Betterment of the self—financially and otherwise—is incredibly non-linear. Regular readers, you may remember that I’d just started my post-Latin America rebrand before this life-changing event happened to me. Familiar with the quote “if you want to make God laugh, show him your plans”? Well, my version is that he’s definitely lolling, hard, at the goals I mapped out on my whiteboard a week before my life fell apart.

Now if you’re new to Financial Hot Girl, you might’ve assumed that this newsletter was finances for hot people. Although ostensibly that’s correct, it’s a common misconception.

What we do here is connect the dots between the mental, physical and financial. Being a Financial Hot Girl is understanding that being hot is being financially savvy. Having a life with options, understanding, discernment and agency are the things that makes you feel hot, despite putting effort into how we look.

Financial Hot Girls are put-together because they’re deliberate, and they’re financially savvy because they’re disciplined. That creates the kind of confidence that makes you feel hot, and that people apparently read as attractive. So let’s build it back.

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Being hot in my books means being so on top of yourself that you are just obsessed with yourself. You’re proud, you’re full of self-trust, you never stutter. But I won’t lie to you and say that the looks don’t matter. They do, both for you personally (look good, feel good, get more done) and for being hot as a way to strategically signal status. So here’s exactly how I’m getting back to feeling and being hot.

Building the proof again, in small units. Hot is a feeling, and mine comes from doing what I said I’d do. The coolest thing about self-trust is that it’s not a fleeting feeling, it’s evidence of you being awesome. Real, hard, evidence, that your mind and body can’t deny. So I’m collecting small pieces of that evidence. That means not procrastinating. No negotiating with myself about my own goals. Using the 54321 rule to get out of bed and get the day started. Using my calendar to time-block and keep myself accountable. Prove that if I really want it, I’ll go after it, and then I’ll feel it.

Take care of the bodily brown girl basics. Oiling my cuticles, moisturising my body, oiling my scalp, threading my ‘tache and eyebrows (tutorial here), getting back into my 3x a week tretinoin application, and daily night-time face massage. When the basics fall to the wayside, it can feel quite laborious to add them back, but spend a week or two setting alarms or reminders on your phone to do these things and before you know it, they’ll be habits again.

Moving intentionally. My average steps were 3,500 (womp womp) and I did 0 workouts, so I’m working back up to an average of 10-15k steps daily, with grace. Walking (helps with my stress, anxiety, creativity, digestion, stiffness), zone 2 cardio (running or the stairmaster for me, 3x a week) and strength training (3-5x a week in the gym). While I fear for the DOMs I’ll face tomorrow, a daily combination of these things makes me feel great, but also keeps me active, strong and lean. Stacking feeling good and strong with heart health is very hot.

Drink water. My water intake has been abysmal, partly because tap water outside of Scotland is terrible, and partly because my daily routine was completely flipped on its head. What has previously worked best for me to instil a strong hydration habit: making my water bottle an extension of my body. Where I go, the bottle goes. Being hydrated shows up on my face, in my mood and in the quality of my nutrition.

Use a one thing only rule. I’ll do either my hair, makeup or outfit daily. Look good, feel good, remember? It’s hard for me to feel good right now, but I’ll try anyway—picking one of the three to focus on boosts my productivity, which makes me feel good (like the eldest-daughter-dependent-on-work-as-a-symbol-of-my-self-worth that I am) but keeps the daily ask of myself low.

While it’ll take some effort to bring these habits back, discipline will soon kick in and everything will feel normal again.

This is the power of having a system—even though I violently fell off it, I have an it to come back to. I’m not scrambling for ‘good habits’ or wondering how on earth I can feel better. I just click revert all changes (minus a few things, as you’ll see below).

Checking my financial season. A crisis or unexpected life event can move your financial season without warning, so making sure you know where you’re at is important because a financial season guides what you focus on. Reflect on right now, this very moment, not 1 month ago. Are you in Earn, Keep or Grow? Financially, acting in seasons helps you get more done because you spend less time trying to do it all and more time making meaningful progress on the tasks that matter, before you move onto the next season. During my own crisis, I stayed in Keep and didn’t put the pressure of an Earn season on myself. Recognising that was important.

🍒 Not sure how to figure your financial season out? Read the guide here.

Figure out your emergency cost. If you lost your job tomorrow—or your boiler broke—or your partner left you—or something worse happened—will it make you nervous about money? Do you know what the absolute bare minimum version of your life costs, and how long could you afford it? Financial savviness isn’t just understanding money, it’s understanding what money means for you: what a hard month is, whether you could sustain it for 3-6 months, and whether that money is being saved in a high-interest, easy access savings account so that if you ever face a terrible situation, money is the last thing on your mind.

Stick to a financial system. Reviewing personal and business transactions every month, reinvesting as much as possible and setting goals for business income, instead of just personal income. And working backwards from that in order to structure the tasks to do day-to-day. Goals → objectives required to achieve goal → tasks required to achieve objectives → broken down by year/month/week/day etc. As a solopreneur, the habits I previously applied to my personal finances need to be transitioned to my business too, so my system is staying the same but my inputs are changing.

Automate the things I want. I don’t just mean literal things, but more-so financial goals. If your goal is quitting your job in a years time, the money going towards a financial buffer that’ll let you quit should be an automated transfer. Something you don’t think about or negotiate. Financially literate people don’t actually think about money all the time, because a lot of their goals are run on automatic transfers. The thing I’m building back is my emergency fund after using it heavily this year, and so my automation is going there.

Minimising the self-hate tax. Something I did a lot in my 20s was pay my way to being liked by other people, because that liking didn’t come from myself. Coming out of a 5-week period of the least amount of self-care ever, I’m acutely aware that I’m prone to buying things for a dopamine hit right now. To avoid this, I’m doing things that fill my cup: minimising screen-time, focussing on gratitude, practising discernment, making time for my hobbies. If you fill your life with curiosity, play and fun, there’s physically less room to dislike yourself, pick apart your life and fill the gaps by buying stuff.

🧱 For a full list of financially savvy skills to build, read this.

Recovering forwards. The temptation after a hard month is to sprint, to make up for lost time, or to prove the five weeks didn’t cost you anything. Especially if you’re an eldest daughter/high-achiever. That’s ego, and it’s also how you end up back on the absolute floor in a couple of weeks. I’m rebuilding at half the capacity of what I was doing before, at least for a few weeks. 3 gym sessions instead of 5. 7,000 steps before 15,000. The goal is for future me to be much harder to knock over than current me, and remembering that I’m not in a rush.

Deciding Once, while I’m clear-headed. I’m writing my re-entry plan down this week, while I can think straight, because I know life is non-linear. Future me that’s struggling during a bad week cannot be trusted. Using the Decide Once™ principle, I’m settling on one physical move, one mental move, one financial move, and not renegotiating with myself. It’s the reason I have something to come back to at all.

Keeping one thing from the hard month. Something always survives a period like this that’s worth taking with you. For me it’s how little I actually needed to be okay, and how much of my normal routine was a performance rather than something that added value to my life. I’m not going back to my old life exactly, and that’s okay. Everything is data, and it’s the Financial Hot Girl way to see it as such and use it.

Redefining urgency. 5 weeks away from everything I’ve built and the business is still here, the income was still earned, the audience is still here, the newsletter still went out. Most of what I thought was urgent simply…wasn’t. My deadlines were so painfully unnecessary. I’m going into the rest of this year with a much shorter list of things I’m willing to panic about, and I’d recommend the same to you, without needing a life-changing month to get there.

My journey to hot and financially savvy is alongside feeling unhot and pretty messy, and whatever happens, I know that I can feel multiple things at the same time. Duality is a thing. You can feel ugly while doing the hot girl habits. You can track your transactions knowing they represent actions that aren’t the most financially literate. You don’t need to justify what you do to anyone, especially yourself.

You must take agency over your life and move forwards—whether that’s you recovering from a not-go-great month or simply picking back up your goals. Notice that here in this issue, I’ve set the rules, because the world is my oyster. I encourage you to do the same <3

Until next week,

— Dev xo

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• The Big Phat Survey has landed!!!

• From next Sunday, things are the same but different

• July’s 3x Hot List

✦ The Big Phat Survey is here!!!

Hotties, one thing about me is that I’m not interested in what’s popular.

Big Phat Survey

Starting this month, once a month, I’m sending you One Big Survey. Whatever’s on your radar right now; high-ROI products, routines, money moves, books, apps, whatever you’re currently obsessed with or considering, goes in!

The future we’re building together isn’t mine, it’s ours. You’re not just reading FHG anymore, you’re part of writing it. I wanna be influenced by you, financial hottie. So tell me your favs.

I’ve designed it to take max. 2 minutes for you to fill out, and I’ll send you a reminder every month!

It takes 2 mins 👩🏾‍💻

For a few years, Financial Hot Girl has been mostly me, my laptop and a dream.

From next week, every Sunday issue will revolve around 5 sections…

Hot Lists ~ inspired by the absolute binges I used to do on thought catalog as a 16 year old. I love lists, so why not give them a home, and make them extremely useful for financial hotties?

The Little Red Book ~ taste, culture, recommendations, the Personal Uniform. The stuff that makes up a financially hot life, because being financially hot gets to be (and is) fun too.

The Guest List ~ collabs with the fhgs I’d die to have at my dinner table. Women doing something interesting with their money, career, or life. *Not just famous women btw.

The Boardroom ~ where business meets the fhg. career moves, brand strategy, creator economy, money in the news, the stuff i’m normally talking a lot about in-person.

The Operating System (OS) ~ oh, the implementation of it all! Templates, frameworks, the actual how. Close friends only, because building the systems is where the real work happens, and you have to curate your environment to be full of those putting in the work.

⟡ July’s 3x Hot List

July has been a… difficult month for me, but I’ll explain it all later. Writing and sending out FHG this month has not only been a labour of love, but something that’s saved me mentally. Here’s my 3x Hot List ❤️‍🔥

We’ll be back to regular programming next week with an issue designed for a financially-coded, hot, you.

Thanks for everything so far, and until next week,

— Dev xo

My personal opinion is that watching these videos are useless in terms of real high ROI spend. It’s another way to be influenced to buy, instead of challenging your desires and consumption habits.

Most people spend their entire lives spending on things that cost so much in time and energy. And to be honest, these videos are another way to signal status, as most of them include designer/branded items and experiences. They put the personal in personal finance, and are absolutely not guides on how to spend your money. Even so, they’re fun to watch, as per any and all Hot Girl Propaganda™ content.

So instead of letting a stranger’s content strategy decide what’s worth your money, let’s build you a way to work it out yourself.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

1. What a purchase actually costs

2. Calculating a what a high return is a Financial Hottie

3. The Financial Hot Girl’s high-ROI spending matrix

4. How to map your high-ROI spends to your financial season

5. The exact audit to run on your spending

6. What I’m actually spending on for a high ROI

What a purchase actually costs

Your life. Over 150 years ago Henry David Thoreau essentially wrote that the real cost of a purchase is the hours of your finite life you handed over to earn it. The most Financially Hot sentence in the history of personal finance.

