I grew up with zero financial literacy and everything I know came from falling down a personal finance rabbit hole and making most of the mistakes first. Not long ago I was on £30,000 a year, so none of this started with a big salary.

These are the 25 lessons I wish someone had handed me at 18. Some took me years to learn and a few I’m still working on.

In this issue:

• Looking rich vs actually being rich

• Saving, and where it stops working

• Your first £100k and your pension

• Negotiating and debt

• Your time, your freedom and saying no

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Looking rich vs actually being rich

01. Looking rich and becoming rich are opposite behaviours.

In my first fashion job I bought £50 Supreme and Palace t-shirts because I thought they made me a more interesting person. They didn’t, and I had less money to show for it.

02. Keeping up with the Joneses now means keeping up with the whole internet.

The Joneses used to live next door. Now they’re on your phone, all day, and you will never catch up.

03. Real wealth is control over your time.

Not having to ask for annual leave to see your family. The gym session at 3pm, meals cooked from scratch, and turning down work you don’t need.

04. Aim for low status and high income.

It’s a nod to Naval Ravikant’s advice to play wealth games, not status games. Plenty of plumbers, tradespeople and creators out-earn people in prestigious careers, without burning out on someone else’s ladder. More in Low Status, High Income.

05. Boring investments make the best money.

I’d rather own index funds that have done well over time than the exciting individual stocks that sound impressive when you share it with your peers.

Saving, and where it stops working

06. Saving builds stability, not wealth.

It’s the foundation, and you need it. Investing and growing your income are what build wealth.

07. Build your emergency fund before anything risky.

Three to six months of living expenses, for when you lose your job or the boiler breaks. Without it, investing or starting a business is a much bigger gamble.

08. Cash in a current account is quietly shrinking.

Plenty of people have hundreds of thousands sitting in savings, or worse, in a current account earning nothing, while inflation eats a little more of it every year.

09. Your time is worth more than the pennies.

At uni I hand-washed my clothes in the sink to avoid paying £3 a load. That makes sense when money is tight. After that, your hours are better spent learning skills that pay more.

10. Write everything down before you change anything.

Current account, savings, investments, pension, every debt, listed with no judgement. You can’t build wealth from “I just want to be rich one day”. I do mine in my Frugal Chic® budgeting planner.

Your first £100k and your pension

11. The first £100k is the hardest.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right-hand man, said the first $100,000 is the hard part. Until you get there, every pound comes from what you put in and what you give up.

12. After that, your money starts doing some of the work.

That’s compound interest: your money making money on what it’s already made. At 7%, £100k makes £7,000 a year, more than most people manage to save. (7% is an example, not a promise.)

13. Small amounts aren’t pointless.

Think of a snowball rolling downhill. £20 or £50 a month feels like nothing at first, and then one day it doesn’t. Celebrate your first £100, £1,000 and £10,000 too.

14. Your pension isn’t a problem for future you.

If you’re employed, at least 8% of your qualifying earnings goes in, with at least 3% from your employer and tax relief on yours. Unless you genuinely can’t get by without that money, don’t opt out.

15. Self-employed? A SIPP is your pension now.

A private pension where you pick the investments (mine’s in the S&P 500, but do your own research). You get tax relief on up to £60,000 a year, or your earnings if lower, the growth is tax-free, and you can usually take 25% tax-free when you draw it.

Negotiating and debt

16. If you don’t negotiate, you leave money on the table.

Rent, bills, your phone contract, your pay. I used to avoid it in case it made me look greedy or ungrateful, or in case they said no. No is where you started anyway.

17. Always ask what the budget is.

When you’re offered a salary, a pay rise or a fee, don’t say yes to the first number on the spot. Ask what the budget is, then decide.

18. Know what you’re actually being paid for.

My first brand deals were £200, which felt amazing on a £12-an-hour day job. Then I took £700 on the spot, and the brand put ad spend behind the video until it hit a million plays. Content is paid on trust and attention, not hours. I’d left thousands on the table.

19. Not all debt is bad debt.

I have student loan debt and I don’t plan to clear it. In the UK it works more like a tax: repayments follow what you earn, not what you owe. I’d rather that money went into a house deposit, investments or my business. (High earner on a salary? The maths can go the other way.)

