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

Happy Sunday, financial hotties. The biggest thing blocking most of us is not knowing how to move forward: staying stuck in that paralysed state of knowing all too much and doing all too little.

For whatever reason we may be stuck there, the most helpful antidote is a structure to uphold a good decision. Something that makes you feel less like you’re just picking a decision out of thin air and hoping for the best.

I remember all too well my first few years at corporate: I was earning very little, looking up at this metaphorical wall of milestones to come. Buying a house, getting married, and finally looking up what investing was. And the only thing I could think of was: “well how in the heck am I going to afford to do all of that on my measly £20,000 salary”.

The thing I didn’t quite realise back then was that life is very much seasonal, and I had only just entered my season to earn. That’s where the Earn, Keep, Grow© model comes in.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• What is Earn, Keep, Grow

• How to know your season

• The exact moves for each season

• The seasonal trap to avoid like the plague

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Financial literacy is seasonal

Financial literacy is very seasonal, and I know this because even since becoming financially literate, I have still made mistakes. And that’s because personal finance isn’t one size fits all: it’s possible that you can optimise too hard, play it safe for too long, or invest too early (yup).

That’s why I invented the Earn, Keep, Grow© model behind the Financial Hot Girl methodology. It helps you place yourself in a season, and understand that a decision made now doesn’t take away from a decision you can make later on. It allows you to understand fully the opportunity costs that may or may not be on the table, and the priorities to you and your life at any given time, based on your goals and ambitions.

Having and adopting a seasonal mentality to your finances then allows you to stop putting displaced pressure and/or responsibilities on yourself:

• Thinking you need to invest while you still have debt

• Over-optimising your spending when it’s time to start investing

• Earning more at the cost of future growth (risking burnout)

Without the ‘right timing’ mindset that a seasonal mentality gives you, financial literacy can feel full of friction (the wrong kind—in this year of friction-maxxing).

How to know your season

In my opinion, a core pre-requisite for determining your season is understanding your goals in life. Do you want to retire early? Start a business? Start a family? Because, you are only ever in one season at any given time. And that’s largely because of human psychology: you physically cannot give 100% to more than one focus at any given time. So while it might feel efficient to try and optimise two seasons at once, doing so sabotages any chance of success with both the seasons and the goals.

Given that you are always primarily in one season, here’s how to determine which is for you (at this moment). Think about these factors against your goals:

• Earn: your income is your main constraint. You feel stretched month to month, despite reeling in your spending. You can’t meaningfully save. You feel like you have to rely on overdrafts, credit or other buffers.

• Keep: your income is sufficient, but savings don’t reflect that. Earning your income doesn’t burn you out. You have lifestyle creep. You feel out of control. You know you leak money but you can’t quite put your finger on why.

• Grow: you have a surplus after expenses. You have a safety buffer. You’re not relying on debt. You know you can make your previous seasons work harder. You don’t leak money. All of your energy does not go to earning or keeping your money.

As a quick filter to understand what season you may be in, ask yourself these questions.

If my income doubled tomorrow, would my current problems disappear?
→ You’re in Earn.

If I managed what I already make better, would everything feel a bit less like throwing spaghetti at the wall?
→ You’re in Keep.

If I don’t invest now, will I regret wasted time?
→ You’re in Grow.

The exact moves for each season

꩜ Earn: your job is expansion.

Your only job here is to raise two things: your income floor and ceiling.

This means that you prioritise:

• Negotiating pay upwards

• Applying for better roles

• Up-skilling with ROI in mind

• Starting small income experiments

• Building high-value skills

And that you deprioritise:

• Aggressive investing

• Over-optimising expenses that make up <1-2% of your income (e.g. £20-£50 expenses on a £25,000 salary)

• Lifestyle upgrades that lock in fixed costs

In an Earn season, your energy goes into earning capacity and earning potential. P.S. for more on earning and building leverage:

꩜ Keep season: your job is control.

Your only job here is to stop the leaks and build stability with your own finances.

