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

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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

Read more

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

A form of words used as magical charm. Which means every thought you repeat to yourself is a charm you’re casting on what will eventually be your confidence, your ambition, and ultimately your money.

So, when I was telling myself things like:

“I’m so disorganised.” “I’m just not an exercise person.” “I’m just not someone who’s good with money.”

I was quite literally charming myself into believing them. Said enough times, words, or spells, stop being just opinions and become your actual identity. And once something is your identity, you don’t question it. You just organise your whole financial-and-otherwise life around it. It shapes what you believe you’re capable of, and influences every single decision you make.

So today, let’s dispel (geddit) spells, where they came from, and what to do instead.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• the spell you’ve been casting on yourself without realising

• where the spells actually came from (it’s not your fault)

• the 5 minute exercise that changes everything

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The spell you’ve been casting on yourself without realising

You might already know your financial season. You might know you’re in an Earn season, that your income is the constraint, and that negotiating your salary or pushing for more is exactly the move you should be making right now. Yet, somehow, you’re not doing it.

Because somewhere underneath the mountain of knowledge of what you need to do, there’s a lingering belief: “I’m not really the kind of person who pushes back, who asks for more, or who negotiates.”

That belief (far more than any missing information or skill) is what tends to actually be in the way. It’s why the salary conversation didn’t happen, and two years later, you’re wondering why you’re on the same pay.

And it shows up differently for everyone. Maybe yours is I’ve always been a bit of a pushover at work. Maybe it’s I wouldn’t even know how to start that conversation with my manager. Maybe it’s I don’t want to seem difficult (which by the way, is a spell dressed up as professionalism).

It happens physically and mentally, too

And it’s not just finance where this happens. So many people have spent years convinced that being physically active just isn’t them, that being the kind of person who runs, or walks every day, or genuinely enjoys moving their body, is a personality type they weren’t born with. I thought this too, being someone who wasn’t sporty as a kid.

Even mentally, some people have the belief that therapy isn’t really for them. Or that they’re not someone who journals, or that needing quiet time is somehow indulgent. These aren’t personality traits people were born with or without. They’re just identities (formerly, word spells) that got built up over time, usually without anyone consciously choosing them.

With money, it works the same way. You act in ways that confirm the belief. You accidentally, but on purpose sidestep the financial decisions that would contradict it: the negotiation, the uncomfortable conversation, the bold move your season is actually calling for. And you stay exactly where you are, because somewhere, you’ve already decided that you won’t do what you need to do.

Where spells actually came from (and why they were never really yours)

The good news about these beliefs is that you probably just absorbed them when you were younger, without realising it (and that absorption is totally undoable).

When I was growing up I didn’t see people who looked like me or came from where I came from negotiating, pushing back, or taking up that kind of space. So without really thinking about it, I concluded that world probably wasn’t for me. It was just as the most obvious interpretation of the evidence available to me at the time.

So whether the women around you growing up never asked for more, or accepted what they were given, or from what went unsaid in your household, or from years of watching financial confidence look like a very specific type of person, and concluding, without ever thinking about it consciously, that you probably weren’t them…

Until you question it, your behaviour will keep confirming these thoughts — it’s like a vicious cycle. Because that’s what identities do, they run in the background, shaping every decision, without you ever having to consciously choose them. It’s actually really efficient if you think about it.

The 5 minute exercise that changes everything

Financially glowing up = removing spells from your mind. And the financial glow-up you’re looking for starts with a decision. Just like mine did.

You need to know which spell you’re actually running, so here’s what I want you to do right now.

And a really important reminder is that you don’t need to earn this decision first. You just decide you are, and then you act from that identity before it fully feels true. I.e., sloppy action.

Eventually you’ll realise that your spells changed. They didn’t break or stop working, because words are always spells.

You just changed those words.

Until next week,

— Dev xo

If you read Issue 87, you’ll know that the ambition trap a lot of us fall into is a direction problem. Absolutely none of us can say we don’t put effort in.

So this week we’re doing the actual, specific work: identifying your season, finding the one priority that lives inside it, and building the plan that makes Q2 the quarter you actually look back on and feel proud of. The 1-1-13 method.

Work through this as you read, and don’t forget to use the contents table that appears on the left hand side of the browser as you work through this issue.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

1. The One Thing

2. Why you’re probably in one season, not two

3. Finding your one priority inside your season

4. If you’re in Earn

5. If you’re in Keep

6. If you’re in Grow

7. Making this something you will actually do

The one thing

Before we get into it, I want to introduce a concept that changed how I think about progress entirely, and it comes from a book called The ONE Thing by Gary Keller.

