.
“I was just learning so much, consuming so much content and actually putting in that work, implementing everything I was learning,” Ceasar says.
By age 20, he had purchased his first house, earned his real estate license, and begun investing in the stock market – in one case turning $500 into $15,000. Today, he is making more than $100,000 a month.
‘You Have to Move Along With the Change’
You can find Ceasar relaying to his followers practical tips on a wide range of personal finance topics. Teens and college students who may not know how to write out a check or make sense of their credit card statement can find tutorials in brief, user-friendly clips on Ceasar’s channels. He’ll walk them through more advanced ideas, too, such as avoiding capital gains on inherited property or understanding the power of compound interest.
He also recognizes that not every generation approaches building personal wealth in the same way. Despite his success, Ceasar has come across more than his fair share of skeptics over the years. Fellow business conference attendees, people unfamiliar with social media, and even his own father have all openly doubted his decision to follow this path. As Ceasar has found, plenty of others don’t believe anyone can make an honest living posting content online or that social media influencers can in fact serve as legitimate sources of information.
“People have to understand that money is not as difficult as they make it out to be. People think that you have to put a direct amount of time to make a direct amount of money; you have to go to school, you have to get a job,” he says. In his experience, many people simply “put their own limiting beliefs onto others.”
“I don’t mean any offense to anybody who’s still thinking traditionally, but they have to understand the world is adapting. You have to move along with the change,” he adds.
His advice is to “stop being so skeptical, be a little more open-minded, and just do your research.”
That guidance holds true for older adults who want to communicate to their kids or grandkids the importance of financial well-being, Ceasar says.
The way he sees it, in today’s creator economy, kids are consuming content online regardless of whether it is beneficial or even informative. They are also hyperaware, so directing them to the right type of content and “the creators that are going to actually educate them” can make all the difference.
“How I learn – and how the world is learning now – is through content creators and influencers,” Ceasar says. In fact, research shows that 89 percent of consumers trust influencer recommendations at the same level as personal recommendations. Ceasar counts real estate investor Graham Stephan and financial minimalist Andrei Jikh among his own motivating mentors, neither of whom he’s met.
Coaching the Next Generation: The Three F’s
Growing up in the Chicago area after immigrating to the United States from Africa, Ceasar watched his parents and his friends’ parents all work different shifts and multiple jobs, missing out on quality time with their families. Even he worked 16-hour shifts as a high schooler while bullied for being “the broke kid.” He quickly realized that was not how he wanted to live his adult life. What he wanted was a life of freedom.
Ceasar regularly touts what he refers to as the three F’s: Financial freedom, time freedom, and location freedom. That includes vacationing when he wants to, spending his free time as he wishes, working hours that he sets for himself, as well as providing for his extended family back in Africa.
Teaching the next generation about how to achieve this level of freedom means, in part, showing them how certain actions will benefit them: “People are selfish by nature,” Ceasar says. They may not be in control of whether they get sick, are laid off from a job, or experience discrimination in the workplace. But what they can control is setting goals.
In addition to seeking out valuable mentors and sources of information, online or otherwise, he recommends that everyone, regardless of their age, look toward securing multiple streams of income – advice he himself follows. While he creates practical educational content for his social media channels, he also teaches workshops, serves as an affiliate marketer, and is currently focused on building software in a dedicated app for content creators.
After he “fell in love with” personal finance, Ceasar never questioned being able to help other people achieve financial independence; he knew he had something to teach them. “If you become addicted to something, there’s no way you can’t get better at that thing,” he says.
Find Sharif Ceasar on YouTube, Tiktok, Instagram, and Facebook YouTube @therealmelaninking.
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