how to return to your most Financially Hot self
you're too smart to think life won't test you. here's how to come back anyway. | fhg #105
I’m just out of the first 5 weeks in 2.5 years I’ve taken off from my business, the gym, from my friends, from my habits, from everything I’ve known as normal in my life. And I feel so, deeply, unhot for it. And while that’s unfortunate for me, it’s fortunate for you, because you’re subscribed to an oversharer in recovery from the most brutal month of her adult life.
Betterment of the self—financially and otherwise—is incredibly non-linear. Regular readers, you may remember that I’d just started my post-Latin America rebrand before this life-changing event happened to me. Familiar with the quote “if you want to make God laugh, show him your plans”? Well, my version is that he’s definitely lolling, hard, at the goals I mapped out on my whiteboard a week before my life fell apart.
Now if you’re new to Financial Hot Girl, you might’ve assumed that this newsletter was finances for hot people. Although ostensibly that’s correct, it’s a common misconception.
What we do here is connect the dots between the mental, physical and financial. Being a Financial Hot Girl is understanding that being hot is being financially savvy. Having a life with options, understanding, discernment and agency are the things that makes you feel hot, despite putting effort into how we look.
Financial Hot Girls are put-together because they’re deliberate, and they’re financially savvy because they’re disciplined. That creates the kind of confidence that makes you feel hot, and that people apparently read as attractive. So let’s build it back.
Being hot in my books means being so on top of yourself that you are just obsessed with yourself. You’re proud, you’re full of self-trust, you never stutter. But I won’t lie to you and say that the looks don’t matter. They do, both for you personally (look good, feel good, get more done) and for being hot as a way to strategically signal status. So here’s exactly how I’m getting back to feeling and being hot.
Building the proof again, in small units. Hot is a feeling, and mine comes from doing what I said I’d do. The coolest thing about self-trust is that it’s not a fleeting feeling, it’s evidence of you being awesome. Real, hard, evidence, that your mind and body can’t deny. So I’m collecting small pieces of that evidence. That means not procrastinating. No negotiating with myself about my own goals. Using the 54321 rule to get out of bed and get the day started. Using my calendar to time-block and keep myself accountable. Prove that if I really want it, I’ll go after it, and then I’ll feel it.
Take care of the bodily brown girl basics. Oiling my cuticles, moisturising my body, oiling my scalp, threading my ‘tache and eyebrows (tutorial here), getting back into my 3x a week tretinoin application, and daily night-time face massage. When the basics fall to the wayside, it can feel quite laborious to add them back, but spend a week or two setting alarms or reminders on your phone to do these things and before you know it, they’ll be habits again.
Moving intentionally. My average steps were 3,500 (womp womp) and I did 0 workouts, so I’m working back up to an average of 10-15k steps daily, with grace. Walking (helps with my stress, anxiety, creativity, digestion, stiffness), zone 2 cardio (running or the stairmaster for me, 3x a week) and strength training (3-5x a week in the gym). While I fear for the DOMs I’ll face tomorrow, a daily combination of these things makes me feel great, but also keeps me active, strong and lean. Stacking feeling good and strong with heart health is very hot.
Drink water. My water intake has been abysmal, partly because tap water outside of Scotland is terrible, and partly because my daily routine was completely flipped on its head. What has previously worked best for me to instil a strong hydration habit: making my water bottle an extension of my body. Where I go, the bottle goes. Being hydrated shows up on my face, in my mood and in the quality of my nutrition.
Use a one thing only rule. I’ll do either my hair, makeup or outfit daily. Look good, feel good, remember? It’s hard for me to feel good right now, but I’ll try anyway—picking one of the three to focus on boosts my productivity, which makes me feel good (like the eldest-daughter-dependent-on-work-as-a-symbol-of-my-self-worth that I am) but keeps the daily ask of myself low.
While it’ll take some effort to bring these habits back, discipline will soon kick in and everything will feel normal again.
This is the power of having a system—even though I violently fell off it, I have an it to come back to. I’m not scrambling for ‘good habits’ or wondering how on earth I can feel better. I just click revert all changes (minus a few things, as you’ll see below).
Checking my financial season. A crisis or unexpected life event can move your financial season without warning, so making sure you know where you’re at is important because a financial season guides what you focus on. Reflect on right now, this very moment, not 1 month ago. Are you in Earn, Keep or Grow? Financially, acting in seasons helps you get more done because you spend less time trying to do it all and more time making meaningful progress on the tasks that matter, before you move onto the next season. During my own crisis, I stayed in Keep and didn’t put the pressure of an Earn season on myself. Recognising that was important.