Things to prioritise:

• Tracking spending properly

• Building a 3–6 month buffer

• Paying off high-interest debt

• Automating savings

• Reducing fixed costs that suffocate you

• Spending less than you earn, repeatedly

What to deprioritise:

• Chasing more income for ego (it will end up leaking out)

• Jumping into complex investments

• Ignoring your numbers because it feels uncomfortable

Keep is self-respect in practice, because most of the Keep related behaviours revolve around intentional behaviour—and intentional behaviour revolves around a strong sense of self and discipline toward your goals.

꩜ Grow season: your job is leverage.

Your only job here is to turn surplus into assets.

Things to prioritise:

• Consistent investing

• Pension contributions

• Equity and ownership

• Reinvesting in scalable systems

• Playing long games

What to deprioritise:

• Hoarding cash out of fear

• Micromanaging tiny expenses

• Staying in Keep forever

Grow is where time becomes your partner.

The seasonal trap to avoid like the plague

Some of you reading this might see a seasonal mentality as a trap because you might look at a Grow season as one for status, or feel avoidant around the Earn season because of sunk cost or it feeling risky. You might also want to stay in Keep forever because control, naturally, feels very safe. These things happen when you don’t have a) goals and b) a financial identity.

Your identity and your goals come down to who you are at your core. For example, if you don’t really trust yourself, have no clear goals and lack confidence, you could end up trapped in Keep, never leveraging your money, or Earn, trying to burn out earning the most for no real reason.

I made this mistake myself. Before leaving my corporate job, I didn’t believe I could be an entrepreneur. So instead of fully committing to my Earn season and increasing my income or building runway intentionally, I focused on investing aggressively as a 9-5er trying to retire early. I was technically in a Grow season on paper. I had surplus, and I was investing. I was “doing the right things”. But I wasn’t building toward the life I actually wanted.

Had I been clearer on my identity and had more self-trust, I would have optimised my Earn season properly. I would have pushed harder on income and built a bigger runway to leave corporate earlier, instead of over-optimising Keep behaviours and quietly coasting into Grow while feeling deeply misaligned.

But what I’m here to remind you is that you don’t stay in one season forever, by definition of the fact it’s a season. I have moved back into my Earn season, to earn at a higher level, and I’ll move into Grow when the time is right, having had a successful Keep season a few years ago.

And that’s the beauty of financial seasons—you cycle through them. Earn creates surplus, Keep protects it and Grow multiplies it. Then if you want, you Earn again at a higher level and jump straight back to Grow.

The goal here is aligning yourself with a season and giving it 100%, knowing it will carry you through to the next.

It facilitates a) having the confidence to make decisions and b) actually following-through on those decisions, creating the financial momentum you need to actually hit your goals.

I hope this helped create a lightbulb moment for you in how you can frame your financial decisions this year—and let me know, what season do you think you’re in, and why?

See you next week,

— Dev xo

So while on the beach, I spent some time trying to critically challenge1 my why. And it revealed what pains me the most— to see, experience or be a woman who does not have optionality when it comes to being in relationships. A woman who stays because she has to, or shrinks because leaving would destabilise her, or who tolerates disrespect because rent is shared. That fear (more than a desire for luxury or status, for me) is what sits underneath my ambition.

It’s the reason a lot of us are—or should be—obsessed with money. Utterly and completely obsessed with acquiring and investing as much of it as possible. Money, used properly, buys leverage. It buys the ability to leave and choose yourself in any situation. Handbags and apartments are just the cherry on the cake. The real luxury is choice.

So today, we’re talking about the six financial behaviours ambitious women adopt when they are serious about building a life with options, because you’re simply too smart to not be obsessed with the money that buys them.

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Keep emergency funds private

An important distinction I want to make is here is privacy versus secrecy. Financially free women have money that is accessible to them, and them only. It is not mixed into a joint account, or dependent on someone else’s signatory (and definitely not a ‘we’ll figure it out together’ fund).