The central idea is that extraordinary results come from narrowing your focus to the single most important thing, and giving it everything before you give anything else anything at all. Keller calls it the focusing question:

What’s the one thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?

It sounds simple, but it’s also one of the hardest things to do — especially if you’re the kind of person who is ambitious about everything simultaneously, which, if you’re reading this, you probably are.

The reason it’s hard is that it’s modern life and modern financial advice, that constantly pulls you in multiple directions at once. Save more. Invest now. Earn more. Pay off debt. Build an emergency fund. Start a side hustle. Contribute to your pension. All of it is technically correct advice. None of it tells you what to do first, which means most people try to do all of it at a mediocre level rather than one thing exceptionally well.

This is exactly why I built the Earn, Keep, Grow framework the way I did, as a seasonal lens that tells you where your one thing lives right now. The seasons exist to give the focusing question a financial answer.

So before you set a single Q2 goal, the work is finding that answer.

Read more

In the last few weeks, I’ve been obsessing over South American history. The fall of the Aztecs and the Incan Empire, and how cities were constructed larger than any in Europe at the time.

Looking over Machu Picchu, which the Incas built at 2,400 metres above sea level, our guide explained that the stone was so precisely cut the walls have survived centuries of earthquakes without mortar. And the only thing I was thinking about was how much attention they must have pored over cutting that stone.

How rarely do we hone in on our own ambitions with that same energy? We have more tools, more information, more access than any generation before us. And most of us are spreading it across five directions at once, making marginal progress on all of them, wondering why nothing quite compounds into something we're proud of.

This issue is about fixing that, specifically, for the next 13 weeks.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• The ambition trap we all fall into

• What your financial season is actually telling you to do right now

• Set one Q2 priority that actually compounds

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The ambition trap we all fall into

Imagine you signed up for a race without knowing the distance. You’re fit, you show up every single day, you’re one of the most committed people there.

But because nobody told you whether you’re running a 5k or a marathon, you can’t pace yourself properly. You burn out at kilometre three of what turns out to be twenty-six, or you hold back the entire way through something you could have won. The effort was never the problem. It’s that the direction just wasn’t specific enough to make the effort actually count.

This is what ambition without a financial plan is. Someone who genuinely wants to build wealth, knows the principles inside out, but spreads her energy across five goals simultaneously: save more, invest more, earn more, sort out the pension, start the side hustle…and makes marginal progress on all of them because none are specific enough to act on daily. The drive is completely real, but it’s not pointed at anything narrow enough to compound.

And this tends to show up most obviously at the start of Q2, because January energy has admittedly worn off, summer isn’t quite here yet, and the gap between where you are and where you want to be is suddenly staring you in the face.

It’s time for a fix: a plan narrow enough to actually follow.

What your financial season is actually telling you to do right now

You’ll know that the Earn, Keep, Grow framework exists precisely for this moment. To give you direction and a reason to focus.

The most common Q2 mistake is trying to optimise across all three seasons at once. Investing aggressively while also trying to grow income while also trying to tighten spending…it sounds thorough, and it feels productive, but it’s the financial equivalent of trying to train for a sprint, a marathon and a powerlifting competition simultaneously. You will fail at all three despite putting in effort.

So before you set a single Q2 goal, the question to answer is this: what is my actual season right now, and am I giving it 100%?

Remember, if your income is the constraint, you’re in Earn. Your Q2 priority lives there. Negotiation, new income experiments, up-skilling with ROI in mind. Investing will become the priority later, and having a growth mindset can help you peacefully accept that.

If your income is sufficient but your savings don’t reflect that, or if you know you leak money but can’t quite put your finger on where, you’re in Keep. Your Q2 priority is control: one system that stops the leak, repeated until it’s automatic.

If you have surplus, a buffer, and your day-to-day financial decisions aren’t draining your energy, you’re in Grow. Your Q2 priority is putting that surplus to work, consistently, without overthinking the timing.

Remember: 1 season, 1 priority, and 13 weeks.

Set one Q2 priority that actually compounds

Once you know your season, the plan builds itself — but only if you make it specific enough to fail! A goal you can’t fail is a goal you can’t track, and a goal you can’t track is just a feeling.

Your Q2 financial priority needs three things: a number, a date, and a first action that happens this week (i.e. not next week).

If you’re in Earn: I will have a salary negotiation conversation with my manager by 30th April, and I’m sending the email to request the meeting by Wednesday.

If you’re in Keep: I will have my payday system fully automated by 15th April, and I’m setting up the standing orders on payday this month.