Your health. A second currency every financial hottie feels; the hours you spent earning that money costed something physically, too. The stress of the deadline that funded it, or the sleep you didn’t get. The body keeps the financial score, and there’s a record in there somewhere for every impulse purchase you made to get a little dopamine hit.

Your joy. Speaking of dopamine, there’s also the cost of hedonic adaptation. It’s when the rush of dopamine you feel after consistent spending gets duller and duller, but the numerical spending stays the same. Hence why the odd splurge feels worth it and the daily one doesn’t. Making that feeling scarce is what keeps the cost of something in line with the feeling of buying it.

Calculating a high-ROI spend as a Financial Hot Girl

Every spend has a return (positive or negative). Sometimes the return is:

1. Financial: you maintain, make or get more money because of it—exercising the principle of leverage. E.g. investing £50 in the stock market to get back much more than £50 25 years down the line. Or spending money to outsource a task in your business to get back more time (to then make more money).

2. Operational: it gives you back time or energy. With physical health being the basis of being a Financial Hot Girl, you’re spending money to maximise your mood, your earning potential, your longevity and your independence

3. Compounding: it improves how you think, earn, sleep or perform, which touches every other area of your life (i.e. it lets you leverage something)

4. A status return: people perceive you as a certain kind of person because of it, which could allow you to access certain rooms or conversations. Spending with this in mind rather than the status itself is how you use status as a tool to level up.

Remember these could all be negative i.e. take away energy/money/time/status too.

But the reason it’s hard for you to determine what a good ROI is that you don’t actually know the value of your time. Lucky for you, it’s easy to work out.

Start with two numbers:

1. Your current rate. Net monthly income ÷ hours actually worked (be honest about the evenings and weekends)

2. Your aspirational rate. The rate you'd need to earn to hit the income you actually want, rounded up*

Example: you’re on £36,000 and you work a normal 9-5, and the odd evening. That’s ~£2,450 a month working 50 hours a week. 2,450 ÷ 200 = £12.50 an hour.

Now imagine you’re debating a £90 air fryer versus a £90 moisturiser. That’s 432 minutes of your life, or 7.2 hours. Instead of focussing on whether you can afford £90, think about whether the purchase is worth 7.2 hours of your time.

*A big gap between current and aspirational is a good hint that you’re in your earn season. Now let’s figure out how to calculate your return.

How to define a high-ROI purchase

Once you know your hourly rate, a purchase earns the high-ROI label if it gives you back more than you put in, measured in productivity, health or time, and if the return survives the initial pleasure spike. So let’s move onto the next equation.

The implementation section of this issue is for paid financial hotties. I’m walking through:

• how to calculate your specific return-on-investment based on your current rate

• how to map your high-ROI spends to your earn/keep/grow financial season

• the exact audit to run on your spending

• exactly what I’m investing into

What I’m actually spending on for a high ROI

For a bit of transparency, my highest-ROI spends thus far have been:

• My travel around Latin America, a considered investment in life, memory and identity

• A private member’s club in Edinburgh

• Books, always books—and strictly fiction over self-help—on my Kindle

• Software that gives me back time: Wispr flow, CleanMyMac, Claude, Canva Pro, Notion, NordVPN

• Padel and Spanish lessons

• My walking treadmill + standing desk

• Used iPhone, used Macbook

• Sony A7c ii and my Sigma 16mm lens (for both content and hobby)

• Phillips air fryer, Ninja Creami

• Something I’m in the process of setting up: my online security with software and a YubiKey. Will update you on this once I’ve figured it out.

Remember: a high-ROI spend doesn’t have to be an expensive purchase, it just has to be something you might not have otherwise bought had it not been for you being clear on intentionality and your life values. Affordability is not the point when it comes to what’s “worth it”.

Until next time,

— Dev xo

The more I’ve settled into my 30s, the more I realise that lifestyle traps exist in the most sneakiest of ways. They really are disguised and embedded into our daily lives so much so that it takes proactive effort to side-step them. They limit your future without you realising it’s happening. Some are unavoidable, but most are hard to reverse. Nobody around us pushes us to think critically about these, because a lot of people have been entrapped themselves.

𝜗ৎ 16 lifestyle traps to avoid

1. The 35-year mortgage

A 35 or 40-year mortgage taken at the absolute top of what a bank will lend you is a decades-long commitment to a specific income or job market (not to mention a specific relationship if it’s joint). The affordability calculation the bank does is designed to work for the bank, and unfortunately not for you.

My opinion: even if you can afford to do so, buy smaller, and take a shorter term if you realistically can. Every extra year on the mortgage adds a lot in interest and locks you into more career risk. Honestly, we don’t need to commit to our forever homes or get on the property ladder in our 20s. Not in this economy.

The exit route:

Read more

I thought it would be the marker of my success, my freedom, my optionality. The kind of thing the women I admired seemed to have, so naturally, I assumed I should want it too.

I now think this was absolutely ludicrous of me, but for quite rational reasons.

Aside from realising it was mimetic desire showing up, I actually hate having to carry a bag (it’s one area of life in which I’m extremely jealous of men and wallet culture). Despite this however, I’m a crazy bag lady. I have pouches for everything and don’t like leaving the house empty handed (how very Virgo big sister of me).

Now, this contradiction told on me a little. You can be perfectly self-aware, and still attach a huge amount of meaning to something that doesn’t actually make sense for your life. My milestone Birkin stood in for freedom when what it really represented was a desire to belong. Snap.

Some of us do want more than the average lifestyle. Some of us are building lives that are meant to feel exceptional. Some of us want beauty, wealth, range, elegance, impact, room to move, room to choose, room to change our minds.

So how do you know when a goal actually supports your life, instead of just being a beautiful symbol you’ve mistaken for a need? How can high-achieving people separate expansion from escapism and status-signalling?

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• Dealing with the rising price of success

• A scorecard to figure out the goals worth keeping

• The diminishing returns of status

• Questions to define a different ambition

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✦ The rising price of success

Part of what makes this conversation hard to define is that the cultural baseline keeps moving. Gen Z is apparently imagining that financial success means hundreds of thousands a year, even before they have the life, stability, or peace that money is supposed to buy.

The cost of living keeps rising too, which means people are being asked to pay more for less certainty and less breathing room. People want more because inherently, everything costs more and it’s only getting worse.

When life costs more, it becomes harder to tell the difference between a desire rooted in wisdom versus panic. And in this panic, it’s easier to want to signal wealth. Even celebrities do it.

Take recent big-name weddings. Dua Lipa got married and it became a stream of labels, settings, and iconic fashion moments: Schiaparelli, Bottega Veneta, Chloé, Chanel, a civil ceremony in London, then broader wedding celebrations in Sicily.

It is glamorous and probably spectacular in person. But it captures how quickly a milestone can become a production, where every feeling has to be translated into a designer, a location, a look, a reveal.

Then there’s the opposite fantasy: Zendaya and Tom Holland, whose marriage drew attention because it was so incredibly withheld. It suggested to me that a milestone event can still be real, meaningful, and complete without becoming content, and that enough looks different even for those who can have anything they want.

Both women can quite literally afford whatever version they want. Even at their level, the choice still exists: enough is a decision instead being of a milestone income bracket. And if the two most-watched women of the year can arrive at completely different versions of the same event, the pressure you're feeling to inflate your own goals is worth questioning too.

⟡ The goals worth keeping and how to find them

To fight through the rising price of success, we need to shift our perspective inward to our own personal values. We need to ask whether the big goal deserves the level of devotion we’ve prescribed in the first place. So we’ve got a little scorecard to work through.

Audit each of your goals before investing too much time, money, or energy. Score each question with a number between 1-5, then total the number:

• Meaning: does this deepen my life, work, or relationships?

• Values: does it align with what I actually care about?

• Freedom: does it increase optionality, or just create upkeep?

• Energy: does it energise me, or subtly drain me?

• Durability: will I still care about this in three years?

• Craft: does it sharpen a skill or capacity that matters?

• Cost: what does it ask of me financially, emotionally, and physically?

• Signal: do I want the thing, or the identity attached to the thing?

• Enough: can I define what a satisfying version of this looks like?

With this scorecard, you can make two conclusions. A high-scoring goal tends to give something back in the texture of your real life. It increases freedom, capability, pleasure, or peace. A low-scoring goal usually depends on an audience, even if that audience is imaginary.

A goal can be chic, expensive, widely admired, and completely wrong for you. Avoid this trap.

✦ The diminishing returns of status

Next, we need to work out how we use status strategically to set our goals.

Status-based goal setting has a point of failure because status gives you an emotional return early on. Things like your first pay-rise or the first big spend on a holiday. After that, each additional layer costs more (money, time or energy) while delivering less emotionally than that first, and that is the logic of diminishing returns.

A values-based life however, feels slower at the beginning because more effort is spent planting seeds: of skill, trust, health, reputation or relationships, all of which start to flourish over time. And these remain useful for longer, because they increase your capacity to feel deeply gratified instead of just feeling a pang of “okay great now it looks like I’m doing well”.

With this in mind, point your goals at the value (skills, relationships, capacity, networks) that often sits underneath the status and then let the status follow. Do things for the value and let status be a by-product that just happens to be there.

Status matters, because social signalling affects success, confidence, opportunity, and how people are read in the world. Similarly to how you look. The problems will start for you if you start using it as a way to operate instead of the clever tool that it is.

⟡ Questions to define a different ambition

To find your enough (without shrinking your audacious dreams and goals) ask yourself:

These questions force you to be clear without taking away from the fact that you don’t want an average life. As Financial Hot Girls world we’re not interested in encouraging each other to stay average, but we’re also not interested in inflating our lives for anyone but ourselves.

All in all, the answer to finding enough is to become more exact and look inward rather than shrinking anything, which is the pressure I’ve felt while reflecting on this question myself.

Big dreams are not the enemy of enough. You can want an extraordinary life and still refuse the upgrade treadmill. A person can love beauty without worshipping labels, build wealth without making wealth the only scoreboard, and celebrate milestones without turning every success into a spectacle.

Until next week,

— Dev xo

Issue 100 (!) felt like the right time to zoom all the way out and answer the question I get most often, which is what actually makes someone a Financial Hot Girl in the first place.

It comes down to one thing: your finances are a downstream output of your lifestyle. All the mental, physical and financial decisions I made in my 20s produced the results they did because of a lifestyle I designed accidentally (but one I’m now teaching on purpose).

When your lifestyle is the input, it shifts the focus off finances without being avoidant about it. It’s a lot like what James Clear wrote about changing your habits, in that there’s a huge difference between the identity of someone trying to do something versus being the kind of person that does.

That is the whole thesis of the Financial Hot Girl, choosing an identity, doing the hard stuff that comes with it and letting the rest fall into place. And after more than 30,000 of you have turned up for the last 99 Sundays (which is a little crazy to me?! thank you!), I wanted to write it down in full.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• the financial hot girl hierarchy, explained

• what being a financial hot girl asks of you

• 3 questions to build your own financially hot practice

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✦ The financial hot girl hierarchy

level 1: physical foundation

This is my version of look good, feel good. My confidence and self-esteem has skyrocketed since building a strong physical foundation in my life. In practice that looks like prioritising sleep, strength training, protein and daily movement, to name a few.