Liquidity is important in any circumstance, because it gives you power. If you can fund your own exit from a relationship or a job, you can negotiate any situation with confidence. You’ll probably tolerate less and make excuses less. You will certainly not feel trapped by logistics.

Maintain a financial identity

In Mexico, we met a couple celebrating their 50th anniversary. I asked them to share their best bit of relationship advice and they told me: “In any situation, you’re both in the boat together. It’s always ‘we’, never just ‘I’. It’s both your responsibilities to not sink the boat.”

It’s great advice, and I hold it close. But financially, for ambitious women, and as an ambitious woman myself, I do not dissolve into “we”. Even in a loving, stable relationship, certain things must be done in your own name:

• Having accounts

• Building credit

• Understand every asset and liability

• Know exactly what comes in and goes out

In relationships, dependence always starts subtly. Someone else handles a bill once or ‘sorts the investments’. It feels convenient at the time, especially if you’re busy and overwhelmed, but easily turns into vulnerability 10 years down the line.

Maintaining your own financial identity isn’t the same thing as doing it all yourself (and trapping yourself in masculine energy), it’s making sure you have an awareness over everything at the very minimum—that there is transparency over shared assets and liabilities.

Protect your earning potential relentlessly

One of our biggest owned financial assets as women is our ability to earn. Once this declines, whether through motherhood, caring responsibilities, burnout, etc—rebuilding is incredibly hard.

Staying aware of changes in the market, building skills that stabilise or increase your market value, keeping your network warm, maintaining any and all professional certifications and ensuring that your income is growing (or can grow) faster than inflation are key priorities when treating your career like an assets instead of simply ‘a job’.

Separate stability from safety

On a reality TV show called Selling Sunset, one of the realtors Chelsea Lazkani recently went through a public divorce. On one of the episodes, when ‘accused’ of having a generous spousal support payment, Lazkani admitted that her finances post-divorce were so tight that she now has a newfound appreciation for single mums. It’s a great example of the difference between stability and safety:

Stability = things that stay the same and are predictable. Think: shared rent, living costs or shared routines. What Lazkani had pre-divorce.

Safety = a sense of stability, but without routine. Leaving a situation in 30-60 days without financial panic or not going into debt to meet basic living costs. What Lazkani probably had to build, and keep building post divorce.2

Ambitious women should be asking themselves—despite their current stability, if their relationship ended tomorrow, would they be ok?

Understand unromantic, unsexy legal and financial structures

A lot of women in my life cohabitate with their partners. In the UK, it’s sometimes referred to as ‘a live-in partner’ or an ‘unmarried partner’. Did you know that there are things that cohabitation does and doesn’t protect?

Outside of that, there are also other structures to understand:

• Whose name is on what (accounts, bills, insurance)

• What joint ownership actually means

• What marriage legally changes

• What breaking-up or divorcing actually costs

Whilst romance is emotional and fun and cute, the legal structures that uphold it—like marriage and cohabitation—can severely impact our finances and honestly, are really easy to ignore. But not understanding them is a future financial liability that you’re signing up for.

Build a life you could afford alone

The least romantic yet most adult thing to do in life is to avoid building a life that 100% relies on two incomes, without over-indexing on hyper-independence.

Importantly though, not building a life that only works if someone else stays ≠ planning for a break-up. Nobody has a guarantee over how life will pan out. There is no genie with all the answers or your future written definitively in stars. Building a life you can afford alone is simply the smartest thing to do in a world that disadvantages women.

Before moving in with someone, before upgrading your life, before merging assets or co-signing anything, ask yourself:

If I had to afford this alone, could I, and would I actually want to?

Don’t get me wrong, building a bigger life together can be powerful. Two aligned incomes can materially impact how fast you build wealth, and a strategic partnership can be life changing.

The key difference here is ensuring your baseline survival costs are costs you can afford. I’m not encouraging you to try and afford everything alone, but to instead think strategically about how you inflate your costs with a partner in a way that traps you into needing them financially. The goal is to want to stay in a relationship, not to need to stay.

