Best finfluencers of Germany

Carsten Maschmeyer has sat on the panel of Die Höhle der Löwen since 2016, and his Maschmeyer Group runs three funds, from seed stage to a US arm in San Francisco. You read very little about any of it. What he writes instead are lines about leadership: anyone who cannot take criticism should not be a boss.

In 2021 Ibo Ahmiane quit his job as a bank adviser. His household model splits every salary five ways, 55 per cent of it fixed costs, the rest spread across fun, debt, saving and investing. Almost everything he makes follows that pattern, one rule and one number, with a question to the audience underneath. His latest book is called “Werde Aktien-Millionär”.

Under many of his videos there is no explanation at all, just a case number — a federal tax court ruling, or a parliamentary paper. Fabian Walter took a tax master's degree in Freiburg and ran the tax desk at publisher Haufe Group; since 2020 he has run the largest German-language tax channel under the label #1minutesteuern. In 2021 he was named tax expert of the year.

Once a month Ercan Avci lists which rules have just changed. In between he works through the fine print of everyday life — welfare reform, the pension package, overtime, Amazon returns. The insurance and property broker from Lörrach also runs his own interview podcast, with guests ranging from a comedian to a divorce lawyer.

Natascha Wegelin founded the flat-share portal wg-suche.de at 26 and handed part of it to ImmobilienScout24 in 2017. The blog she had started in 2015 meanwhile grew into a business with around thirty staff. Her subject is the pension gap facing women; she has written two bestsellers about it and addressed a Bundestag committee in 2023.

Behind Finanzstarter are Tim Thöne and Philipp Berner, friends since childhood. In 2021 they left the sales organisation they worked for because it banned online marketing, and built an advisory firm of their own, around fifty people. Between pointed questions about housing policy they explain where subsidies sit, which tax items get missed, and how the latest scam works.

Can you set a trap for parcel thieves? Christian Klages puts that to his readers, then supplies the sober version alongside: the Cologne appeal court on deleting a credit-agency entry, the Munich regional court on advertising inside a streaming subscription. The Cologne specialist in employment and tenancy law has written a bestseller and hosts two podcasts, one of them on real criminal cases.

For his series on disability insurance, Bastian Kunkel put the people who decide the claims in front of a camera — assessors almost no policyholder ever meets. His book “Total ver(un)sichert” entered the bestseller list at number two in 2022, and since early 2026 his podcast on real claims has run with a former television insurance investigator.

“Your boss does NOT want you to know this trick.” Simon Neumann works in that register, and behind it sits a fresh ruling or a fresh change in the law every single day — five judgments that spare tenants a bill, the minus hours no employer may impose. At the 2026 Finfluencer Award he won the tax-knowledge category.

Simon Schoebel footnotes his videos, numbered, with the Ifo Institute, ZEW, the Federal Statistical Office and the labour ministry underneath. He uses them to check what politicians claim about money: whether the state has an income problem or a spending problem, what Sweden's capital-market pension fund actually delivers, how strongly background predicts the school-leaving certificate. He advised the TikTok finance channel run by German public broadcasting.

When the ETF world starts arguing, Mario Lochner puts the arguers in front of a microphone. Gerd Kommer, in his words the ETF pope, has been on; so has the asset manager Andreas Beck; and once Kommer and Marc Friedrich went at each other. The former business journalist has run his own research firm since 2022, and his market briefing lands early on Saturdays.

Ask Tim Hunger about a first ETF and you get the security identification number with it. Ask how to obtain your state pension record and you get the form number, V0410 or V0100. Before financial advice he played football for Chemnitzer FC, until his knees gave out.

Florian Hörning films on the move, in the car or at a petrol station, and it is usually about money that leaks away unnoticed — a PayPal scam, an Amazon fee a court later struck down. Most often the trained insurance broker works out what is left of the state pension. His mother never saw a day of it, and that is where his line comes from: nobody is coming to rescue you.

Holger Graf built structured products at Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt and holds a doctorate in mathematical statistics; today he teaches financial management at Nürtingen-Geislingen University. He never shows a portfolio of his own. What he does instead is press a market event for the arithmetic behind it, weekly with Thomas Kehl on the podcast “Marktgeflüster”.

Five hours of balayage for 500 euros sounds like a hundred euros an hour. Samantha Schüller works out what is left of it after VAT, product, rent, health insurance and tax, and draws the conclusion: revenue is not a wage. The master hairdresser opened her Düsseldorf salon at 21 and now trains apprentices at an academy of her own.