It’s the base of the pyramid because it regulates the nervous system, which regulates everything else. When you’re putting these reps in, you undeniably feel good. You’re more productive, you look and feel better, and there’s a wealth of benefits to your life ahead; you get ill less, you enjoy life more, your earning capacity is more efficient, you’re independent for longer.

A strong foundation of physical habits is the easy baseline because it requires you physically showing up, with the layers ahead to follow.

level 2: mental strength

The mental muscles you construct by turning up physically, and the ones that transfer everywhere else; things like discipline, self-trust, being high agency and delayed gratification.

I’ve found that you have to earn this in your body first through layer 1, because your body is where self-trust actually gets stored. It’s not really conscious. Every time you stick to a movement habit it’s more evidence that you can trust yourself to keep a promise you made in private. That self-trust is so deeply transferable to other areas of life.

Once you have enough evidence, something changes in what you let yourself imagine. You start dreaming bigger financially (and otherwise!), because you finally have proof you will follow through.

When you finally believe you can go for the big thing, whatever your big thing is, it will come from and be sustained by the belief you build internally. The sustainable element here is life-changing and prevents all of this just being a phase.

level 3: financial systems

This is the layer where things you want to do are actioned into things you actually do, because of everything built in layers 1 and 2. You build financial systems around the behaviour you create.

You are only ever primarily in one financial season at a time, Earn, Keep, Grow™. So your job as part of this layer is to identify and act only on which season you’re in within any given quarter, so that you stop trying to do all three at once and burning out doing none of them well.

the peak: the financial hot life

You will notice the peak in this world is not being rich. Being rich is possible without being Financially Hot, because you can earn all the money you want but not necessarily have the physical foundation and mental strength to keep it forever. Being Financially Hot is what makes all-round wealth feel right for you while being sustainable for the long term.

Being a Financial Hot Girl asks you to look at your money as one output of a whole life you are building, and to work on the inputs, instead of just trying to tunnel vision on the money.

Take this into the second half of the year: build the physical foundation that reinforces the mental strength that lets you take action financially.

Until next week,

— Dev xo

@gracebeverleyI know I said I wouldn’t start another business and technically I haven’t!! But this project came about so naturally based on genuinely needing this product, and it's been such a joy to work on. Yay for loopholes!! If you want to change your showers for the better you can get 50% off with the code GRACE, I've popped the link in my bio (ad - proud co-owner & investor)

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The ease with which Grace starts and co-founds businesses is a sensational example of how to build and use leverage.

Leverage is so important once you go through your Earn and Keep seasons and start to enter the Grow season: where you need to prioritise making the money (and earning potential) return more than the effort it took to get it.

If you’re unfamiliar with Earn, Keep, Grow™, learn about your financial season here:

Leverage was a mystery to me in the early days of my financial literacy journey. Being in a Grow season seemed like it was only for people who were already cash-rich. So let’s dissect how Grace has built leverage (not just financially!) and how anybody can too.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• The three layers to Grace’ unusual leverage ability

• Layer 2: the ownership stake

• How we can copy Grace (financially)

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✦ The three layers to Grace’ unusual leverage ability

Leverage is using something you already have (your knowledge, your brand, your credibility, your audience) to generate a return that’s bigger than what you put in.

It’s the opposite of just working harder for more money. It’s making what you already have work harder instead.

Grace has three layers of leverage stacked on top of each other, and this is what makes it so clever:

Layer 1: her personal life. She is her market. She was the actual customer with an actual problem before she was the owner of the solution.

Layer 2: her personal brand. Her audience is the distribution channel. Every business she launches already has a warm, trusting, bought-in customer base because she makes content about layer 1. Most founders spend years and an uncomfortable amount of money trying to build that.

Layer 3 (the magic): equity. She’s not an employee in any of these businesses, and she’s not just a paid spokesperson either. She’s an owner. She has a financial stake in the growth of the company. Which means when these businesses grow (and they grow partly because of her and her brand, which is the point of layer 1) she participates in that upside for years. But without needing to show up and earn it every single day.

In the Financial Hot Girl world, your Grow season is when your job, skillset or money is leverage. Effort and hours put in start to matter less and the focus is on turning what you already have into assets that compound without you putting in that same effort and/or hours.

Grace’s leverage is distinctly powerful because she has a personal brand most people don’t. But in my opinion, the underlying logic is available to everyone.

⟡ What the rest of us are doing instead

Most of us, when we have money left over or unallocated, do one of two things:

1. They either spend it, i.e. lifestyle creep (the slow drip of upgrades that feel earned but accumulate into an expensive lifestyle)

2. Or they save it, which feels responsible, and is until it reaches a ceiling.

A savings account right now might give you somewhere between 4% and 5% interest annually if you’ve shopped around. It doesn’t really fulfil the Financial Hot Girl’s definition of leverage, because your money is sitting still, losing ground to inflation.

Equity (owning a share of an asset) has historically returned closer to 8% to 10% annually over the long term through something as simple as a broad index fund. That gap, compounded over 10 or 20 years, is the kind of leverage that’s worth the effort to earn that money in the first place.

Saving keeps your money safe, but equity makes it work. Understand that early and act on it.

꩜ How we can copy Grace (financially)

A stocks and shares ISA is the interpretation of this strategy with a normal life, without co-owning a company. When you invest through one, you’re buying tiny ownership stakes in different companies. You’re participating in the growth of the global economy in the same way that Grace is participating in the growth of the companies she owns.

Grace’s layers look like this: personal brand + business ownership + equity stake

Yours can look like this: income + stocks and shares ISA + time

You use what you have (your income, your ISA allowance*, your time horizon) to participate in the growth of something bigger than your savings account.

Start paying attention to equity.

*A stocks and shares ISA is one of many assets you could invest your money into, but the equation is still the same.

Grace spotted a problem in her life. She used her existing assets—brand, audience, credibility—to make the investment into the solution viable. And she took equity, not a fee, because she understands the difference between getting paid once and participating in growth forever.

Grace’s business portfolio as a wealth-building manifesto is a fascinating example to me of not only how to grow your money, but how to build wealth as a creator-entrepreneur. It’s something I’m actively thinking about as I grow my brand and business.

If you want to unlock something in your brain when it comes to leverage, think of it like this: stop getting paid once for things you could own a piece of.

Until next week,

— Dev xo

Working through this rebrand has reminded me of what it actually means to have a life philosophy. The baseline that stays constant regardless of what season you’re in, what’s happening around you, or what everyone else seems to be doing. It’s the foundation that all your seasons get to sit on top of. It means I’m not reinventing myself every year only to be chasing my tail.

It’s exactly what most people skip when summer arrives, opting to maximise a season instead of living out their life philosophy. Instead of summer being one part of a life they’ve already designed, it becomes the whole big thing: three months of trying to feel like a person that doesn’t exist normally. The wardrobe, spending habits, the body, the holiday, the energy.

All of it assembled quickly, from scratch, because there’s nothing underneath holding it together. This week, I want to talk about what that something underneath actually looks like.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• What’s wrong with hot girl summer

• The whole point of having a philosophy

• One thing to develop your philosophy

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✦ The problem with hot girl summer

The problem I have with a hot girl summer is basically what follows the hot girl summer. Summer as a season is something that comes and goes, and when it comes to identity and the behaviours that follow, it could mean three months of feeling good about yourself and then just not in October.

I used to do it. Every summer, I’d buy new clothes (bought on a credit card I was ignoring the balance on). A holiday booked because everyone else was going somewhere. An attempt to eat as little as possible so I could look the way I thought I was supposed to look (in the things I’d just bought).

Considering I live in Edinburgh, host city to the world’s largest performing arts festival, I should’ve been paid for this spectacular performance I was putting on every year.

And then September would come, and my bank account would reflect the reality of June and July. I’d freak out about what I’d done, tell myself I’d sort it out before Christmas, and then I would repeat the behaviour but in an Autumn-coded way, and then it was a New Year thing, and then before I knew it, it was June again.

That is the hot girl summer cycle that I see so many people live through, which thankfully means it’s definitely not a you problem. It’s a problem that exists because there is no structure underneath for how you actually want to live your life and so it’s easy to just repeat the cycle.

⟡ The whole point of having a philosophy

Having a philosophy means arriving at summer already knowing who you are, so you can actually enjoy it instead of spending three months trying to earn the right to.

A philosophy, in the way that I live as a Financial Hot Girl, is:

• an identity that runs all year (it doesn't need a cultural calendar, or a moment, to tell it when to switch on)

• a set of decisions you've already made, so you're never starting or spending or saving from scratch (i.e. Deciding Once)

• what's left when my motivation runs out (my baseline)

The three things my Financial Hot Girl philosophy runs on:

Money. You know what’s coming in, what’s going out, and roughly where you’re heading. You’re not anxiously doing mental maths in restaurants or during a holiday. You’ve already accounted for summer because it’s just a season.

Body. You have a relationship with your body that doesn’t need a holiday to kick it into action. Your movement habits exist in November, but they just look different in July. You feel okay in your body because you’ve been looking after it all year.

Mind. You’re not spending because everyone else is. You’re not booking trips out of FOMO or buying outfits to feel like a person who uses summer as a verb (even if that’s the goal!). You know who you are, summer just gives you more hours of daylight to be that person.

Taking an example from my life: my philosophy includes running twice a week for heart health and mental health. This means my runs don’t stop in summer, they just get to move outside. My philosophy is spending in line with my values, which means my budget doesn’t disappear because it’s warm, I have a line in it for holidays and more social events.

A philosophy for me is just a lot of up-front decision making, Deciding Once who I am and then just dialling it up based on the season.

꩜ One thing to develop your philosophy

Before you spend anything summer-related this week, ask yourself:

Am I doing this because I want to, or because it’s June?

When you think about your summer plans, how many of them are things you actually want, versus things that just feel like what summer is supposed to look like?

If the answer is “I want to”, that’s a green flag to me, because a Financial Hot Girl spends on things that matter to her. She knows the difference between wanting something and performing wanting it (mimetic desire).

Until next week,

— Dev xo

P.S. being able to develop a philosophy for life involves being honest and up-front with yourself about what you want vs don’t want (or have pretended to want). This kind of self-reflection could mean breaking up with things, people, or habits that no longer serve you. It sometimes isn’t a pretty process!

Let’s get into it. Please remember that the contents of this article contain financial education, as always this is not financial advice.

The first thing to understand is that you can earn interest on your savings in the UK, depending on where you put these savings—what bank and with what kind of account. However, you’re also subject to paying tax (as if it’s income) on the interest you earn from your savings, specifically above a Personal Savings Allowance which varies depending on what tax bracket you’re in.