There is something very powerful in being a woman who understands both the emotions and the economics of a relationship, so be one. Be obsessed with money. You’re too smart not to be.

— Dev xo

For a long time, being a hot girl was something I really wanted to be. Growing up brown, always the ‘new kid’, and in a country my parents didn’t know how to navigate—all I wanted to be was the seemingly cool girl that everybody wanted to be friends with. In my early 20s, it was rebranded to the “hot girl”.

Which is why it’s ironic that the legacy I’m building now is Financial Hot Girl—I’ve never felt like the ‘hot girl’. But Financial Hot Girl is something I now identify with to my core.

At first glance, the word “hot” makes this space sound aesthetic, even frivolous (it’s partly why I hid it for so long). But being a Financial Hot Girl exists because the world changed. Long-term security became an individual responsibility. Health stopped being optional. Money stopped being something you could ignore.

You can look hot, act hot, live fully, enjoy beauty and confidence. But when you’re financially literate at the same time, you future-proof your life. You worry-proof it. You give it infrastructure. This is essential to understand after last week’s issue.

Being a hot girl isn’t good enough in 2026. Being a Financial Hot Girl is, and there are four main drivers why.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• The old hot girl couldn’t afford the future

• IQ, but make it attractive

• You can’t freelance your way out of financial literacy

• How independence raised the bar

• The new hot girl skill set

The old hot girl couldn’t afford the future

The original hot girl era was built on visibility, externally-validated confidence, desirability and consumption. It was underpinned by the 2015-2022 influencer culture that monetised on attention and aesthetics.

The old hot girl model required spending money to look like you had money. Or spending on your appearance purely for social acceptance or social advancement. Things like buying youth, lavish lifestyle upgrades and dated success-indicators.

That collapses in a high-inflation, high-rent, low-security economy—even the middle class have slowed down their consumption on ‘aspirational luxury’. Aspirational luxury lost its shine when stability became uncertain and the cost of maintaining an image started to compete with the cost of living a life.

It’s a mistake to boil this down to the old hot girl being shallow. She was just responding to the incentives of her time, but those incentives have now changed.

That’s where the Financial Hot Girl comes in.

IQ, but make it attractive

Cultural capital is changing from visual dominance to financial and cognitive competence. We are thirsty for the smarts. Be it because of our phone addictions or AI slop, we want more substance while we’re getting our daily walk in. We want better conversations, relationships and confidence in our ability to make decisions.

It’s the way we’re actually signalling intelligence—through taste, restraint and literacy. Through things like following intellectual creators and having niche hobbies. Knowledge carries social weight and these days, and it sure needs a back brace. Looking good used to open doors. Now, understanding things like systems, money, and trade-offs keeps them open.

Being financially literate reads as self-confident and hot in an increasing unstable world (see below). It’s only fitting that a Financial Hot Girl subs in.

Health is having the same rebrand as money

What happened with the hot girl aesthetic is also happening with health and nutrition. It’s being reframed as longevity. The ability to show up consistently for your own life.

Drinking is declining, protein and fibre are having a cultural moment, and people talk openly about blood sugar, gut health, sleep quality, and strength training now. Wellness has moved away from detoxes and towards routines that actually make daily life feel easier.

This mirrors the shift I’m seeing with money: people are less interested in the short-term gratification that leaves them depleted. Health has become infrastructural, and once you see it that way, the link between physical and financial literacy becomes more obvious. Both are about understanding inputs and outputs, and being proactive rather than reactive.

Just like roads or electricity, health determines how easy everything else is. Health as infrastructure means prioritising sleep over 3 hours of more ‘work’ so that you have the energy for 3 more optimised hours tomorrow. It means prioritising resistance training as a woman for long-term independence and regulated hormones.

A Financial Hot Girl cares about her health for the same reason she cares about her money. It gives her energy, independence, and options. It helps her enjoy the climb to to the view, and love her life all throughout her life.