If you’re in Grow: I will increase my monthly investment contribution by £/$X from May’s pay, and I’m logging into my account today to set it up.

The specificity is about removing the decision from your future self, who I guarantee will be busier, more tired, and more easily distracted than the version of you reading this right now. You Decide Once, here, and the system does the rest.

This is what it means to plan like a CFO. No complicated spreadsheets or a five year projections in sight, but a clear season, one priority, and a first action that makes the rest truly inevitable.

Until next week,

— Dev xo

P.S. in this week’s Close Friend’s issue, we’re building the full Q2 financial plan together — your season, your priority, your system, and the exact structure to make sure Q3 You is looking back at this quarter feeling like she absolutely nailed it. Upgrade to access.

At 24, I had a negative net worth. Consumer debt and absolutely zero interest in looking at my finances properly, because every time I did, it just made me feel worse.

I’m 30 now. My net worth is £124k. My salary never went over £50k. I didn’t go viral, I didn’t build a business overnight, I never lived with my parents and I didn’t have anyone hand me a leg up financially.

What I did have was about five years of financial literacy, applied consistently, in roughly the right order. That’s the whole story.

I know that sounds anticlimactic, but I think that’s the point — because the version of wealth-building that gets talked about online is usually loud, dramatic, fast and involves someone shouting about a random stock. The version that actually works is so boring and slow you doubt it even works. And it starts with habits so basic they feel almost too simple to bother with.

So in this issue, I’m sharing the 10 habits that moved the needle for me since buying my first ever personal finance book.

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1. Pick a personal finance book. One book. And read it.

Not buy one. Not add five to your wishlist. Pick just one personal finance book and commit to finishing it before the end of April.

One book, read properly, will do more for you than a year of scrolling financial content. I started with a very random booked I plucked off the shelf in a bookshop in India while visiting my Nani. Now, start with The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel if you haven't already—it's the one I recommend to literally everyone.

Reading a book for me, was the first domino that started my personal finance journey. I didn’t do anything but read a book to start. It’s (largely) free, and all you need is time.

2. The Financial Hot Girl’s Money Minutes

Ten minutes, once a week, same day, same time. You open your banking app, you look at your transactions, you check your balances. That’s it. No big decisions and no guilt.

The moment I started acknowledging what I was doing with my money every week, something in me just changed. I was more aware of my financial habits, which naturally made me more inclined to stop the avoidance-related ‘bad’ ones. The simple act of looking gave me a lot of financial awareness which then gave me a lot of control.

Financial avoidance makes everything feel bigger and scarier than it actually is. Money Minutes is how you break that cycle. Awareness first, everything else after.

3. The Leverage List

Before leaving corporate, I worked part-time for a few months to ‘trial’ creator life. In these months, I did a lot of work for free because I didn’t ‘feel’ qualified enough to charge appropriately. I carried these bad habits into the first year of working as a content creator full-time, and only recently raised my rates to match my skillset. I was knowingly under-leveraged for over a year, and it cost me a lot of money.

So, I want you to open a note on your phone right now and write down every single thing you could be monetising, negotiating, or leveraging that you currently aren’t.

Things like:

• Skills you’re undercharging for

• A salary you haven’t pushed in two years

• A service you’re doing for free out of habit

• A rate you quoted in 2024 and never updated

Review it every Monday, and action one thing per week. The Leverage List is how you stop leaving money on the table accidentally (but purposefully, out of fear).

4. Calculate your actual net worth

Every time I do this, I’m reminded of how hard I’ve worked to go from 0 to £124k and I feel so, so empowered to keep going. Calculating your net worth — outside of the financial benefits — is a life hack to simply feeling good enough to start and continue your financial literacy journey.

Remember that your net worth is assets minus liabilities. Every savings account, every investment, every debt, and the equity in your property if you own one. I’d been leaving my flat out of my calculation for years, which meant I was significantly underestimating where I actually was.

Do it once, write it down, update it at the end of every quarter. It takes about 20 minutes and it’s one of the most clarifying and motivating things you can do for your financial confidence.

5. Set one sinking fund this quarter

Sinking funds were a big part of my personal money management system, and still are. Travelling Latin America right now was the reason I knew exactly where my savings where going, and when I’d say no to things that didn’t fit the budget.

Pick one future expense — a holiday, a course, a big birthday, a new laptop — and work out exactly how much you need to set aside each month to cover it by the time it arrives. Then automate that transfer for payday and leave it alone.