The allowance is £1,000 for basic rate taxpayers, £500 for higher rate and £0 for additional rate. This means if you’re a basic rate taxpayer and earn between £12,571 and £50,270, and you earn more than £1,000 of interest on your savings, you will be taxed on the amount over £1,000 as if it’s your income.

Now let me explain how I’d use this information to my advantage if I were saving based on this sliding scale of £100 - £10,000.

Your first £100

This is a great milestone to reach, especially if you’re coming from a place of spending everything you earn. Trust me, I’ve been there. Having breathing room, even if it’s £100, is a massive sign to yourself that you can actually create breathing room. Saving your first £100 often comes from making different choices in your life, but not changing much. Maybe you planned your food shop, or audited your spending habits and decided to shop for clothes less. The first £100 is a matter of controlling your expenses. These are variables that we can adjust without friction, as it all depends on our willpower, our discipline and our habits.

Looking at the Earn, Keep Grow framework as a Financial Hot Girl, being able to control your cashflow in such a way that you can keep £100 over and over again is you mastering your Keep season. More on this here:

What to do with it

The first thing to do is think about your upcoming expenses. Things that are guaranteed and necessary to spend on. Examples:

• insurance

• birthdays

• Christmas

• car/motor expenses

• social events

• bills/utilities (if not already coming out)

If you have an idea of what you will 100% be spending on in the short-term, you can create a sinking fund: a fund (pot of money) that will sink (be spent). If you use an ebank like Starling or Monzo, you can create a sinking fund by create a ‘pot’ or a ‘saving space’ and labelling it by its objective.

Your first £100 should go toward one of these expenses. I think it’s a great idea to not immediately save this and instead train the muscle of being proactive about your expenses and spending with intention.

£100 put away for future spending is £100 less to ‘find’ when that time to spend comes. If you build this as a strong habit with £100, you create a lot more financial flexibility in the future when you have £1,000s.

One of my first major sinking funds was for a hen do in Dubai for a friend. I saved up £2,200 over 9-10 months. When the trip came, I was able to spend up to £2,200 without actually impacting my bank account or savings at the time. Financially, it looked like the trip never happened. I didn’t have to dip into my overdraft or scramble for the money because it was already there.

Why this is smart

Read more

I think memoirs are a better way to learn about life lessons than reading a book purely on personal finance. But Strangers actually struck me in an overwhelming way on how easy it is to lose your identity and worth as a woman, in Belle’s case it was to a man and her marriage—in my case it has been to other people and things.

That is the unlock that I always tend to point back to here in the Financial Hot Girl world, ensuring you like yourself enough so that your downstream financial behaviour doesn’t bite you in the backside no matter how wealthy you are. It’s something I see women do a lot in life—outsourcing their identity and worth.

So let’s make sure stories like Belle’s are only those you read, and not write.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• Signs your identity is being outsourced

• What it costs to have no identity

• What to expect as a woman

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⟡ How do you know if your identity is being outsourced?

If you’ve been reading these newsletters for a while, you’ll be familiar with the fact that for a long time, my sense of worth lived in whether the people around me accepted me. I wanted to be cool, smart, someone worth inviting.

I bought things to belong. Said yes to things I couldn’t afford because I was more afraid of being left out than having no money. Ostensibly, I was spending money—but really I was actually was renting a version of myself that other people might find worthy. It felt completely normal.

I call this the self-hate tax—the money you spend not because you want something, but because you don’t feel like enough without it.

Belle describes something similar in Strangers, her version inside a marriage. The belief that she could do things seemed to run through her ex-husband rather than herself.

Identity outsourcing signs to look out for:

✦ What identity outsourcing costs

The cost of outsourcing your identity is simple: you have no financial ground to stand on the moment someone else decides to move.

When your name isn’t on things or when you don’t really know what’s in the accounts. When your earning potential has been slowly, reasonably, sensibly deprioritised in favour of shared logistics. When you only exist financially in relation to someone else—you exist, but financially you’re invisible.

It’s one of the most financially exposed positions a woman can be in, because her financial stability becomes contingent on someone else’s continued (and assumed) goodwill. Goodwill which is not a legal document or an asset, and tends not to hold up particularly well under pressure.

And in Belle’s case, she did everything right by the logic of the relationship she evidently thought she was in. She still ended up having to fight to be seen, financially and otherwise, because she assumed there would be goodwill.

⟡ Stability ≠ safety (again!)

I’ve written about this before but what Belle describes—and what I think a lot of women will recognise in her book—is stability that was being read as safety. A life that looked whole, built on a foundation that turned out to be one person’s continued willingness to hold it together until he decided he didn’t want to overnight.

The gap between stability and safety is invisible from inside a relationship that’s working and you only really see the gap when the relationship stops, because relationships have the infrastructure to prop the illusion of safety up. Recognising this is also recognising how stability might be propping up your worth and/or your identity.

꩜ On expectations as a woman

Expecting people to treat you the way you treat them is expensive, because you are often measuring your worth based on this assumption.

Throughout the memoir it’s obvious that Belle was kind, generous, and well-meaning in the context of her believing she was with a partner for life. And the person she loved most still chose, repeatedly, not to see her2. No amount of goodness on your part guarantees goodness in return, a gloomy fact of life—but also a fact that should never get in the way of you wanting to be kind and generous in this world.

This is why protecting yourself financially is self-respect. You can give as much as you want, not expect anything in return, and not need others to recognise it in order to feel worthy.

The women who move through life like this understand that loving someone doesn’t transfer responsibility for your own financial safety onto them, because at the end of the day they are owed nothing by anyone except themselves.

If your relationship ended tomorrow (just as a thought experiment) would you know exactly where you stood financially, in no less than exact terms? Would you feel confident making decisions about your life? Do you know what your opinions, likes and dislikes are? Would you know how to define yourself without the relationship? Would you have money that is only yours?

Most people don’t know, but it’s a self-knowledge problem that’s very fixable from the moment you are aware of it.

Until next week,

— Dev xo

And I think raising our financial IQ is the answer, at least in part, to being able to have the worst in life happen to you but still be okay—at least financially. Because while I’m not yet married, or going through a tumultuous divorce, I would love nothing more than to avoid one ☝🏽

IQ: intelligence quotient. “A measure of your ability to learn and apply information”

Financial IQ: hereby defined as a measure of your ability to learn and apply financial information.

The word glowing on the screen for me is apply. Because a lot of us learn, and learn very well—all of you reading this are smart, and have no problems learning whatever it is you want to learn with the speed you desire. But applying that information is where we absolutely love to fall short.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• 3 essential concept to understand

• How to apply it

• A free resource for you 💌

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✦ 3 essential concepts to understand

Financial transparency = relationship baseline

Dorit not knowing the details of her own household finances is an extremely common pattern, which tends to follow the same shape: one person in the relationship handles the money, the other person opts out, and it just works until it doesn’t.

Financial transparency in a relationship means knowing—at minimum—what comes in, what goes out, what you own, and what you owe.

It doesn’t mean you have to merge everything or give up financial independence (I’d argue you shouldn’t), but it does mean there should be no financial blind spots between you and your partner.

Not knowing your family’s financial position is the exact future liability you’re signing up for right now—and to put it in context, is the position that Dorit is likely in (again, I’m speculating as I know no details).

She has to now do lots of work, including potentially working with forensic accountants, to build a clear picture of her ex-husbands assets and family assets because she literally does not know and now, because of a soured relationship, cannot reliably find out herself.

Marriage legally changes your money (whether you plan for it or not)

Marriage is a legal and financial contract, and one that has real consequences you don’t get to opt out of just because you didn’t read the small print.

When you get married in the UK, a number of things change by default (there are many more, but here’s a few):

• You become eligible for Marriage Allowance and assets transferred between spouses are generally exempt from Capital Gains Tax

• You become each other’s default next of kin, which affects pension nominations, decisions made in hospital, and what happens to your assets if one of you dies without a will

• If you only cohabitate and aren’t married, you have less of a standing to make any financial claims—especially dangerous if you stepped away from your career to caretake or raise children

Importantly, you’re in a weaker position if you just live together (within the context of having children, joint assets, and significant unpaid labour). But being financially literate means knowing which rules apply to your life before life applies them to you, on your behalf.

Stability and safety are not the same thing—one can disappear overnight

I’ve written about this before but it keeps coming back up, because it’s one of the most important distinctions in your financial life.

Stability is what you have when things are consistent and predictable, like shared rent, shared routines, a household that runs because two incomes are funding it.

Safety is what you have when you could leave, lose, or start over—and still be okay. Not comfortable, necessarily. But okay. Not in debt to cover your basic costs or in some way financially paralysed.

Stability can feel indistinguishable from safety right up until it isn’t. Dorit had stability. Chelsea Lazkani on Selling Sunset had stability. Belle Burden, by all accounts, had stability. The thing about depending on shared financial infrastructure is that it only works when the sharing (i.e. the structure) is intact. Safety is the thing that kicks in when the structure falls apart.

This whole thing isn’t about planning for divorce, or being unromantic, or assuming the worst of someone. Financial safety is yours to build, and yours alone—and it’s far easier to build it before you need it.

⟡ How to apply these concepts

Raising your financial IQ in a relationship context means knowing the above, then using it to have a real and out loud conversation with your partner, whether to review your finances together or just get some answers.

So reader, please know that as soon as finances started being discussed on the show, I slammed that pause button and turned to my boyfriend, ready to ask him 101 questions. Among those, I asked:

• Should we get a prenup, or something drawn up that clearly defines separate vs jointly owned assets?

• If something happened to one of us, like job loss, illness, anything—do we actually know enough about each other's finances to step in and manage it?

• Have you nominated anyone on your pension? Because that doesn't automatically go to a spouse or partner—you have to actively sort it

• How would we go about putting assets in our own name, if we’re building things individually—once we have children, will it ever be fair to do that?

• If I stepped back from work to have children, what do you think would be fair in terms of how we'd manage money—and what I'd be owed if things didn't work out?

The key thing to note here is that watching the show was an especially convenient and useful launchpad for me to turn around and start this conversation without it feeling awkward or out of the blue.

Even while reading Strangers, Belle Burdens’ memoir, has been a great way to bring up certain topics that just wouldn’t come up naturally. I’ve had these conversations before, but it’s always fun to talk about. As a financial influencer and Financial Hot Girl however, the context is always there in my personal relationship to bring up money and finances—but for you reading this, having a conversational launchpad can help a lot.

꩜ The love and money conversation starter pack

Back when the love and money episode came out I created this conversation starter pack to help you discuss finances in your relationship—a starter pack in the sense that it helps you think about that launchpad and how to bring up certain topics, phrase them, and get a conversation started about them, before it’s too late.

Access it here

Until next week,

— Dev xo

In the last few days, I’ve been rewinding the last decade of my life in my mind. How did I go from having a negative net worth, a terrible relationship with myself, depression, anxiety, to this? Travelling the world, with money I earned, with a body I love and a business that lights me up. The whirlwind of my 20s hit me like a brick when the wheels of my plane hit that Scottish tarmac.

This reflection has left me with a tempting thought. One I’ve long avoided for fear of procrastinating or being performatively productive. Is it time for…a rebrand?!