You can’t freelance your way out of financial literacy

Work has also changed in ways that make financial literacy unavoidable.

With more Big Tech redundancies and the increasingly fragile stability of a 9-5 these days, portfolio careers, pivots, businesses and side-hustles are on the rise.

Which means across the UK and the US, freelance, creator and self-employed work are becoming more and more mainstream. That is, there are more people increasing or diversifying their income without knowing how to manage it, making financial literacy all the more important in embracing and enabling a multi-passionate, entrepreneurial career.

A Financial Hot Girl exists inside this reality. She is built for it. She understands that freedom without structure produces anxiety, and that structure without self-respect guarantees burning out.

How independence raised the bar

Women today have more formal access to financial autonomy than at any point in history. We earn our own incomes, manage accounts, invest and are expected to plan for our own futures. But at the same time, the structural gaps remain deeply embedded.

The gender pay gap persists. The gender pension gap is pretty damn significant. Women invest less than men and often start later. Women perform the majority of unpaid labour. Motherhood continues to shape earnings trajectories across decades. Women are more likely to be financially worse off after divorce—the divorce gap. How many gaps do we really need?!

These dynamics mean that not caring about your finances carries a higher cost than it once did, especially coupled with the fact that women can now earn and contribute to household earnings. The margin for error is narrower, and the responsibility is more individual.

And yet, a Financial Hot Girl still emerges from this context. She is not financially literate because it is simply trendy. She is financially literate because it gives her leverage. She knows that relying on goodwill, partnership, or stability without understanding the numbers beneath it is a very fragile position.

In an economy where women are still more exposed to downside risk, financial literacy becomes part of self-preservation. That awareness changes how competence is perceived. It changes what feels impressive or safe. Being Financially Hot, in this moment, is being grounded, financially intelligent, and prepared, because you care about yourself enough to be.

The new hot girl skill set

A Financial Hot Girl:

• Is high agency

• Understands her cash flow

• Respects her body and mind

• Plans for the future without martyrdom

• Treats financial literacy as self-respect

In a world that feels increasingly unstable, the hottest thing you can be is someone who knows how to take care of herself, financially, mentally, and physically, without apologising for it.

Tell me, financial hotties, what does being a Financial Hot Girl mean to you? Have you made any decisions that align with anything we’ve talked about here? I’d love to know if this identity shift aligns with you and inspires you as much as it’s inspired me.

—Dev xo

The unfortunate truth of it all is that no matter how credible you are, it will never neutralise the bias that exists in a culture that reduces women to their looks. So you either opt in and play the game, or opt out and get ignored. And in this issue, financial hotties—I want to talk about how you can opt in and invest in your appearance strategically without using it as an excuse to over-index and overspend on being hot.

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𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• The problem with turning success into a ‘look’

• When being hot becomes unpaid labour

• Leverage changes the rules of the game

• 3 ways to play the game without losing your money

There’s less than 24 hours left to uprgade your membership with the launch offer!

Here’s a summary of what launched to Close Friends last week.

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The problem with turning success into a ‘look’

What Michelle was talking about in institutional power shows up very differently online, but it’s the same mechanism at work in my opinion: how success is portrayed online. Specifically, the sometimes performative female founder aesthetic. It’s a conversation that’s been on my mind a lot, especially after watching this from Nana DelRey:

Nana talks about how founder content rewards the polished look. One look at a Pinterest search for ‘founder aesthetic’ proves it. Having visual order somehow proves your competence online, and messiness just isn’t shown, even though it’s there. And the comments were full of female entrepreneurs singing in validation—people want to see the messy. Even I have deleted drafts and binned ideas because I didn’t look good enough to film them.

The issue underlying what Nana pointed out is that algorithms reward a good look. It then starts to feel wrong to build while looking ‘messy’. A good look then turns into a prerequisite for success (or looking successful). That’s when I think that ‘looking hot’ gets mistaken for progress instead of being the tool that it really should be.