This is how you stop big expenses feeling like financial emergencies. You just pre-decide your financial commitment, and therefore every decision around it. One sinking fund, starting this month.

6. The Payday Ritual

As soon as you get paid, every single month, you do the same five things in the same order. Move your savings and investments (however, these should ideally be automated). Top up your sinking funds. Check your investments are running. Review last month’s spending. Set your financial intention for this month.

A bonus tip I did for years: I’d make a drink and put on a nice playlist to set the mood. The drink was always something I’d been craving that I wouldn’t let myself have during the month, as it was only for the payday ritual. (Usually, an over-the-top matcha recipe from TikTok.)

These are five steps that I’ve prescribed here once, and then you just repeat them. Forever. This is what it means to manage money with systems instead of willpower — you’re not making new decisions every month, you’re just executing a routine you already built.

7. Look at your pension

At 24, I nearly opted out of mine. At the time, pension contributions felt like money disappearing into something I wouldn’t see for decades, and when you’re trying to get out of your overdraft… that’s a hard sell. It was one of the worst financial decisions I almost made.

If you’re employed [in the UK], your employer is legally required to contribute to your pension on top of your salary. Opting out means you’re handing back part of your compensation package. You’re essentially taking a pay cut and not noticing.

This quarter, log in to your pension provider, find out how much is in there, check what you and your employer are contributing, and check whether you can increase your contribution even slightly. You can also change where your pension is invested, because your pension provider will decide this on your behalf.

The gender pension gap in the UK is nearly 35%. A huge part of that is women disengaging from their pensions early. This step is non-negotiable!

8. Open (or actually use) your ISA

The new tax year is starting next week, which means your £20,000 ISA allowance1 will reset. Every pound you invest inside an ISA grows completely tax-free. Even £25 a month counts, and is exactly the amount I started with at 24. If you don’t have one open yet, this week is the week.

9. The 90 Day Number

Pick one financial goal and give it a specific number and a specific deadline. Maybe something like: I will have £1,500 in my holiday fund by June 30th. Or: I will have made three pitches for higher-paid work by May 31st.

The very first goal I set was clearing my credit card debt by Summer 2021. I actually got there early!

Vague goals will always produce vague results. The 90 Day Number gives you something concrete to work backwards from — and something concrete to actually celebrate when you hit it, because it’s easier to know you actually have.

10. Tell someone your goal

A friend, a partner, a group chat, even a reply to this email! The goals I’ve told people about continuously are the goals I’ve achieved. Take 75 hard for example. I’m not taking that data lightly, because accountability compounds just like interest does.

There is a line between some goals and others for evil eye though, and that’s a science I haven’t quite worked out yet. For now, share your top-line financial goal for the next quarter in a safe space and reap the accountability that follows.

That’s your Q2 sorted. The hard part, as always, is actually doing it.

Pick the one step on this list that you’ve been putting off the longest and start there. The one that made you slightly uncomfortable when you read it, or the one you know in your gut you’re most likely to put off.

And if you found this useful, forward it to someone who needs it. This is exactly the kind of thing I wish someone had handed me at 24.

Until next week,

— Dev xo

I watched Louise Theroux’s ‘Inside the Manosphere’ and in it, a man I’ve never seen before takes Theroux up to an apartment rooftop and gestures across the skyline. He asks Louis, “Name one thing here a woman has ever made.”

Meanwhile, this man’s partner Kristen, is at home. She left her career, she’s raising his children, she’s also pregnant with his third. And as Theroux eventually discovers, they are not legally married — because of, as the man puts it, “the financial side.”

Kristen’s response when asked if that worries her is: “It does seem more risky for me, but I don’t feel like I’m at risk.”

And almost like I myself were in a movie, everything sort of fell into place. I realised that the manosphere, the rise of the tradwife, and the problems with female ambition all had one thing in common. And it’s something we should all be more scared of than being single.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• What the manosphere actually is

• What the tradwife actually is

• So what’s the bottom line, and why is this important?

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What the manosphere actually is

Let’s be clear on one thing: the patriarchy benefits a very small number of men enormously, and sells the rest of them the idea that women are the reason why they're losing — not the patriarchy itself.

The manosphere has built an entire ideology around this — the idea that women are a financial risk to men. That marriage is a trap. That feminism has made women undateable.

This is the thing that gets young men riled up, keeps them subscribed to expensive pyramid schemes, and makes a very small number of men at the top of a particular pyramid spectacularly wealthy.

But we know by now that the real group of people who are at risk here are women, and the data backs that up.