It’s a dangerous question to ask in my world. I’m careful with how much I ideate or perfectly plan anything, as evidence in my life has pointed to that being the perfect way to put off doing the real work to get me to my goals. But now, I’m considering a rebrand because of 4 specific things:

1. I’ve just entered my 30s

2. Financial Hot Girl is growing, rapidly, and I’m scared(!)

3. I feel like I’ve ‘outgrown’ the version of myself of my 20s, i.e. I feel a sense of separation from her

4. I achieved a lot in my 20s, and want to feel uncomfortable again

Pivots are scary—I’ve done a fair few of them career-wise in the last few years. So I know a little about what to do about this rebrand, and what not to do. So let’s plan this one out together, and maybe, you’ll join me?

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• How to identify old vs new

• How I’m approaching goal setting

• Setting mental, physical and financial goals

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Before starting, I just want to emphasise that this whole exercise takes time.

I’ll be spending this week journalling and getting pen to paper to map out all of these exercises, and by the end of the week, have a data-informed plan of how my rebrand will play out. This whole thing can’t be thought through in an evening, because it deserves so much more than that.

⟡ How to identify old vs new

The sinfully tempting part of a rebrand for me is trying to do it all at once, with the cherry on the cake being focussing a little too much on the parts that ‘look good’. I.e. new goals, new me, new outfits, new meals, etc.

But as I’ve entered this new decade a Financial Hot Girl, it’s only right to do it the Financially Hot way: with the data.

Before deciding what this new chapter of life looks like for me, I’m closely inspecting the one I’m leaving behind—it’s full to the brim with really useful data. What’s worked vs not worked, and what the latest version of Dev was optimised for. What were the habit loops? What were the things that happened on autopilot? What were the patterns?

What pre-empts the decision of what will be new, is asking myself what the life I’m choosing to leave behind protected. This can be a little challenging, as it requires deeply examining the comfortable parts of my life. Maybe the parts that were a little more comfortable than I’d like to admit.

Note to you, and to myself: you don’t need to burn anything down right now! You just need to get honest about what’s serving the person you want to become, and what’s just a habit from a chapter feels like it’s closing.

⭑ How to set goals properly (i.e. goals you can actually fail)

A lot of the goals I’m associating with my rebrand are essentially 10x’d versions of things I do now. If you’re reading this as someone who wants to rebrand so far as to have new goals and habits entirely, I recommend reading through these issues and getting yourself a copy of Atomic Habits by James Clear:

All of the goals I’ll be setting myself as part of this rebrand are fail-able. That doesn’t mean I will fail them, it means I can—because the perimeters of the goals are easily identifiable. They’re specific and visible so that I can track and measure my progress, and course-correct along the way.

For each goal, I’m identifying:

1. Metrics—what exactly am I measuring

2. Deadlines—by when will this be measured

3. Conditions of failure—at what point will I be deeming this a fail?

I’m a Financial Hot Girl, so I’m defining goals in the mental, physical and financial buckets.

Mental goals

Mental goals are the hardest to make measurable because they live entirely inside your head, duh. But this just means you have to be a little more deliberate about what you’re actually trying to change, and why.

ᝰ✍︎ I’m journalling on these:

• What does my mind feel like right now, and what would I want it to feel like in 6 months?

• Where do I feel most mentally depleted? Is it a habit, a relationship, a thought pattern, or a lack of one of those things?

• What triggers the shame that mentally depletes me, or triggers procrastination or self-sabotage?

• What does a mentally rich version of me actually do in her day-to-day? What time does she wake up? What’s her relationship with work? What’s her self-talk like? What are her hobbies?

• What am I currently doing “for my mental health” that I know, deep down, isn’t actually helping? (Is anything performative?)

Physical goals

Physical goals are actually the easiest to set properly, but difficult to contain, because as we always say here: you have to prove the habit before the purchase. So with physical goals, we can’t use these as reasons to run away and buy stuff.

With physical goals, I’ve found with previous success and failure that the body keeps score in numbers. The issue is that most people, including historical Dev, set outcome goals (e.g. lose X kg) without setting the behaviour goals underneath them—which is what you actually control.

An outcome goal tells you where you want to end up, but a behaviour goal tells you what to do. You need both, and the behaviour goal is the one to measure.

ᝰ✍︎ I’m journalling on these:

• What does a physically disciplined version of me actually do day-to-day: on easy, medium and difficult days?

• What has my relationship with my body looked like in the last year? Has it been coasting aimlessly, punishment, avoidance, or something else?

• What type of movement do I actually enjoy, or could see myself doing consistently until I’m in my 60s—not just in an ideal week?

• What’s the minimum version of this goal I could hit on a bad week? (If I can’t do that, the goal is too big or the system needs changing)

The last one is related to the fail condition, which IMO should be based on reality, not an aspirational version of your schedule.

Financial goals

The fun part, for me—especially because I’m starting from scratch post backpacking Latin America. However, most people here still make two mistakes: they set a destination without a route, and they have no idea why they’re going there in the first place.

ᝰ✍︎ I’m journalling on these:

• What does financial security feel like for me specifically? Monthly salary figure, a number in the bank account?

• What are the income sources that make me feel frustrated vs proud/smart? Why?

• If I imagine the Financially Hot version of myself in three years—what does her relationship with money look like? Would she freak out over anything?

• What financial decision have I been putting off that I already know the answer to?

A system I adore for giving financial goals a tangible shape is FIRE: Financial Independence, Retire Early.

Importantly though you don’t have to be trying to retire at 35 to use the framework. What FIRE gives you is a way to reverse-engineer your number: the amount you’d need invested by retirement to live off your money without needing to work.

The calculation: you take your desired annual income at retirement and multiply it by 25 (based on the widely-used 4% safe withdrawal rate). So if you're 30 years old and you'd want £30,000 a year to live comfortably, your FIRE number is £750,000 (30,000 x 25). If you want to hit that by 50, you've got 20 years to get there—which works out to investing roughly £1,500 a month, assuming a 7% average annual return. The figures change depending on age, desired retirement age, desired annual income, etc.

That number is useful for one reason, because it gives you a direction. A goal you can move toward, even slowly. And when you have a direction, you can set the smaller quarterly goals that actually get you there—how much to invest each month, what return you’re aiming for, how many years out you realistically are, and when you can stop or adjust your financial habits.

More on how I’m working through my F.I.R.E goal, and a much deeper dive into all of my Financial Hot Girl goals coming for paid subscribers on Wednesday. ⭐️ Upgrade your subscription here to read.

Even though I’m going to be executing on this rebrand over the next month, I’m not defining it with a new ‘era’ or a new ‘look’.

I’m making a deliberate decision to stop organising my life around the version of me that just doesn’t feel like me anymore. And hopefully, that’ll look like visible abs and financial freedom by the end of the year (I’m kidding… well, half kidding—I’ll let you guess which half 😉).

If you want to join me, I’ll be sharing more on my IG stories in the coming days.

Until next week,

— Dev xo

As you know, I’ve been travelling Latin America for the last 7-ish months. It’s been one a hell of a ride, and our flight home to Edinburgh is slowly creeping up on us. That also means I’ve been getting myself in order, because the last 7 months have been far from Financially Hot.

Pre-trip Dev had a few nonsensical (in hindsight) assumptions. I thought it would be easy to stay consistent with movement and strength. I did not realise just how much travel would be involved in our travelling — I’ve spent countless hours (straight) on busses, haven’t had consistent access to quality food, and to be honest, too exhausted to even think about steps sometimes.

But for every 4-5 weeks of travel, we’ve found ourselves in a city with at least a week to reset our sleep, movement and eating habits. Personally I found these weeks great for catching up on work and content too, which for me, really feeds my zest for life. (Call me crazy, but that’s the beauty of loving what you do)

In these weeks, I’ve found myself doing a pretty specific group of activities that make me feel my hottest self. If you’re a longtime reader of Financial Hot Girl you’ll know that here, hot is not what you see in the mirror, it’s a feeling before that. So here are a few ways I’ve been recreating that feeling every time we’ve had a few days to slow down and reset.

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1. Moving consistently

As of writing this I’m in Rio, and we have a couple of weeks to slow down, sightsee, learn Portuguese and catch up on work. Being in a city, I signed myself up to a gym and got myself straight onto a protocol of cardio, weights, and stretching.

I didn’t overthink what I’d do because I have a routine back home that I relied on—a minimum of two zone 2 cardio sessions a week, 10,000 steps and 3-4 full body strength days. I just scaled this up or down depending on how much time we had in each city.

Every single time I do this, I feel much more like myself. All it takes is one day of snapping back to my routine to make me feel hot. I forget all the inflammation and exhaustion of the weeks prior that are still on my body.

My previous routines, and how disciplined I’ve been with them, has given me that familiar sense of ‘I know what happens when I do this’ and that has feelings attached, too. I’m reminded of the fact that no matter what, I’ll do what it takes to rebuild the habit.

How to copy me: it doesn’t matter if your choices in life take you away from your routines, but find the routines you like and stay disciplined with them when you can, as best you can. The structure of a routine itself frees you from decision fatigue in the more chaotic moments of life, and keeps you grounded. Not to mention, emotionally, reminds you of the person who is strong, disciplined and trusts herself.

2. Taking the brain bins out

For me, journalling is that one habit that almost got away. It was the one I could never make stick, but I always felt good after doing it. I became a consistent at journalling once I allowed myself to be consistent in different ways.

Before, I thought that if I didn’t put pen to paper in my aesthetic journal, it didn’t count as journalling. But slowly over time, I let myself brain dump thoughts in a blank Notion page. Another time in the Notes app on my phone. Another time in that aesthetic journal. One day I realised that I am a consistent writer, just not in a way that looks neat and squared up on the outside.

On this trip, journalling was the thing that stopped me spiralling when things felt uncertain and out of my control. It didn't fix anything. It just allowed my emotions to be guests in the home that was my brain—it created space between me and my feelings. If you’re Type A or an over thinker, this is incredibly necessary space that you need so you can focus on feeling hot.

How to copy me: do not make this practice precious. Five minutes, any method, no rules (except the five minutes). Just get your thoughts out of your head. You'll be surprised how much lighter you feel, and how much clearer your decisions become when your brain isn't trying to hold everything at once.

3. My worldwide payday ritual

At least once a month, no matter where we were or how chaotic things felt, I sat down and went through my transactions. Checked how I was tracking against my financial goals for the trip. I just looked at it, and sometimes I didn’t action anything after.

And every single time, I felt relieved, clear-headed and proud. 99% of the time I also felt inspired to take action on something else I was procrastinating, like planning the next portion of our itinerary or booking some accomodation.

The relief and pride I felt wasn’t because everything was perfect, because it was far from it—seven months of travel to a budget, is what a rainy day is to a beautiful suede bag. I felt proud because I’m not the girl who ignores it anymore. That version of me used to avoid her finances because she was scared of her reality. Now I look because I respect myself enough to know and take action.