When being hot becomes unpaid labour

The salient thing here is the performance of it all. The performance—which inherently feels wrong because of how irrelevant your looks are to your worth—is necessary simply because of the infrastructure we live in. We [as women] are unfortunately building businesses in a world that ignores our competence until we’ve proved we look good enough, but equally not too good1.

There’s an added layer here for women of colour which often gets ignored in these conversations. Being “polished” or “professional” is still anchored to proximity to whiteness, whether that’s hair texture, skin colour, makeup, body type, or styling choices. Women of colour are often asked to spend more time, money, and energy to be read as hot, while simultaneously being penalised for appearing too visible or “trying too hard.”

Pretty privilege exists, but it is not evenly distributed, and neither is the margin for error. Strategic participation for women of colour often involves navigating a narrower path, where appearance can be used strategically without somehow erasing our identity. That tension makes leverage even more important, because the freedom to disengage from these expectations arrives later and at a higher cost for us.

Leverage changes the rules of the game

Like Michelle said in the Call Her Daddy episode, opting out doesn’t protect you from the system. Refusing to play the game is equal to playing a more difficult game. It’s a hard truth, and a frustrating one to accept. But you can’t dismantle the system without leveraging your way to the top, and this is where we make a crucial turning point: understanding how leverage plays into this.

Michelle spoke a lot about playing the game until you get to a point where your reputation precedes you. Opting in means choosing the path of least resistance: investing into your appearance as a strategy for growth, rather than an element of your identity.

Avni Barman speaks on it clearly here—you learn how the system works, play into it to your advantage, accumulate authority and selectively participate when the time is right. I didn’t understand any of this when I was early in my career, and it showed in how I tried to play both extremes.

Take my very first week in corporate as an example. I wore a full suit to the office because I was quite honestly excited to finally be working my dream big-girl job. I got laughed at by the male senior associates (note: they were also in suits). So in direct response to this reaction I toned it all the way down: jumpers and jeans everyday. I played both extremes and neither served me strategically.

The whole time, I was also straightening my naturally frizzy and curly hair to ‘keep it polished’. Avoiding no-makeup days because my hyperpigmentation can make me look tired on days I’m full of energy.

It’s a maze to navigate, but read the next section carefully and treat the game as a way to build leverage— this will free you when the time is right.

How to play the game without losing your money

As per the Financial Hot Girl motto, this is not a free pass to ramp up your maintenance routine costs in the name of entrepreneurial growth. This is a chance to review what spending will reduce friction in rooms you want access to.

Create a Personal Uniform™ and repeat it

Think about what ‘rooms’ you are in most often. In my life, it’s the gym, working at home, travelling, or remote meetings. What I’ve done is Decided Once (a FHG core principle) what 1-2 repeatable outfit formulas are for each room, and stopped thinking about what I’ll wear again.

• At home, on filming days I wear my Skims black tee, loose black trousers and cashmere socks.

• At the gym, I wear navy or black bottoms and one of my 2-in-1 bra tank tops. I also have gym specific socks meant for running/intense activity, and gym only trainers (old 9 year old trainers that have a flat sole for weightlifting).

• Remote meetings or travelling, I wear an oversized blazer, my Skims tee again and suit pants and either boots or trainers.

For me I’m put together, deciding less, and consistently signalling what I want to signal in less time.

Define what ‘Put Together’ feels like for you

Something I’ve really learned from my 20s is that confidence usually comes from only one or two details, no matter how high maintenance you think you are.

Think about your beauty (skin, hair, body) or styling routines and:

1. Identify the features which significantly impact how you feel

2. Build your routine around those only

3. Stop fixing things nobody notices

Some of my personal examples:

• Even skin instead of a full glam. I only apply makeup to areas of my face I consider ‘uneven’ and it’s cut my routine down by 15 minutes.

• Controlled hair over perfect styling. I will quickly tong my hair in 10 minutes over attempting to achieve the perfect hairstyle that equally doesn’t erase my identity. It’s enough for me to feel put together.