• Wives are more likely to be in a vulnerable financial position at the point of divorce1

• Among women in paid work, mothers were far more likely than working women without children to have a net monthly take-home pay of less than £1,0002

• For cohabitating couples, there is no automatic right for one partner to claim financial support from the other, particularly grim if one partner has taken time away from work to raise children, caretake in some way or support the household3

• Cohabiting couples are also not automatically entitled to pension rights, even after years together

Kristen [partner of the man in Theroux’ documentary] is the logical conclusion of an ideology that has convinced women that financial dependence is femininity, while at the exact same time — convincing men that legal commitment is a trap. Both of those ideas benefit the same person. And by the way it is not Kristen.

What the tradwife actually is

The manosphere is loud and very ugly about something, and the tradwife4 trend is soft and aesthetic about the same thing. That thing is a lack of independence as a woman. And the underlying message is also the same: your ambition is the problem, dependence is the solution, and the right man will take care of everything.

Hannah Neeleman, of Ballerina Farm — the most famous face of tradwife content — fought her way into Juilliard on scholarship and is co-CEO of a multi-million dollar brand. And, her husband is the son of a billionaire.

The version of tradwife that she shares (and that is being consumed by young women who do not have a billionaire father-in-law) is not obvious at all about the fact that her ‘femininity’ is propped up by an emergency fund likely 50x the amount of the average viewer’s lifetime earnings.

Online, you just see the linen aprons and the golden hour family photos and you’re expected to fill in the blanks. Femininity is not something that should cost you your future.

So what’s the bottom line, and why is this important?

Guess what! The bottom line is money. It’s always money.

And by money, I mean your own income, maintained and grown. Pension contributions in your name. An understanding of what you own, what you’re entitled to, and what you would be left with if everything changed tomorrow. And if you are in a relationship — married or not — a clear, honest conversation about how money works between you both, before it becomes a crisis.

The women most at risk financially are the ones who were told that settling down meant handing over their financial independence along with their heart. The Kristen’s of the world who stay in their own ‘lanes’, but without guardrails — without security. Those are two completely separate things. You can have both, or neither — but conflating them is where the real danger lives.

Physical, mental and financial independence is not a threat to your femininity, nor is it a threat to masculinity. It’s simply the protective mechanism from the very system that guides the manosphere to point at women (and immigrants) as the problem.

You should be far more scared of being financially exposed at 50 than of being unmarried at 30. One of those things is recoverable. The other, if you haven’t been building financial independence, really isn’t.

Finally, my parting words to you this week are: understand the system so you stop internalising it as personal failure. The manosphere, to me, is unequivocal evidence that the financial guilt women carry around is not theirs to carry. It is the result of structural and historical gaps built to disadvantage women, and they are not evidence of ‘bad decisions’, ‘being stupid’ or ‘not trying hard enough’.

If this resonated with you, please send it to someone who needs to read it. This is, and will be, my life’s work. Independence, especially with money, is the single greatest thing you can build as a woman.

— Dev, xo

One thing before we start! The conflicts I mention in this issue are real and still unfolding, and I want to be clear that I’m not treating them lightly. I don’t want to reduce them to a finance lesson. People are being affected in ways that go far beyond the cost of a flight. I just think you deserve to understand how these things connect to your actual life, and how you can use that knowledge to do better things with your money.

Happy Sunday financial hotties. As you know, I’m currently travelling in South America, and this week someone I met on the road said something to me that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

We were talking about travel plans and I mentioned I needed to book my flight home soon. They said: “you might want to do that soon, if the Iran situation escalates, oil prices will go up and your flight will get more expensive.”

It made me stop and think — if I hadn’t spent the last few years obsessing over money, would I have had any idea why flight prices went up? Probably not. And that matters, because when you don’t understand why your cost of living keeps creeping up or why your mortgage rate won’t drop, it just feels like the world is something that is constantly happening to you. You feel unlucky or worse, bad with money.

Thankfully, luck has no place here. All that’s missing is context. I call it the luck gap: the distance between feeling financially unlucky and actually just missing context — and closing it starts with understanding the chain: the sequence of events that connects something happening on the other side of the world to something you feel directly in your bank account.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• What the chain actually looks like

• How to close the luck gap

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What the chain actually looks like

Here are three examples of that chain in action right now.

Example 1: Your food shop

Right now, there is war with Iran. The Strait of Hormuz (a narrow waterway off the coast of Iran) is where roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes through every single day. Since the conflict began, that waterway has been effectively paralysed, and oil prices have surged to near $120 a barrel, the highest since 2022.