The act of checking in, even when things aren’t exactly where you want them, is what separates a Financially Hot girl from someone who is just letting life happen to them and hoping for the best. Hope is not a financial strategy, even in the chaos of the road.

How to copy me: once a month, sit down with your transactions and your goals. No spreadsheet necessarily required — just look. The habit of looking is the foundation everything else is built on.

4. Face and body massage

For years, after trips, I’d roll the heck out of my feet with massage balls. I never knew that what I was doing was self-myofascial release, which is having a hell of a moment on social media right now.

When I read books on how your body holds onto stress and trauma (not from physical pain but from emotional and spiritual pain) a lot of my instinctive habits made sense. As well as rolling my feet, I also loved massaging my face—particularly my brows and around my mouth. The muscles there are so tense that sometimes, they’re painful just to touch.

Knowing that I’m actually massaging stress and pain away takes a literal weight off of my body. And you know what I can do when I feel light as a feather? Many things:

• Think clearly

• Make better decisions

• Concentrate and focus

• Sleep better

• Converse more thoughfully

• Maintain more joyful moods

Need I list more benefits out to massaging your face more? I’ve gone on to invest into small tools to help me do this more methodically, and it’s slowly but surely becoming an incredibly soothing part of my day during a time I’ve needed to self-soothe and feel my hottest, lightest self while backpacking Latin America!

How to copy me: take a moment to yourself right now and close your eyes, to try and notice where your face or neck is holding tension. Maybe a clamped jaw or a furrowed brow. Gently, and very softly, start to massage those areas in a way that feels right to you. Then start to research proper techniques. Feel comfortable building the awareness in your face and body first.

I want you to really think about the times you’ve been busy or stressed and imagined that more perfect, sensible conditions were needed for the habits that make you feel financially hot.

Take a look at my habits—these are the ones I do with 100% consistency in my controlled home environment, but I didn’t give up on them while travelling, and that’s the common thread between them that makes me feel hot. I do them even when it doesn’t look perfect, feel perfect, and when no one is watching.

Until next week,

— Dev xo

If this had happened to me in my early 20s, I would have let it happen to me. I would have let it define me as unorganised, stupid, or a disaster of a traveller. But one of the best things that the development of my frontal lobe has given me is the understanding that failure is information. And the difference between someone who lets life happen to them and someone who navigates it with information is agency1.

Agency is the habit of treating a problem like it has an instruction manual. To me, it’s the opposite of having a ‘victim mindset’. And financially, to be more high agency, it’s worth avoiding three low agency traps.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• The Perfect fantasy

• Waiting to “feel better”

• Over-identifying with one bad day

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Important note: a high agency person is inherently trustworthy of themselves, and doesn’t have a scarcity mindset. They realise that even in the worst situations with the worst outcomes, they can recover from it, and that rock bottom means nothing other than having to go back up. That’s why they’re able to act, or move forward, despite an unfavourable situation.

I learned this from reflecting on all the situations I’ve faced in life, which I’ve come out the other end of, despite the anxiety/depression/financial-nothingness it gave me. This reflection has been tremendously influential in giving me a foundation for being high agency.

Trap 1: The Perfect fantasy

Have you ever heard the Woody Allen quote “If you want to make God laugh, then tell God your plans”? I think this also applies to money. Maybe even more so to money, because money hates perfection. And the moment I understood this, was also the moment I realised I wasn’t actually terrible at budgeting or unorganised with money, and that I could simply just change how I organised my money.

Logistically, it’s hard to plan for the unplannable. It’s hard to predict what will go wrong, but equally, you can’t plan for things to go wrong and manifest failure. But financially, the thing to do here is to not let the ‘wrong’ or ‘unpredictable’ happenings be the main plot-line of your life. Especially if you’re in your Earn/Keep season!

Low agency says: “Well, I didn’t stick to the budget because of [insert unplanned event here], so the budget is ruined. Therefore I suck at finances and only bad things happen to me.”

High agency says: “The plan met my reality. What did I not account for? Let’s change things.”

Despite things going wrong, the most useful question you can ask yourself financially is:

What is the smallest version of this I can still do today, despite what ‘went wrong’?

Minimum viable financial behaviour that can be done in the midst of whatever life throws at you is the goal. Like logging into your bank app instead of tracking your transactions because you don’t have the time or energy. The problem with the minimum viable behaviour is that it feels embarrassingly sloppy, pointless, almost cringey in how little difference it could make. But sloppy and pointless gets you further than not doing it unsloppily.

Even how I used to budget for my social life a few years ago was sloppy—I wasn’t getting a spreadsheet out and forcing myself to stick to a figure. I knew I had drinks coming up with a friend, but I also knew that I wanted to max my investments that year. So I transferred myself an approximate amount for 2 drinks and a sweet treat on a specific card I used for ‘fun’ spending, told my friend up front that I couldn’t stay too late, and accepted that I adjusted the plan for my ‘imperfect’ life.

Trap 2: Waiting to “feel better”

Grow season hotties, this trap is sticky for you. Telling myself that I’ll do it later when I feel more motivated, or better, was one of my most unhelpful thinking patterns in my 20s. It cost me a lot financially, because this is the exact thinking that stopped me from investing back then.

And therein lies the irony. It’s often that the feeling we’re waiting for is hiding behind the action we’re avoiding. Like when I felt financially more ready once I’d opened an investing account that I didn’t even put any money in.

Think about how often you’ve said things like:

• “I’ll sort out my investments when I’m less stressed in a month”

• “I’ll negotiate my salary when I feel more confident”

• “I’ll check my subscriptions when I have a free afternoon next week”

Low agency here is waiting around for that feeling, which in all honesty may or may not ever arrive.

A high agency mindset here is understanding that motivation follows action, and not the other way around. And financially, this carries so much more weight. It’s why I sometimes think that once you reads a finance book or find a podcast you finally get—you don’t stop your personal finance journey2, because something finally clicked.

The feeling you’re so desperate for is on the other side of that tiny3 task you’re avoiding. So just do it.

Trap 3: Over-identifying with one bad day

This is the trap that causes the most damage because we really often tie our ‘failures’ directly to our self-worth, especially if you already struggle to feel worthy without external influences.

I skipped the gym = I’m undisciplined

I overspent = I’m bad with money

I didn’t read = I’m stupid/never follow through

Low agency turns behaviour into a complete character assassination assessment. But per the Financial Hot Girl micro-philosophy; we use ‘failure’ as data.

High agency behaviour after a bad day is reflecting on it. Your ‘worst’ financial decisions very rarely exist in a vacuum. Your ‘worst’ days are likely to coexist with your ‘worst’ financial decisions. Impulsive spending, financial procrastination, aggressively ignoring banking app notifications will never happen on your best days. Ask yourself what else was going on that day/month? Stress, exhaustion, loneliness, your luteal phase?

All of the data from a terrible day can be used to shape a better tomorrow, only if you let it. Bad days are not evidence of who you are as a person, how smart you are, or how financially capable you are.

Money-related things you’ve negatively characterised yourself for, have nothing to do with your actual character. Something happened in your life that’s leading you (unfairly might I add) to these conclusions—and that’s all it is. An annoying, yet correctable thinking pattern.

Because truly:

• Understanding the economy is as simple as picking up a book.

• Investing is as simple as…investing the money. There is no ‘too late’ or ‘too little’. There is your timeline and a few clicks on your computer.

• If you find yourself reading this and thinking “well it’s not that simple, Dev” I challenge you to think more high agency. Things may not be simple in life, but the step 1.1 of doing something likely is.

The common thread across all three traps is this: low agency makes everything feel personal. A missed habit, the overspending, the plan that fell apart, but none of it is a verdict on who you are. It's just information. Start using this information, and stop weaponising it.

Until next week,

— Dev xo

A luxury brand made a $2,900 replica of the thing that’s actually making me feel good right now. Because fresh produce has now become so culturally loaded — so tied to a certain kind of aspirational and healthy life — that it belongs on a runway. And it’s meant that spending on wellness as a whole has replaced the old designer haul. Even more troubling, is that it’s easier to justify.

That’s where we are with wellness in 2025. Yet another status signal with a price tag. And a lot of us are accidentally over-consuming this signal, because consumption got a very sneaky rebrand that makes us feel good about doing it.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• How you’ve been tricked into another consumption spend

• How Financial Hot Girls decide what’s worth spending on

• 4 essential wellness spending questions to ask yourself

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☆ consumption got an irrefutable rebrand

10 years ago, if I asked myself “am I spending too much on things I don’t need” the answer was an incredibly easy yes, because I could look at my transactions and see 2398723 distinct line items — on things that added no value to my life. Shoes. Nights out. More shoes.

Overconsumption hasn't gone away, but the definition of it is changing. We’re starting to buy time, access, and rituals to show we are well. Take Nara Smith, she’s transforming ‘cooking’ into a luxury experience in an economy where having spare time to intricately prepare food has become another position of social signalling. The new version of a designer haul has become this:

Wellness spending has replaced designer spending as the category where money disappears without obvious scrutiny. Because why would you look at how much you spent on fresh produce and think “that added no value to my life”? Unless you’re the person that keeps buying vegetables you never cook, in which case, no judgment here.

“I’m investing in my health” is not a sentence you can combat, not like “I bought another handbag”. Wellness spending feels good, and feels most justified to the women who are self-aware enough to have stopped spending on things not worth their time or energy. Investing in yourself often feels like the responsible version of spending, which is why it needs more scrutiny, not less, especially because it has morphed into a status symbol.

On top of that, everything in the wellness space is mostly tiered. There’s a version of almost every healthy habit out there (that would cost nothing to do) that has a little cost, a premium version, and an ultra-luxury version. Would you like a tap water, or pure Acqua di Cristallo Tributo a Modigliani with 24k gold packaging1?

Tierification in wellness exists for a reason and it’s not entirely for your wellbeing. It’s the other reason that makes wellness different from any other spending category: it’s almost entirely recurring. Clothing is a one-off decision. But a membership, a supplement or a weekly class are decisions that compound every month, but are really easy to justify when individually charged.

Wellness is the one category that will always agree with you. It will never tell you that you've spent enough, or too much. There will always be a more optimised supplement, a more sophisticated tracker, a more restorative practice that someone you look up to swears by. The category has no natural ceiling because the goal — feeling good, performing well, living longer — has no natural ceiling, either.

★ how do you decide what’s worth the spend?

This is where your Earn, Keep Grow™ season matters more than you realise.

✧ Financial Hot Girls in EARN: when your income is your constraint, your body is your primary asset in this season because it is literally what earns. This is where investment in your physical capacity pays you back well. Think sleep quality, consistent mood, brain function.

This is also not the season for expensive wellness infrastructures that don’t go beyond the basics, like high-cost studio memberships or premium supplement stacks. Costs should be lean while supporting foundational habits.

✧ Financial Hot Girls in KEEP: this season calls for control. The wellness audit I go through below belongs here, where recurring charges need to be culled and audited as truly for you vs statements you’re trying to make about yourself and your lifestyle choices.

