the case for being a difficult woman

the easier you are to say yes, the more expensive your life gets | fhg #91

There are only two things in life that give me spicy armpits. One is replying '“you too” when a waiter tells me to enjoy my meal, and the second is knowing that I’ve willingly annoyed someone.

Hola from our AirBnb in Buenos Aires! This is me realising 4 pictures were happening in quick succession.

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

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.

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

Inside the implementation pack this week:

• 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 earning 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

• A note on what to expect when the world pushes back, because the women who give up on being difficult usually fold after the first negative reaction, and doing this kind of work is hard in real life

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:

Until next week,

— Dev xo