🍒 Not sure how to figure your financial season out? Read the guide here.
Figure out your emergency cost. If you lost your job tomorrow—or your boiler broke—or your partner left you—or something worse happened—will it make you nervous about money? Do you know what the absolute bare minimum version of your life costs, and how long could you afford it? Financial savviness isn’t just understanding money, it’s understanding what money means for you: what a hard month is, whether you could sustain it for 3-6 months, and whether that money is being saved in a high-interest, easy access savings account so that if you ever face a terrible situation, money is the last thing on your mind.
Stick to a financial system. Reviewing personal and business transactions every month, reinvesting as much as possible and setting goals for business income, instead of just personal income. And working backwards from that in order to structure the tasks to do day-to-day. Goals → objectives required to achieve goal → tasks required to achieve objectives → broken down by year/month/week/day etc. As a solopreneur, the habits I previously applied to my personal finances need to be transitioned to my business too, so my system is staying the same but my inputs are changing.
Automate the things I want. I don’t just mean literal things, but more-so financial goals. If your goal is quitting your job in a years time, the money going towards a financial buffer that’ll let you quit should be an automated transfer. Something you don’t think about or negotiate. Financially literate people don’t actually think about money all the time, because a lot of their goals are run on automatic transfers. The thing I’m building back is my emergency fund after using it heavily this year, and so my automation is going there.
Minimising the self-hate tax. Something I did a lot in my 20s was pay my way to being liked by other people, because that liking didn’t come from myself. Coming out of a 5-week period of the least amount of self-care ever, I’m acutely aware that I’m prone to buying things for a dopamine hit right now. To avoid this, I’m doing things that fill my cup: minimising screen-time, focussing on gratitude, practising discernment, making time for my hobbies. If you fill your life with curiosity, play and fun, there’s physically less room to dislike yourself, pick apart your life and fill the gaps by buying stuff.
🧱 For a full list of financially savvy skills to build, read this.
The way life works, as I now understand, is that I won’t wake up tomorrow as the same girl I was five weeks ago. So instead of the goal being getting back to her, it’s building a new me who can hold what happened and still achieve my wildest dreams.
Here’s how I’m doing that.
Recovering forwards. The temptation after a hard month is to sprint, to make up for lost time, or to prove the five weeks didn’t cost you anything. Especially if you’re an eldest daughter/high-achiever. That’s ego, and it’s also how you end up back on the absolute floor in a couple of weeks. I’m rebuilding at half the capacity of what I was doing before, at least for a few weeks. 3 gym sessions instead of 5. 7,000 steps before 15,000. The goal is for future me to be much harder to knock over than current me, and remembering that I’m not in a rush.
Deciding Once, while I’m clear-headed. I’m writing my re-entry plan down this week, while I can think straight, because I know life is non-linear. Future me that’s struggling during a bad week cannot be trusted. Using the Decide Once™ principle, I’m settling on one physical move, one mental move, one financial move, and not renegotiating with myself. It’s the reason I have something to come back to at all.
Keeping one thing from the hard month. Something always survives a period like this that’s worth taking with you. For me it’s how little I actually needed to be okay, and how much of my normal routine was a performance rather than something that added value to my life. I’m not going back to my old life exactly, and that’s okay. Everything is data, and it’s the Financial Hot Girl way to see it as such and use it.
Redefining urgency. 5 weeks away from everything I’ve built and the business is still here, the income was still earned, the audience is still here, the newsletter still went out. Most of what I thought was urgent simply…wasn’t. My deadlines were so painfully unnecessary. I’m going into the rest of this year with a much shorter list of things I’m willing to panic about, and I’d recommend the same to you, without needing a life-changing month to get there.
My journey to hot and financially savvy is alongside feeling unhot and pretty messy, and whatever happens, I know that I can feel multiple things at the same time. Duality is a thing. You can feel ugly while doing the hot girl habits. You can track your transactions knowing they represent actions that aren’t the most financially literate. You don’t need to justify what you do to anyone, especially yourself.
You must take agency over your life and move forwards—whether that’s you recovering from a not-go-great month or simply picking back up your goals. Notice that here in this issue, I’ve set the rules, because the world is my oyster. I encourage you to do the same <3
Until next week,
— Dev xo