Spend only where it reduces friction

Spend only after you have assessed the above two things in your life. For me, I’ve made a huge impact in my appearance and my spending by cutting routines to core products and only replacing things that work for me. I no longer purchase trends, ‘steps’ in a routine I don’t maintain, or brand upgrades that are superficial.

If it saves you time and energy, it’s entitled to be spent on. Remember that.

Use your appearance to reduce the resistance to getting what you want, while building that leverage financial hotties. Then, you can choose to do whatever the hell you want after, including burning down the system itself…

—Dev xo

You already know what you should be doing with your money, your time, your health, and your life. You have read the books, listened to the podcasts, saved the articles, and nodded along to ideas that make complete sense in theory. And yet, when it comes to actually doing the thing, you stall.

Over the years, I realised that consuming more content was never going to fix that gap. What helped was changing how I consumed it. I stopped treating books, podcasts, and essays as things to get through, and started treating them as tools to make decisions with.

This index is the result of that. It is not everything I have ever liked or found interesting. It is a short list of media I return to when I feel stuck, avoidant, overwhelmed, or behind. Each one earns its place because it has changed how I behave, and every time I re-consume it, I do things differently.

You do not need to consume all of these. You do not need to consume them in order. You do not need to finish any of them.

You only need one of them to create movement.

In this issue:

• How to use this index

• Books (top 5 FHG recommendations)

• Podcasts

• Long-form articles

• 8 AI prompts to turn media consumption into behaviour change

How to use this index

This index is something to return to when you feel stuck, so don’t try to treat it like a list to work through. It has taken me years to find these books and articles, let them create lightbulb moments for me, and then change my behaviour. I’ll also keep updating this index when I find things worthy of being revisited.

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The reason I like to write about and share these learnings is because a) I am incredibly curious about building businesses, email and personal branding and b) I want you to learn from my mistakes and my wins. It’s the only way to ensure that you—as the readers—are able to grow, expand your income, and build a world we’re all proud to be in. The more I can do to help shape that, the better I can sleep at night 🫶

In this issue:

• How I gained 25,000 emails

• I had an email list, but not an email system

• Why I deleted 25,000 people

• How I secretly didn’t (?) delete 25,000 people

• The 3 exact steps I’d repeat if I could go back

• What I’ll keep doing to hit my goals

In March last year, I proudly announced that I was all in on Financial Hot Girl, after years of hiding it. And after years of collecting emails (around 25,000) I burned it all down to start from scratch.

And this is not to brag. I’m simply trying to emphasise what a colossal lack of direction can do when it comes to an effective email strategy, and why it led to me burning it all down to start from 0.

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Before we get into this, a reminder that the Close Friend’s launch offer ends in 7 days. If you’ve been thinking about joining, this is your window.

Happy Sunday financial hotties. Last week, I shared this video on my very draft thoughts on ‘going analog’, and why it’s giving me the ick.

Analog and being offline is being framed as the antidote to burnout, social media fatigue, hustle culture, and generally being digitally overstimulated. And I do get it. We’re living through a time where nearly half of Gen Z and 40% of millennials1 are reporting the highest levels of stress, anxiety and burnout ever recorded. Young adults spend an average of 7+ hours a day on screens outside of work. We are exposed to a very unreasonable number of notifications, news cycles and social comparisons daily. So sure, we’re craving some time offline.

But one thing about a trend is that when it gets rebranded as a luxury, it’s always worth asking one uncomfortable question.

Who can actually afford it? And is this one worth investing your time into? I have an answer, and it’s going to help you make better, more strategic decisions with your time and energy this year.

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𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• Why staying online is often an economically rational choice

• Where exactly are we meant to go if we log off?

• Buying the identity instead of building the habit

• Offline only works after this exists

• The skill is knowing what phase you’re in

Why staying online is an economically rational choice

I watched this video by recently that finally articulated why the whole “just log off” narrative feels slightly icky to me, which is that being offline is being framed as a brave, enlightened choice, when in reality it only works if you ignore the economic conditions most people are actually living under. Things become status symbols precisely because they’re inaccessible, and going offline is starting to function the same way, because for most people in this economy, building a personal brand is literally a survival strategy. We cannot pretend it’s some kind of whimsical lifestyle choice.

