Key Facts:
- Australia’s financial literacy gap spans all generations, with the average 50-year-old holding around $200,000 in superannuation – well below the $370,000 needed for a comfortable retirement – whilst Australians under 35 hold just 7% of total household wealth.
- Gen Z is increasingly turning to social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram for financial education, with two in five using these sources for guidance – more than double the rate of Millennials – as schools, banks, and parents have historically failed to teach wealth-building fundamentals.
- OpenCorp CEO Cam McLellan reports growing demand from younger rent-vestors and families using guarantor loans and untapped parental home equity (lazy equity) to help the next generation enter the property market without a second cash deposit.
- McLellan argues the traditional distinction between good debt and bad debt has been widely neglected, with most Australians taught that all debt is dangerous, leaving them ill-equipped to use borrowing strategically to build wealth through appreciating assets.
- To address the knowledge gap, McLellan visits schools and sporting groups, and has written *My Four-Year-Old The Property Investor* – which has sold over 120,000 copies – alongside a free companion guide, both designed to make property investing accessible to those without wealth, connections, or prior financial education.
The financial literacy gap behind Australia’s widening wealth divide is not a young person’s problem, OpenCorp CEO Cam McLellan says, it’s a generational one. The majority of Millennials, Gen X and Baby Boomers were never taught the fundamentals of building wealth through debt and assets either. What’s changed is that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are the first generations refusing to wait for someone else to teach them, turning to TikTok and Instagram to learn what schools, banks and parents never explained.
The scale of that historic gap is visible across every generation, not just the youngest one. The average 50-year-old Australian, a Gen Xer who has now had three decades in the workforce, holds around $200,000 in superannuation, well short of the roughly $370,000 needed to stay on track for a comfortable retirement at 67. Nationally, Australians under 35 hold just 7% of the country’s total household wealth, while the wealthiest 10% of households hold, on average, 25 times as much wealth as households in the bottom 60%.
That refusal to wait is showing up in the data. ASIC’s 2026 Moneysmart research found Gen Z’s leading sources of financial information are now YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, ahead of banks, schools or financial advisors, and separate research shows two in five Gen Z Australians use social media for financial guidance, more than double the rate of Millennials and far ahead of older generations.
OpenCorp says it is seeing that shift play out directly in its own client base. Enquiries from younger rent-vestors, buyers who rent where they want to live and invest where the numbers work, have grown steadily over the past two years, alongside a rising number of families structuring guarantor loans and using lazy equity, the untapped equity already sitting in a parent’s home, to help the next generation buy their first investment property without saving a second cash deposit.
Mr McLellan said the pattern was one he now saw constantly in client conversations.
“For years, the people who came to us were nervous, almost like they needed permission to be interested in money,” Mr McLellan said. “The younger clients we’re seeing now are different. They’ve often already done hours of research on socials before they’ve spoken to us. They know what rentvesting is. They know what lazy equity means. Nobody handed them that, they went and found it themselves because nobody else was going to. It’s one of the best things happening in this country right now, a generation that got tired of waiting to be taught and just started teaching themselves.”
Mr McLellan now tours high schools and sporting groups teaching the fundamentals of finance and investing to a young audience to encourage them to make informed money decisions. He says they are slightly more aware than the majority of older generations thanks to social media, however there is still a huge way to go. Cam says his own generation had faced exactly the same silence, just without social media to fill the gap.
“I left school and started stacking shelves at a supermarket,” Mr McLellan said. “Nobody sat me down and explained the difference between good debt and bad debt, or how an asset that costs you money on paper each week can still be building your wealth in the background. I had to learn it by doing it, mostly by accident, with a mate who was in the same boat. That’s not a system that’s failing people by chance. It’s a system that was never designed to explain itself, and most people are left to work it out on their own, usually much later than they needed to.”
Mr McLellan said the good debt versus bad debt distinction was one of the simplest, and most overlooked, lessons in personal finance.
“Most Australians are taught that all debt is dangerous, full stop,” he said. “But debt used to buy a car that loses value every year is a very different thing to debt used to buy an asset that has historically grown in value over time. Nobody’s born knowing that difference. It has to be taught, and for most people, it isn’t.”
It’s the reason Mr McLellan wrote My Four-Year-Old The Property Investor, a book aimed at stripping out the jargon and the sense of superiority that can come with property investment circles, as much as explaining the mechanics. The book has sold more than 120,000 copies since it was first published, deliberately pitched simply enough for a small child to follow, and OpenCorp has since released a free companion, The Ultimate Mini Guide to Property Investing, for anyone who has felt shut out by the way the industry talks about itself rather than by a lack of ability or money.
“I didn’t come from money, and I didn’t come from a family that talked about investing,”Mr McLellan said. “I left home at sixteen. Everything I’ve built came from figuring this out myself, mostly the hard way. When I wrote the book, I wanted to strip out anything that made property investing sound like a members-only club, the jargon, the assumption that you need to already be wealthy or well-connected to start. As a Dad I wanted to create a simple step by step manual for my kids to use to cut out the BS, and have a clear plan to execute and build wealth. There’s no excuse for an industry to keep dressing this up as complicated. It isn’t. It was just never explained to people who didn’t already have someone in their corner.”
Mr McLellan said the biggest shift he wants to see now is not financial, it’s a change in thinking.
“The old Australian Dream said work hard, save up, and buy your first home outright as your forever home,” Mr McLellan said. “For a lot of people today, that model is dead on arrival, the numbers just don’t work like that anymore. The people we’re seeing succeed are the ones who’ve let go of that idea. They rentvest instead of waiting to afford their dream suburb. They use equity that’s already sitting in a parent’s home instead of starting from zero. They build a portfolio first and buy their dream home later, on their own terms, once it’s actually affordable to them. None of that requires wealth or privilege. It requires knowing the option exists, and being willing to do things differently to how your parents did. That’s how you beat the banks and the government at their own game, not by working harder inside a system that was never built for you, but by understanding it well enough to use it for yourself.”
About us:
OpenCorp is an Australian property investment company founded in 2006 by Cam McLellan, Matthew Lewison and Allister Lewison. For more than 20 years, OpenCorp has helped everyday Australians build wealth through property, combining independent research with full transparency, publishing the performance of its entire client portfolio against ASIC disclosure standards. OpenCorp has helped clients build more than $2 billion in property portfolio value and generate $691 million in client equity, with a track record of outperforming the capital city average by more than $254,000 per property since 2006.