20. Klarna and credit cards are a different animal.

My student loan repayments drop if I earn less. However, if you miss a Klarna or credit card payment your credit score takes the hit. Rich people aren’t scared of debt, they’re just picky about which kind.

Your time, your freedom and saying no

21. A soft life needs hard work first.

Women carry costs men don’t, from the pink tax to maternity leave, so I get why leaning on a partner’s money is tempting. But if your finances are in someone else’s hands, you’re always beholden to them. I want a soft life I built myself.

22. Watch what people do, not what they perform.

Plenty of tradwife creators cooking elaborate dinners from scratch run content businesses with brand deals. They perform financial dependence while being financially independent.

23. Work out your FIRE number.

Take what you spend in a year and multiply it by 25. For a lot of people that lands near £1 million, and you’ll need to allow for inflation. My FIRE calculator does the maths for you.

24. FIRE isn’t suffering now to enjoy life later.

It’s knowing exactly what your freedom costs. There’s even Barista FIRE: invest enough to work part-time or chase the passion projects that don’t pay much.

25. Price your time like it’s money.

If someone asked you for £100, you wouldn’t just hand it over. So why did I give someone I barely knew four hours for a “pick my brain” chat? You can buy anything, but not everything.

The one I’d send back to 18-year-old me first is number 25. I waited until I was earning more to start protecting my time, and I could have done it from day one.

Which one do you wish you’d known at 18? Tell me in the comments.

That’s all this week,

Mia xx

This is what’s worked for me, not financial advice. Do your own research before you invest.

P.S. Everything above is what to do. On Wednesday I’m going through how, starting with the pension check for paid subscribers.

If that’s you, you’re in very good company. On Sunday I mentioned a survey that found a quarter of people in the UK earning £100,000 or more had nothing left at the end of the month. That isn’t because they’re bad with money. Nobody gets a pay rise and actively decides to waste it. It goes in about forty small decisions, and none of them feel like a decision at all.

There’s a name for this: lifestyle creep. The good news is that it always leaves a trail. You can still see it sitting in your bank statements, line by line, as soon as you put the correct two months side by side.

So today we are covering exactly that. The bank statements, payslips, side by side and how you can tackle it to get more out of your money.

In this issue:

• Why a pay rise can leave you feeling exactly as broke as before

• The one question that sorts every increase: chosen cost or lifestyle creep?

• What your pay rise is really worth each month

• The lifestyle creep audit, step by step, and the one-page sheet

• A worked example where the pay rise disappears to the pound

• Where creep hides, and the pay rise rule I’d use from now on

Where a pay rise goes

Lifestyle creep, or lifestyle inflation if you prefer, is what happens when your spending rises to meet your income without you ever deciding that it should.

The tricky part is that it almost never looks like a big purchase. Nobody gets a pay rise and goes straight out for a Birkin Bag. More often like that it’s small upgrades. The filter coffee becomes a flat white, and then the flat white becomes a daily treat. The bus home becomes an uber ride when it’s raining, then when it’s late, then when you’re tired. Each step is tiny, and each one is something you can obviously afford now.

Then two more things happen.

First, the upgrade stops feeling like an upgrade. Psychologists call this hedonic adaptation: within a few weeks, the nicer thing is just the normal thing. You don’t enjoy the daily flat white any more than the filter coffee you used to have. You only notice it when you don’t get it.

Second, it only ever goes one way. Adding a cost feels like nothing. Taking it away feels like losing something, even when it’s the same £3. So spending ratchets up with every rise and almost never comes back down on its own.

Put those together and a pay rise can disappear completely without you buying a single thing you’d call a treat. It’s not that you spent it badly, you just never spent it on purpose.

Read more

Influencers mean trips, pictures on yachts and a new designer bag every other week. Frugal means penny-pinching, or the realistic everyday saving most of us actually do. The two don’t seem to belong together.

But I came across two podcast clips recently that made me think again. In one, Nara Smith talks to Emma Grede on Aspire about the money rules her dad drilled into her.

In the other, Isobel Lorna explains on Hot Smart Rich why she’ll happily buy a Birkin and then reach for the Tesco own-brand olive oil.

I know this one won’t feel relatable to everyone. The internet is very anti-influencer right now, and some of that is fair: influencer culture has a lot to answer for on overconsumption. But building a personal brand is more and more common, and it’s something I do. I’m a creator. And behind the scenes, I’ve had so many conversations where someone says “I’m not buying that, it’s not worth the money” about something they could clearly afford. They just choose not to.