When you’re told your degree might be pointless, your job might be automated, and the thing you were advised to learn five years ago is already obsolete — image, reputation, and visibility often become the only assets you feel you can still control. So choosing to be online can be an economically rational response to the constant instability we face as Gen Alpha/Z/Millenials.

Where exactly are we meant to go if we log off?

What really stuck with me is Eugene’s question of where people are actually supposed to go if they do log off, because we talk about “real life” as if it’s some neutral alternative while Western societies have spent decades defunding and dismantling third spaces, replacing them with monetised, branded versions of community that still require money, time, and flexibility to access.

So when people say “just be offline”, what they’ll often mean is “opt into a version of life that assumes financial buffers you may not have”, which is why I’m sceptical of framing analog living as a universal solution to our generation’s problems — the issue isn’t as binary as being online or offline, it’s pretending those choices are neutral when they both have very real economic costs.

Buying the identity instead of building the habit

What did slightly enrage me was the fact that “analog” trending then immediately turned into an aesthetic you’re supposed to purchase, complete with gift guides, props, tools, notebooks, cameras, flip phones and artisanal accessories for hobbies that I know2 — will end up in a box at the back of a cupboard within a month.

It’s the same pattern we see every January, when deciding you want to be a runner somehow turns into buying the shoes, the watch, the outfit and the water bottle before you’ve built the habit of actually running, and then when running predictably feels uncomfortable, boring, or hard to stick to, the story quickly becomes “this isn’t for me” rather than “I tried to buy an identity instead of change my behaviour”.

The cost here isn’t just financial (although that adds up quickly) it’s psychological, because every time you spend money trying to shortcut a lifestyle change and it doesn’t stick → your confidence takes a hit → your trust in yourself erodes slightly → you internalise the idea that you’re inconsistent or undisciplined. When in reality, you were sold the illusion that buying the tools, or buying into an aesthetic, would do the work for you.

Offline only works after this exists

Going offline has a real ROI, I won’t skip past that. It shows up as deeper focus, better thinking, more original ideas and a calmer nervous system, but those returns compound most cleanly once you already have some form of leverage in place. Whether that’s income stability, career capital, an audience, a reputation, or systems that keep working when you’re not actively working on them. Leveraging intense sprints of being online to then be offline.

One of the few takes on this conversation I love is the work CatGPT is doing with physical phones, because it treats going offline as the infrastructure problem that is is.

Her business is built on reducing friction between intention and behaviour without pretending most people can afford to opt out of visibility altogether.

A physical phone acknowledges the digital economy, while creating enough friction to protect attention, limit compulsive use, and still allow people to stay reachable, employed, and connected. In the context of everything in this issue, that’s what a high-ROI version of analog actually looks like — selective participation that acknowledges the real economic trade-offs of modern life.

The skill is knowing what phase you’re in

The most financially literate position here isn’t total withdrawal or constant presence. It’s knowing when visibility is an asset and when “going offline” is actually the best strategic move for your finances, energy or wellbeing. This is why I liked the idea of analog intentionality: not logging off for the performance of it, but deliberately redesigning how technology fits into your life so it stops hijacking your attention without requiring you to opt out of modern life altogether.

When it comes to going analog, the Financially Hot goal is agency. Being able to choose when to be visible, or when to disconnect. Understanding the trade-offs (a key skill, #6 of the 7 that are key for your financial literacy) and building leverage is what a Financial Hot Girl would do in the midst of people rushing to buy their way into a trend.

Being offline isn’t free, being online isn’t evil, and the real skill isn’t choosing one forever, it’s understanding which phase you’re in and making decisions that respect the trade-offs instead of copying a trend and trying to look like you have taste.

—Dev xo