When oil gets more expensive, diesel gets more expensive. More expensive diesel means higher delivery costs for every product that needs to get from a farm or factory to your local Tesco. On top of that, fertiliser is made from natural gas — the price of which has also spiked — meaning it now costs farmers more to grow the food in the first place. Both of those costs end up on the shelves of supermarkets.

Energy prices are the thread that runs through the entire global food system, and straight into your basket during your Sunday food shop.

Example 2: Your subscriptions and lifestyle costs

When oil prices spike, inflation rises across the board. The things that cost businesses more — energy, transport, materials — get passed onto us. And subscription businesses are no exception. Your gym, your streaming services, your phone plan, all of these companies face higher operating costs during inflationary periods, and the way they protect their margins is by raising your monthly fee.

A £2 or £3 increase individually feels like nothing, but collectively they are a very real drain on your monthly budget that has nothing to do with your spending habits and everything to do with the macroeconomic environment we’re living in. But the false belief of thinking it’s you that’s the problem is why it’s important to understand where in the chain these financial changes happen.

This is also why inflationary periods are actually the best time to audit your subscriptions — not to cut everything, but to make sure you’re actively choosing what stays rather than passively letting price increases accumulate.

Example 3: Your rent

Rising rent is a structural problem in most places, that goes beyond any one conflict. But the macroeconomic environment absolutely makes it worse.

When oil prices spike, inflation goes up, and the Bank of England faces a choice about interest rates. Higher interest rates make it more expensive for landlords to hold mortgages on rental properties, and many of them pass that cost straight on to tenants through increased rent1.

So when your landlord puts your rent up and it feels completely disconnected from anything you’ve done...it often is. You didn’t cause it. But understanding why it’s happening means you can plan around it rather than just absorbing it and feeling stuck.

The average monthly rent in the UK is now £270 more than it was in 2020. That is not a coincidence. That is the downstream consequence of a pandemic, an energy crisis, a war in Ukraine, and interest rate decisions made in response to all of it. All of those things reached into your life and your bank account without asking.

A result of the chain, and not your luck.

How to close the luck gap

One thing I really didn’t want you to take away from this issue is that you need to obsess over geopolitics or economics in order to understand your money. There is a link, but you don’t need to be an expert at describing it.

I do, however, think there are 3 shifts that separate someone who feels at the mercy of their finances from one who feels like they’re playing a different game completely.

1. Start reading the news as a financial feed

Build your context! When something big is happening in the world, get into the habit of asking one question: where does energy touch this? Oil, gas, and food are the first dominoes in almost every cost-of-living shift. If you can spot the chain early, you make decisions ahead of the curve rather than reacting to the consequences.

2. Build a buffer that isn’t doing nothing

An emergency fund in a high-interest savings account at least keeps up with some of inflation while it sits there. It also acts like a shock absorber when there is volatility in our lives and in the world. Money sitting in a current account is losing value whenever inflation is running high.

3. Stop confusing ‘bad’ timing with ‘bad’ habits

This is the one I really want you to take away. If your cost of living has gone up, if your rent keeps increasing, if your subscriptions keep creeping — that is not a reflection of how good you are with money2. Knowing the difference between a structural problem you can fix and an external one you can only prepare for is one of the most underrated financial skills there is. And it starts with understanding the chain.

Your money is not separate from the world. It never was.

The Financial Hot Girl way of thinking about it is this: luck is just a word we use when we don’t understand the chain yet. The more you close that luck gap, the more context you have, the less your financial life will feel like something that just happens to you, and the more it will feel like something you’re actually ahead of.

That’s what financial confidence actually is, knowing enough to stop calling it luck.

See you next week,

— Dev xo

A note on accuracy: The oil price figures and Strait of Hormuz details are based on real reporting as of this week (March 2026). The Iran-US conflict is ongoing and the situation is developing, prices and timelines may shift by the time you read this.

This week I’m writing a short issue to you from the depths of the Peruvian desert. I have had minimal WiFi this week, and I haven’t had the broadband strength for my usual graphics, charts or diagrams… so you’re getting this issue straight from my journal and Apple Notes.

So while this issue is about nailing your foundations, I also want it to be a live demonstration of a Financial Hot Girl rule: show up anyway. Financial Hot Girl has been growing at a really exciting rate, and that’s all because I have been sloppily showing up even when I don’t have the motivation, the wifi or the branded graphics!

I have a commitment to you every Sunday, and nothing will get in the way of that. Sloppy action > perfect inaction. Every time! Now let’s get into it 📩

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• Your body always knows first

• Money loves this

• A practical Financial Hot Girl audit

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Your body always knows first

This week, my time of the month arrived 6 days early. My Whoop even picked up that my body temperature was slightly higher, and that I could be due early, but not 6 days early.