For example, this is the season where you want to be intentional about finding (and cutting) a £40 subscription you forgot about, or a membership you don’t actually use, or a supplement that ran out a long time ago you haven’t noticed. Cancel the mimetic spending, and work on building the baseline habits that you can support financially when you’re in a different season.

✧ Financial Hot Girls in GROW: financial hotties, you have surplus and stability. This is where you can invest in wellness infrastructures you’ve already proved with discipline and strong habits. Perhaps because now, the ROI makes sense and isn’t just a shot in the dark (“If I pay for this fancy gym, it’ll make me go more).

Be conscious of this: being in your grow season isn’t a green light to just ‘spend more’. Just be more deliberate and intentional with where that extra spend is going.

Across every season, your capacity should be front of mind. Every penny or cent you spend on your body should be answerable to the question of whether it increases what you can do, earn, think or sustain. If you’re spending to “seem” like the kind of person who’d do that spending…you’re signalling something. And signalling has a cost, whether you choose that consciously or not is up to you.

✮ 4 ways to apply scrutiny

I’ve written before about proving a purchase before you make it — starting small, building the habit, then investing in the infrastructure. The same logic applies to wellness spending.

With wellness, consuming feels like the responsible choice, and opting out feels like neglect. The industry created enough tiers, enough science, and enough community, that spending became the default and not spending became something you had to justify.

A Financial Hot Girl knows the difference between capacity and consumption. She funds the former and audits the latter. And remember, with all spending, it always comes back to understanding yourself and what you need, and trying not to replicate these things from external sources.

Until next week,

— Dev xo

Mentioned in part 1, there are two traits to being a difficult woman:

#1 Extreme certainty: she knows what she wants. Specifically, financially, and behaviourally. She’s done the thinking and she’s not outsourcing her preferences to a group chat, Google or ChatGPT.

#2 Extreme confidence: she goes for it without apologising. She asks, holds the price, says no without justification, and she leaves the room when the room isn’t for her.

These two traits aren't things you either have or you don't and are very, very buildable — only by doing. Every exercise in this issue is training one or both of them directly.

The yes audit sharpens #1: you cannot know what you want until you can see clearly where you've been wanting something else.

The scripts and the rate-holding build #2: confidence in execution comes from repetition, not from feeling ready first. The over-achieving perfectionists will understand me here.

To make the most out of this implementation pack:

1. Run through these once and you'll hopefully start to notice the edges of your own preferences more clearly.

2. Run through them consistently and the gap between what you want and what you actually do starts to close.

A realistic note on what to expect

When you start being more difficult, some people will not respond well. And the biggest mistake you can make when people start responding negatively is taking it as a sign to stop, when in fact, it’s a sign that the muscle is working.

A few things I am cementing in as expectations ahead of trying to be more difficult:

• Some no’s will be received badly. Someone might go quiet, or follow up with a guilt trip, or just not invite you next time

• Some rate-holds will lose you the deal. Clients will ghost. Brands will go with someone cheaper

• Some people in your life will start describing you differently. This might get back to you. It’ll sting

• The research is unfortunately clear on this one: women who negotiate are often punished for it regardless of how they ask, and are more likely to be perceived as greedy, demanding, or not very nice for asking the same thing a man asks for. Personally, I’ll try not to care and importantly, I will not let it stop me from keeping on going

I’m telling you this as a reminder not to give up or think that the protocol failed. If the first response was negative and you read that as evidence that difficult-woman traits are just not for you, that’s a limiting belief popping up. Everything is hard at first. And when you’re being difficult, you’re actively pushing away things that are not for you. After a while, it’ll feel less like a mistake and you’ll be so, so grateful you did it.

For every brand deal you lose by holding your rate, you’ll close two at the right number because you’ve stopped flinching. For every plan you say no to that creates a sulk, you free up the time and money to invest in the relationships that don’t punish you for having preferences.

So when you use what’s below and the response is mixed, don’t take it as a sign to stop. Take it as a sign you’ve correctly identified who in your life was relying on the easy version of yourself. That information is this whole thing actually working.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• The 7-day yes audit that shows you exactly where your ‘easy yes’ is leaking money

• The 3 sentence no I use for everything from social plans to scope creep

• Rate-holding scripts for 5 contexts, including the rule of what I do after I state my number

• The decision tree I run before any yes worth more than £50 or 2 hours

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I was reminded of #2 a few days ago at an artisan market in Buenos Aires. There was a beautifully designed scarf stall and I spotted a scarf ring that I liked the look of from afar. I dragged my boyfriend and his mum along, and what followed was a good 15 minutes of looking at every scarf ring, every scarf, and trying on almost every cute ring-scarf combination I could put together.

And at the end, I smiled, thanked the sales lady for her time, and left without buying anything. My boyfriend and his mum were quick to be surprised that after all that, I didn’t make a purchase.

The old me would have felt deeply embarrassed. Like I had been too difficult, and that I should have pleased everyone and bought something.

But then my inner monologue challenged me. It wasn’t awkward for her. She works there! She happily and patiently walked me through every item that I wanted to look at. It was quite literally, her job.

What happened when I decided to walk away was that I was being picky on purpose. I know what I spend my money on because I know what suits me. I can tell the difference between wanting something because it's trendy and wanting something because I actually like it. I'd decided mid-try-on that nothing passed these filters.

So I didn’t buy, and the only awkwardness in the whole interaction was the awkwardness other people felt on my behalf.

This is the trait I want to talk about today, and it's the most underrated financial trait a woman can build.

Being difficult.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• You’re too easy (no, never like that)

• 2 traits that make a woman deliciously difficult

• Why difficult women Earn, Keep and Grow way more money

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Being easy is a marketer’s dream

One thing I’ve realised about myself as an ‘easy’ woman historically is that I was the perfect customer. I’m the one that brands are praying, with both hands, walks into their funnel.

An easy woman doesn’t really know what she wants. She’s unsure of herself, so it makes sense that she doesn’t even know her likes and dislikes. And because she’s so unsure of herself, she depends on people liking her to feel good about herself. That means she’ll pay the price for that validation, to be the version of herself that gets approved. That gets included. She’s trained herself to be agreeable, and her finances follow suit.

I’m cringing writing that because of how deeply easy I was. At the time, all of my spending leaks could be attributed to this. Spending on social events I didn’t want to attend, or on clothing to be a person I wasn’t.

All because I could never confidently hold onto a ‘no’.

And it didn’t just stop at my spending, being easy intensely affected my earning potential too. It nudged me to accept low rates, avoid negotiating and embarrassingly, for a period of time — do free work.

The 2 difficult woman traits

Being difficult in the context of being a Financial Hot Girl means two very simple things:

1. Extreme certainty: she knows what she wants. Specifically, financially, and behaviourally. She’s done the thinking and she’s not outsourcing her preferences to a group chat, Google or ChatGPT.

2. Extreme confidence: she goes for it without apologising. She asks, holds the price, says no without justification, and she leaves the room when the room isn’t for her.

These two traits go against everything we’ve been taught since childhood. Women who know what they want and go for it aren’t useful to the systems built around them, which is precisely why those systems work so hard to make her feel like a problem.

Take Jennifer Lawrence in 2014 who wrote an entire essay about not wanting to seem difficult when she realised she was being severely underpaid compared to male co-stars. One of the highest-paid actresses in the world lost money out of wanting to be ‘easy’. That’s how powerful the system is, and how little it has to do with your skill or worth.

Why difficult women keep more money

Once you can hold a clear yes and a clear no, your finances start to behave incredibly differently, because it collapses the 90% of financially draining decisions into a much smaller number.

Here, the difficult woman isn't necessarily doing more financial admin, she's just making fewer financial decisions, because she's pre-decided most of them. She's used the Decide Once principle on the kind of woman she is, and now her money behaves accordingly.

But won’t people think I’m rude?

Probably. Actually, some of them will. Friends may turn on you. Potential clients won’t like your rates. But the emotional discomfort of being perceived as difficult is often the only thing standing between most women and the financial life they say they want.

I’m not as difficult as I’d like to be, but I’ve made a hell of a lot of progress in my 20s. So with that, I have warnings and little honesty:

• The people who call you difficult are often the people who benefit from you being easy (read that again)

• “Difficult” and “self-respecting” are usually the same trait, just described by different audiences

• You can be warm, kind, and generous and still be difficult. These aren’t opposites

• Being liked by everyone is 100% a financial cost, and most women are paying it without realising (the self-hate tax)

The goal of a Difficult Woman is to become unmovable on the things that matter to you, while staying genuinely true to everything else. And being so ruthlessly clear about what it is that matters to you is what’s important (trait number #1 of a difficult woman as above).

We say yes when we mean later, no, or never. We say “I’d love that” when we mean “I’d tolerate that”. We say “happy to” when we mean “I’d really rather not but I don’t want to make it awkward”. And this misalignment costs a lot of damn money.

Women have been called difficult for centuries as a warning. I’d really like us to start hearing it as a compliment.

I’m currently working on becoming a more difficult woman. And the implementation pack I’m following just got sent to paid subscribers.

Remember that behaviour change is what impacts your financial future. Doing the work after you read these issues is what matters more than the notes you make. So don’t hesitate and:

Become a Difficult Woman

Until next week,

— Dev xo

During this trip, I’ve booked padel lessons I’m not good at, signed up for multiple weeks of lessons in Spanish I am definitely not getting paid to learn, and been on multiple hikes where I took no content. They’re probably the most Financially Hot things I’ve done all quarter.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because there’s content doing the rounds online: the wealthier you are, the weirder your offline life is. The cooler your hobbies, the richer you are. Rich people do the most random things: fencing, falconry, rare book collecting, birdwatching, competitive chess. And I’m noticing it online like it’s a lifestyle tip: pick up an obscure hobby…and you’ll become rich/cool/[insert IT girl adjective here]!

But in my opinion, this take is getting the causality completely backwards. The obscure hobby isn’t the cause of the wealth. The kind of person who cultivates a life full of obscure hobbies is also the kind of person who builds wealth, because the traits required to do both are the same.

So this issue is about how to become that person, but on purpose.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• the burden of monetisation

• the traits a weird hobby actually builds

• the links between unmonetised hobbies and wealth you didn’t realise

• how to craft a wonderfully weird offline life

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the burden of monetisation

Somewhere around 2019/2020, we somehow decided that every hobby needed a revenue stream. You don’t just like baking, you have a sourdough account. You don’t just run, you’re training for a marathon with a sponsorship and a full production crew.

The second you monetise something, it stops being a hobby. It becomes a job. Labour. Something you could potentially resent one day. I know this, because it’s happened to me multiple times. As soon as I put too many rules and regulations around something, friction enters the chat.

There’s actual research on this and it’s called the over-justification effect. When you give someone an external reward for something they already enjoyed intrinsically, their intrinsic motivation drops. It’s like taxing the joy out of it.