So this week, let’s unpick it.

In this issue:

• Why what you see online isn’t how anyone actually spends

• The olive oil test: why frugal doesn’t mean cheap

• Why frugality matters more, not less, as your income grows

• Three things to take into your own spending

• One thing to do this week

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What you see isn’t what influencers spend

On the surface, influencing looks like the most glamorous job going: PR dinners, press trips, cars, clothes, endless skincare. Plenty of creators do buy expensive things, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But a lot of what you see was gifted. A lot of it was bought for a shoot, a campaign or a brand deal someone was hoping to land. If you’re a lifestyle creator, what you buy is almost part of the business, the same way a photographer’s camera is.

So the designer bag in someone’s morning vlog tells you very little about what they spend on an ordinary Tuesday. Copy it and you won’t get their life, just their receipt. We all know social media isn’t reality. Sometimes we just need the reminder.

Frugal doesn’t mean cheap

Isobel Lorna is known for Porsches and Hermès. She started posting on TikTok at 19 while working night shifts in an Amazon warehouse, and by 25 she’d bought a Porsche, a Birkin and a house. Her viral mantra is “save the pennies and the Porsche will buy itself”.

On Hot Smart Rich, she explains that almost everything she buys comes back to her content and her brand image, so she treats it as an investment. She jokes she can pass anything off as one. But in Tesco, faced with the own-brand olive oil and the posh one, she picks the own-brand, because it’s got nothing to do with work.

Some people will hear that and think workaholic. I hear a fellow frugal person. Frugal isn’t choosing the cheapest option every single time. It’s being really selective about where your money goes: spending properly where you get a real return, and cutting back where it doesn’t matter to you.

Take the Porsche. The content around it went viral. Views aren’t money, but I’d guess buying that kind of reach with paid ads would have cost her even more.

That doesn’t mean anyone should go out and buy a Porsche. It means influencers are playing a different money game. What’s a smart spend for them could be a terrible one for you, because frugal is relative to your income and to what a purchase actually does for you.

The Frugal Chic® rule: Splurge where it pays you back. Own-brand the rest.

Frugality doesn’t stop when the money arrives

People assume that once someone’s making real money, frugality goes out the window. In my experience it’s the opposite: the people who keep the habit are usually the ones who stay wealthy.

Nara Smith is 25, has four children under six and runs a multimillion-dollar business. When Emma Grede asked about money, she went straight back to the rules her dad drilled into her: “invest your money, save your money, live below your means”. She says she’s still like that now. Obviously the business made the money, but if she’d spent it all, she wouldn’t have it today.

On a lower income, you’re often frugal because you have to be, and it builds security. On a higher income, it’s what builds wealth, because it creates a margin between what you earn and what you spend, and that’s where saving and investing happen.

It’s that old line: it’s not about how much you earn, it’s about how much you keep. A 2023 survey by RBC Brewin Dolphin found that 26% of people in the UK earning £100,000 or more had no money left at the end of the month. There’s even a name for it: HENRYs, or high earners, not rich yet.

The Millionaire Next Door, the famous 1996 study of how American millionaires actually live, found the same thing. Thomas Stanley and William Danko compared people of the same age and income, and the “prodigious accumulators of wealth” typically had at least four times the wealth of the under accumulators. Same pay, completely different outcome.

So yes, increasing your income matters hugely. But your habits decide where that extra money goes.

What to take into your own spending

• Ask whether it’s really an investment or just a momentary desire. If you aren’t using it to earn money, and it isn’t one of the rare things that holds or grows its value, it’s an expense. That’s completely fine. Just call it what it is.

• Build wealth before you flex. A lot of people spend to look like they’ve made it before they’ve built anything underneath. Watching influencers makes that lifestyle feel attainable, which is exactly what makes it a trap.

• Play your own money game. Compare your spending to your goals, not someone else’s feed. Their brand deals don’t pay your rent.

And if you’re building a brand yourself, some purchases genuinely do pay you back, like the outfit that makes you look the part on a panel, or the laptop that lets you take on bigger work. Sometimes what looks like flexing is strategic spending. Just be as honest about the return as Isobel is about the olive oil.