And this whole thing reminded me of how often and how easy it is to forget the basics. Over the last month, my sleep, stress or nutrition — or some combination of those things — must have been slightly off. My body knew it, but I didn’t.

And I was still there trying to optimise everything without realising that. I was trying to eat my protein, lift heavy, batch film content, furiously catch up on emails, forgetting that a 15 hour bus journey destroyed my sleep and I would likely therefore burn out and think I’m a terrible person.

And most of you reading this are doing exactly that: trying to optimise your finances on top of a truly chaotic life.

Money loves structure

I honestly think that where there is structure, there is money. And that’s what makes financial literacy a very non-linear journey, because you always have to check in on your structure. It’s not something that’s one and done, like a checkbox.

And when I say money, I also mean in a broader sense: income and wealth-generating behaviour.

Now, structure here isn’t being organised and Type A. What I mean is:

• Consistently sleeping well

• Making sure you’re not stressed all the time Lifting heavy 2-4x a week

• Drinking water throughout the day

• Getting sunlight

• Eating protein & fibre

I don’t want you to roll your eyes while you read this because it sounds like generic wellness advice. I know that when you do all of these things consistently, you feel on top of the world, for reasons other than a slight superiority complex…

Financial Hot Girl was born out of the fact that when I did these things consistently, my financial and entrepreneurial habits dramatically changed. I build the transferable discipline and courage to take risks that allowed me to transform my net worth and my body and my mind.

And science backs all of this up, which is all the more reason I urge you to focus on these things. When you are tired, stressed or low in self-esteem, your brain defaults to behaviour that is financially less favourable: impulse spending, disregarding the benefit of long-term investments, not being confident enough to ask for a raise, or simply not wanting to deal with money at all. I did these things, so I know they happen.

Layer this onto your financial season and you’re onto a winner: you can optimise your structure based on what season you’re in.

For example, if you’re leaning into your Earn season — I’d be ruthless about sleep and physical energy so you look and feel your best, and your self-esteem is at an all time high.

The only part that’s eye-roll worthy is that this list of things has to be done regularly, which is why they’re easy to forget and hard to be disciplined about. For example, walking and eating enough protein is a daily requirement rather than a weekly quota to average.

But this is exactly why the Financial Hot Girl always comes back to the boring foundations: financial literacy is built on top of them.

A Financial Hot Girl audit

I’ll be asking myself these questions this week as a reflection on my cycle changing. While I’m giving myself a little grace for being out of routine while abroad, remember to do the same depending on what you’re in the middle of as you read this. Do the same, and score yourself from 1-10 based on how often you do each thing.

• Do I sleep well most nights?

• Do I move my body most days?

• Do I have quiet thinking time?

• Do I scribble down my worries, thoughts or observations at least once a day?

• Do I know what exactly I earned last month?

• Do I know roughly what I spent last month?

• Do I drink at least 2 litres of water a day?

• Do I have protein and fibre with every meal?

• Do I avoid my phone first and last thing everyday?

Anywhere you’ve scored yourself a 6 or under is a guide on where to focus your energy for the rest of this month, and are also likely priorities for you in Q2.

Remember financial hotties, wealth starts with getting your life in order. Nailing the foundation that you can then build financial literacy and growth on. That way, the legacy you build for you and those around you lasts a long time, and you enjoy the process of building it.

— Dev xo

But if you read the being hot is a strategy issue, you already know where I stand on this. Your appearance is a lever when you’re a woman. And I’ve figured out that building a Personal Uniform is how you use that lever.

A Personal Uniform is not a capsule wardrobe or a mood board, however. It’s a very simple decision you make once, so you never have to make it again.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• the reason this is a financial habit is deeper than you think

• what most style advice gets wrong

• how I found my uniform by accident (and what it actually looks like)

• the 4 questions that will tell you what yours already is

• the one question to filter everything

• why this is one of the most underrated money decisions to make

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the reason this is a financial habit is deeper than you think

Every morning most of us stand in front of a full wardrobe trying to figure out what to wear, which is really just trying to figure out what version of ourselves to present that day, which is really just trying to answer the question: will this be acceptable? Am I acceptable? And that question takes up an enormous amount of energy before we’ve even left the house.

I know because I did it for years, and my main problem was the fact that what I wore was dictated by what I thought I was supposed to look like (and probably what was trending) — what I thought would make someone receive me well.