So the popular advice — monetise everything you love! — destroys the thing in you that actually builds wealth: your ability to do something consistently for no reason other than you like it. Which, tied back to our money, is the same ability required to invest money for 30 years and not touch it.

the traits a hobby actually builds

I think a lot of people get this wrong in the ‘get a hobby’ content I see online. A cool girl, weird, unmonetised hobby builds the exact psychological stack that wealthy people have. It has nothing to do with the specific hobby, but the doing of it which then rehearses these traits:

• Tolerance for slow reward. Learning Spanish is boring for 18 months before it’s fun. So is investing. So is building a brand. So is literally anything that compounds.

• Being okay with being bad, or stupid at first. I was terrible at padel. I keep going anyway. This is the same muscle as starting to invest with £50 when the internet is pressuring you to have a £100k portfolio by 30.

• Comfort in your own company. A hobby requires sitting with yourself. So does money. People who can’t be alone tend spend to escape.

• Process over outcome. You don’t hike to get to the top. You hike because the walk is the beautiful thing. This is the single most underrated financial skill.

the links between unmonetised hobbies and wealth

I took a long, hard look at my hobbies and why I think they’re the key for a life full of wealth. These are the actual mechanisms by which an unmonetised hobby makes you richer.

1. Energy arbitrage. This is the one I feel in my feelings the absolute most. My photography/videography, running, padel and language learning make me better at my actual job. I come back to the income-generating work with something to give. Burnt-out people make terrible financial decisions — there’s well-documented research on decision fatigue, and it affects everything from spending to investing to whether you negotiate a pay rise or not.

2. The anti-dopamine economy. We are drowning in short-form, fast-reward content. Your brain gets trained to expect everything now. Slow hobbies retrain the exact neural pathway that investing (and a financially disciplined life in general) requires. You cannot hold an index fund for 20 years if you can’t sit through a 10-minute walk, in my opinion.

3. Your social layer changes. In my case, my network could include hiking groups, run clubs, language exchanges, padel leagues. You meet interesting people without an ‘official’ transaction involved. Sociologist Mark Granovetter wrote a famous paper in 1973 called The Strength of Weak Ties — most career opportunities and life-altering introductions come not from close friends, but from acquaintances. Hobbies manufacture weak ties, but at scale, without effort, and with fun.

4. Lifestyle ceiling drops. When your joy comes from a 6am run or a £4 library book, your spending baseline naturally just drops. You’re able to keep more of what you spend, without trying.

5. Identity-first wealth. Morgan Housel’s whole argument in The Psychology of Money (a Financial Hot Girl staple) is that wealth is more about behaviour than smarts. A weird hobby is a signal — to you, and to everyone else — that you’re the kind of person who does things on their own terms. For you, and not anyone else. Financial confidence follows the same identity.

6. You stop copying. Hobbies pull you out of mimetic desire and more into yourself. When you’re obsessed with getting better at your own thing, you care less about what everyone else is buying, wearing, posting, therefore you spend less trying to ‘fit in’.

crafting a wonderfully weird offline life

I think you engineer a life with cool hobbies instead of trying to find a perfectly-cool-enough one to pick up. Here’s how I think about it:

Pick one hobby you’re genuinely curious about and protect it from monetisation. For me it’s photography and padel. I don’t really post the photos I love most (if I do, it’s as a personal note). If you need to, make it literally impossible to monetise. Pick pottery, not pottery-TikTok.

Pick one physical hobby that gets you outside. Running, hiking, padel, climbing, anything. This is your energy generator. You’re doing it because it’s the input to everything else — it helps you become a better version of you.

Pick one cognitive hobby that has a slow curve. Language learning, chess, a musical instrument, learning to cook properly. Something where you have to measure progress in years, not weeks. This is where you rehearse patience, discipline and delayed gratification (two key skills of financial literacy).

Stop explaining what you’re doing to other people! The second you start narrating a hobby to everyone, you’ve started doing it as a performance and it’s not for yourself anymore. Shut up and just do it (please).

Separate the money work from the soul work. My business makes money. My hobbies make me. I need me to make money. Conflating the two is how most creators burn out and most professionals lose themselves, speaking from experience.

The Financial Hot Girl will not read this and start googling ‘weird but cool hobbies’. Take note!

Follow your natural curiosity. Calendarise a Daily Stupid Hour and learn a new skill. Craft a life where you become the kind of person who has a few, protected, slightly strange things you do just because they’re yours, and they’re fun.

Ironically, you can’t learn this as a wealth strategy and there probably isn’t a course on it. You kind of just have to be interested enough to do it yourself.

Until next week,

— Dev xo

Whenever I find myself in the swing of good habits, 1% improvements and a slow march towards my goals, at some point in the journey I always seem to encounter a big, steep wall. That wall is a rut. Where my motivation is slow and I am very dangerously on the brink of not caring anymore, sometimes not caring enough to stop my progress altogether.

I usually find myself facing this wall when it comes to wellness or physical habits, but I think the most problematic time to encounter it is when you’ve got a financial habit that’s starting to seem a little boring.

So while the habits are there, but it’s the intention that might not be. And I’ve found that the longer you ignore it, the more likely you are to start unravelling the things that are actually working — or as we love to know it — self-sabotaging.

So here’s 3 steps I do when I catch myself falling into a financial rut.

Step 1: Diagnose what kind of rut you’re in (there’s 3)

Not all flatness toward a goal feels the same, and the cause matters because the fix is therefore different. Here are the three versions I’ve identified within myself, that you likely face as well — so be honest about which one fits your situation right now.

Read more

A few years ago, I noticed that in certain situations, my stomach twisted into a knot so tight that I woke up not being able to breathe properly. This twisting happened so subconsciously that I didn’t even realise I was doing it, and for years, assumed that in these certain situations, I must have been eating or drinking something to cause breathing issues.

It was only after reading The Body Keeps The Score that I learned how our bodies protect us from perceived trauma, even if we don’t even realise what that trauma is. Avoidance, procrastination, the inability to just open an app or make a decision. A lot of that is our nervous system doing its job, which is shielding us from something it decided was dangerous.

The question is: what happens when the thing it’s shielding you from is your own finances?

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• the gym story I don’t talk about enough (i think)

• the hormone that’s sabotaging your financial decisions

• 3 solutions for 3 specific physical reactions

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the gym story I don’t talk about enough (i think)

So how did I actually get my finances under control? The gym. Stay with me.

When I got consistent in the gym, something permanently changed in how I related to myself. I started to become someone who did the thing she said she was going to do, i.e., I built self-trust.

Self-trust is the foundation of financial behaviour. Even though I talk a lot about skills and knowledge, at the bottom of the Financial-Hot-Girl pyramid sits self-trust.

Because when you don’t trust yourself to follow through, you avoid setting up the direct debit because part of you doesn’t believe you’ll leave the money there. You avoid looking at your spending because you don’t trust yourself to do anything useful with what you see. You push the pension off again because “future you” feels like a stranger you don’t owe much to yet.

And a lack of self-trust makes you financially anxious. Which, as it turns out, is a hormone problem as much as a money problem.

The gym gave me evidence that I could be consistent. That when I said I was going to do something, I did it. And that evidence (and resulting discipline) transferred. Physical discipline didn’t create the financial discipline, it created the self-trust that made financial discipline actually possible.

What self-trust actually does is give you the belief that even if you open your banking app and it’s a mess, you can get yourself out of it. And when you have that, your finances stop being a museum of failures. They’re just situations you’re capable of handling.

the hormone that’s sabotaging your financial decisions

Now, when you’re financially anxious (i.e. not just stressed about a specific bill, but living in low-grade, background dread about money) your body is producing cortisol. The stress hormone designed to help our ancestors outrun life-endangering threats, which is now running on a loop because your overdraft is £200 and payday is nine days away.

Cortisol is useful in short bursts, but when it’s elevated consistently (because maybe you’ve been avoiding a bank letter for three weeks) it starts doing things you’d never connect directly to your money.

It disrupts sleep, narrows your ability to concentrate, and makes your brain default to short-term thinking over long-term planning. It suppresses the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain responsible for rational decision-making, planning ahead, and impulse control.

When you’re financially stressed, your brain is physically less capable of calm, future-oriented thinking that good financial decisions actually require.

And all of this is to say that your nervous system is likely in survival mode. And survival mode does not care about your savings or investments, it’s just trying to get you to tomorrow.

So this becomes the loop that too many of us are familiar with:

Money feels tight → cortisol rises → sleep suffers → energy drops → you avoid the financial admin → nothing improves → money still feels tight → cortisol stays elevated

And studies show that when people are in a state of financial stress, their cognitive bandwidth narrows a lot1. They get better at managing immediate crises and worse at planning anything beyond the next few days, because their brain is rationing its resources.

So if you’re chronically financially anxious, advice like “just start a budget” or “just start investing” is a bit like asking someone to write a thoughtful email while someone is shouting in their ear.

But it’s also why things that feel less like a threat produce less cortisol. And less cortisol means your brain can actually make the decisions it needs to make.

Your nervous system decided that your finances were dangerous, for a seemingly legitimate reason in your past. The way through this ‘danger’ is rebuilding the physical self-trust that makes facing your finances feel survivable.

3 solutions for 3 specific physical reactions

While a physical habit changes your baseline over time through self-trust, here are solutions to manage how cortisol shows up for you right now.

The heart-in-mouth feeling. When you think about everything you haven’t done yet. That feeling is likely shame, and your nervous system has flagged it as a threat.

What to do:

• Don’t open five tabs and try to fix everything at once! Your cortisol is high and your decision-making is impaired

• Write down one specific thing, (NOT a to-do list, just one thing please). “Log into my pension this Sunday at 11am.” That’s it

• The act of writing it externalises the threat, your brain can stop holding it (yay, science)

• Set a calendar reminder for this task before you close this email

Heat in your face. Like when a card declines or when a friend texts about a trip and you have to do the maths while looking relaxed. Your threat response is activating in a social context, which makes it ten times worse because there’s usually an audience.

What to do:

• Two sharp inhales through your nose, one long slow exhale through your mouth; this activates your parasympathetic nervous system and physically slows your heart rate within seconds

• Repeat twice, then respond

What to do about the pattern:

• The heat keeps coming back because the underlying situation hasn’t been addressed

• Identify the one financial conversation or task producing the most dread

• Give it a date in your calendar (not today if you’re still reacting in this way, but a real, specific date)

Your racing heart. Especially if you have any self-employed, freelance, or side income, taxes or deadlines can do this. The dread that you’ve underpaid, haven’t tracked properly, or that a letter is coming you won’t know how to handle. This is almost entirely driven by uncertainty.

What to do today:

• Open a new note on your phone

• Write down your best estimate of what you earned

• Multiply it by 0.2 (a rough 20% liability estimate to start)

• Write that number down

That number is less terrifying than the blank space your brain is currently filling with catastrophe. A plan requires a number, and you cannot make a plan for a feeling.

Financial literacy is built on a nervous system that's regulated enough to use information2. But financial literacy is also built on a version of yourself that you actually trust. Those two things are very connected.

Start with your body, whether that's the breathing technique above or a physical habit that gives you evidence you show up for yourself. Everything else gets easier from there.

Until next week,

— Dev xo