3 levels to being a Financial Hot Girl
and how to build your own financially hot practice | fhg #100
Happy Sunday, financial hotties 🫶
Issue 100 (!) felt like the right time to zoom all the way out and answer the question I get most often, which is what actually makes someone a Financial Hot Girl in the first place.
It comes down to one thing: your finances are a downstream output of your lifestyle. All the mental, physical and financial decisions I made in my 20s produced the results they did because of a lifestyle I designed accidentally (but one I’m now teaching on purpose).
When your lifestyle is the input, it shifts the focus off finances without being avoidant about it. It’s a lot like what James Clear wrote about changing your habits, in that there’s a huge difference between the identity of someone trying to do something versus being the kind of person that does.
That is the whole thesis of the Financial Hot Girl, choosing an identity, doing the hard stuff that comes with it and letting the rest fall into place. And after more than 30,000 of you have turned up for the last 99 Sundays (which is a little crazy to me?! thank you!), I wanted to write it down in full.
𝜗ৎ In this issue:
the financial hot girl hierarchy, explained
what being a financial hot girl asks of you
3 questions to build your own financially hot practice
✦ The financial hot girl hierarchy
level 1: physical foundation
This is my version of look good, feel good. My confidence and self-esteem has skyrocketed since building a strong physical foundation in my life. In practice that looks like prioritising sleep, strength training, protein and daily movement, to name a few.
It’s the base of the pyramid because it regulates the nervous system, which regulates everything else. When you’re putting these reps in, you undeniably feel good. You’re more productive, you look and feel better, and there’s a wealth of benefits to your life ahead; you get ill less, you enjoy life more, your earning capacity is more efficient, you’re independent for longer.
A strong foundation of physical habits is the easy baseline because it requires you physically showing up, with the layers ahead to follow.
level 2: mental strength
The mental muscles you construct by turning up physically, and the ones that transfer everywhere else; things like discipline, self-trust, being high agency and delayed gratification.
I’ve found that you have to earn this in your body first through layer 1, because your body is where self-trust actually gets stored. It’s not really conscious. Every time you stick to a movement habit it’s more evidence that you can trust yourself to keep a promise you made in private. That self-trust is so deeply transferable to other areas of life.
Once you have enough evidence, something changes in what you let yourself imagine. You start dreaming bigger financially (and otherwise!), because you finally have proof you will follow through.
When you finally believe you can go for the big thing, whatever your big thing is, it will come from and be sustained by the belief you build internally. The sustainable element here is life-changing and prevents all of this just being a phase.
level 3: financial systems
This is the layer where things you want to do are actioned into things you actually do, because of everything built in layers 1 and 2. You build financial systems around the behaviour you create.
You are only ever primarily in one financial season at a time, Earn, Keep, Grow™. So your job as part of this layer is to identify and act only on which season you’re in within any given quarter, so that you stop trying to do all three at once and burning out doing none of them well.
the peak: the financial hot life
You will notice the peak in this world is not being rich. Being rich is possible without being Financially Hot, because you can earn all the money you want but not necessarily have the physical foundation and mental strength to keep it forever. Being Financially Hot is what makes all-round wealth feel right for you while being sustainable for the long term.
Being a Financial Hot Girl asks you to look at your money as one output of a whole life you are building, and to work on the inputs, instead of just trying to tunnel vision on the money.
Questions to build your Financially Hot practice:
If you had to pick one physical habit to keep going for the next 12 months no matter what, which one would do the most for you?
Where in your life do you already have concrete evidence you can keep a promise to yourself, and where do you keep breaking one?
Which season are you actually in right now (Earn, Keep, or Grow) versus which one are you trying to be in?
Take this into the second half of the year: build the physical foundation that reinforces the mental strength that lets you take action financially.
Until next week,
— Dev xo
Viewing money as a downstream output of your actual lifestyle changes the whole game.
This completely mirrors how I had to play it. Back when I was grinding through two to three jobs for decades, I was purely in Level 1 and 2 mode—building the mental discipline and physical stamina just to survive the hustle and save aggressively.
That grueling active work was the heavy input required to secure my first rental property.
Today, I’m fully operating in Level 3 (Financial Systems).
I keep a strict safety net of a few months' expenses separate to protect my peace of mind, and I let my rental and covered call ETF cashflow automatically compound in a set-and-forget loop.
Setting up the lifestyle inputs first is the only reason the financial output finally takes care of itself!
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