The self-hate tax, showing up in my wardrobe.

But when you dress for approval you never actually get anywhere. You buy the thing, you wear the thing, you’re still slightly uncomfortable, still checking yourself, still adjusting, still wondering if it’s right. Then something new comes out and the cycle restarts.

what most style advice completely misses

Referenced in issue #78, Michelle Obama spoke about playing a strategic game with your appearance until your reputation precedes you. Opting in to appearance as a strategy — not as an identity — means choosing the path of least resistance on your way to building real leverage.

You invest in looking the part so you can get in the room, and then from inside the room you build the thing that eventually makes your appearance irrelevant.

The Personal Uniform is how you make that investment without it swallowing your finances whole.

A personal uniform is 3 to 6 repeatable outfits you rotate for your top 3 main life arenas. You stop re-deciding what to wear, impulsively shopping, and you spend on fewer items with a much higher wear rate. You essentially compliment (and strengthen!) your identity by consistently wearing things that align with it.

When I’m wearing my uniform, I’m not thinking about my appearance at all. And that’s kinda the point. I put it on, I know it works, I walk in to my arena. I’m not half-listening to a conversation because part of my brain is still wondering if my top is sticking to my midsection too much. I can be present.

That is the lever working properly. You’ve done the appearance work. Now your energy is free for everything that actually matters.

how I found mine by accident (and what it actually looks like)

I did not sit down and design my Personal Uniform. It found me, in the most unglamorous way possible.

What I noticed, especially on the mornings I was running late or already stressed, was that I kept reaching for the same things. COS tailored trousers, a Skims tee, a tailored jacket or a blazer. That was literally it. That was what I kept going back to when I didn’t have the mental space to make a more considered decision.

The stressed, time-pressured version of me kept voting for the same outfit. And at some point I had to listen to that.

So I accepted it. I stopped treating it like a default I fell back on and started treating it as a decision I had already made: this is what I wear. I’m not going to keep entertaining other options that I never actually end up choosing!

Deciding Once is a core principle as a Financial Hot Girl. This is exactly what that looks like in practice — you make the decision once (properly!) and then you stop making it over and over again every morning for the rest of your life.

four questions that will tell you what your uniform already is

You probably already know more than you think. The uniform is usually already there — you’re just not calling it that yet.

1. Pay attention when you’re stressed or in a rush. The version of you that is running late doesn’t have the mental space to perform. She goes straight for what actually works. That outfit is information, so take note.

2. Ask what you adjust when you’re wearing it. If you spend the day pulling at something, covering something, checking something… that item is not your uniform. Your uniform is the stuff you put on and then completely forget about. You want to feel put together and then move on. That’s it.

3. Think about what rooms you’re actually in. My filming days look different to my gym days, which look different to my travel days. The uniform isn’t one outfit. It’s one decision per context — the top 3 places you dress for most weeks, aligned to your goals. A repeatable formula for each of the situations that make up your life.

4. Ignore what you think you should want. This is the hard one, so I want you to read it twice. There will be things in your wardrobe that you bought because they seemed like the kind of thing you were supposed to own, and they sit there barely worn because they’re just not you. The uniform only works if it’s actually yours. Dressing like the woman you think you should be is how you end up uncomfortable and 9 times out of 10, over-budget. Dressing like the woman you actually are is how the lever works.

the one question to filter everything

I talked about this in a recent reel. If something got ruined — genuinely, irreparably ruined — would you go out of your way to save it?

The things you would rescue without question are the things that actually belong in your uniform. The rest is aspirational spending that you haven’t quite earned yet. Things you bought hoping they’d change something about you. They didn’t, and they won’t (unless you prove the habit and do the work).

Your uniform is made of the things you would be in your feels about losing. Everything else is noise, and I learned this the hard way by decluttering 90% of my belongings last summer.

the financial decision hiding in your wardrobe

The Personal Uniform is a KEEP habit. It sits in the middle of the Earn, Keep, Grow framework because it’s fundamentally about spending less without opting out of the strategic game we need to play as women.

When you know your uniform, the shopping changes completely. You buy fewer things, but they’re the right things. Your cost per wear goes up because you actually wear what you own. The wardrobe anxiety disappears because you stop managing a wardrobe full of things that don’t quite work.

And the less obvious cost — the one I want you to really feel — is the energy cost of getting dressed in something that makes you not feel like yourself, and then carrying that into every room you walk into that day.

The fidgeting, the adjusting, the half-presence. That is a tax. It doesn’t show up in your bank statement but it shows up everywhere else.

See you next week,

—Dev xo