This week, do one thing

Look at the last three things you bought for more than £50 and write investment or expense next to each one. To count as an investment, it has to earn you money or save you money in a way you can actually name. If you can’t name it, it’s an expense, and that’s okay. The point is to stop using the word investment as permission.

The key takeaway here is: The women who seem to have it all are often the ones being most careful about what they don’t buy.

That’s all this week,

Mia xx

P.S. On Wednesday, paid readers get the lifestyle creep audit: a one-page sheet for comparing what you spend now with what you spent a year ago, so you can see which increases you chose and which just crept in. If you’ve had a pay rise but still feel like you’re penny pinching and getting nowhere, you can upgrade here:

“Is there anything else you need to go with that?”

I used to think it was manners. It isn’t, or it’s not only manners. It’s the business model. The coat gets you through the door. The boots, the bag and the little tin of leather balm are how the shop makes sales.

On Sunday I wrote about Diderot, his scarlet dressing gown, and the chain of upgrades one lovely thing can drag in behind it. If you read it and thought of your own chain straight away, you’re in very good company. The sofa that needed a new rug, the phone that needed a new everything, the wedding guest dress that had somehow cost £400 by the time it left the house.

None of those were bad decisions if you are looking at each one, individually. However, that in itself represents the whole problem. Every link in a chain is reasonable on its own. It’s only the total that isn’t, and nobody ever sees the total, because it arrives in instalments over six weeks and each one feels like an isolated event.

So today we do the sum before the first link. Five questions, one page, about two minutes in a changing room.

In this issue:

• Why the price on the label is only the first instalment

• Why £100, and why it has to work in a shop

• The five questions, in full

• The one-page sheet to keep on your phone

• A party dress where the dress turns out to be the cheap part

The label is the first instalment

Retail has a phrase for this: the attach rate. It’s how many extras get sold alongside the main thing, and in plenty of shops somebody has a target for it. The case with the phone, the protector spray with the trainers, the “complete the look” row under every dress online.

The oldest version is the razor and the blades. Sell the handle cheaply and make the money on the blades for the next twenty years. Printers and ink. Coffee machines and pods. We all know that trick when it’s a gadget, and most of us have learned to check the price of the ink.

What we don’t notice is that our own taste runs exactly the same scheme on us, with no shop involved at all. Nobody sold Diderot the leather armchair. The dressing gown did.

So the price on the label is only ever the first instalment. The rest is what I’ve started calling the matching tax: everything that the new thing needs to work, plus everything it makes look wrong, plus whatever it costs to keep nice for a year.

It isn’t on the label, it isn’t on the receipt and it never appears in one place at one time, which is exactly why it never makes it into a budget.

Read more

Let’s say that thing is a proper coat or the sofa you’ve been saving for since you moved in. For about a week it’s the best thing you own, and you keep catching yourself looking at it.

Then something odd happens. The boots you’ve worn happily all winter look wrong next to the coat. The cushions look tired next to the sofa. The rug that was fine on Tuesday is suddenly “the wrong shade”. Nothing in the room has changed except one thing, and now everything in it looks like it needs replacing.

If you’ve felt that, you’re in good company. A French philosopher felt it in 1769 and wrote a whole essay about it. He gave the essay a subtitle that could be this newsletter’s strapline: a warning to those who have more taste than fortune.

So this week we will discuss: what happened to him, the name for it, where it gets you now, and how to buy the one thing without buying the next six.

In this issue:

• The scarlet dressing gown that cost a philosopher his study

• The Diderot effect: why your things come in sets, and why one new thing breaks the set

• Where it gets you now: the new flat, the new phone and the “complete the look” button

• Five ways to buy the first thing and stop there

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The scarlet dressing gown

Denis Diderot spent twenty-odd years editing the Encyclopédie, which made him famous and did not make him rich. He wrote in an old dressing gown, a comfortable rag of a thing, and he loved it. He wiped his pen on it, he dusted his books with it. The ink stains down the front, he said, were the marks of a working man.

Then a wealthy patron sent him a new one: scarlet, beautiful, stiff. And from the moment he put it on, his study stopped looking like a study and started looking like a problem.

In his telling, the scarlet made everything else fall into line behind it. The straw chair was sent out to the hallway and a leather armchair took its place, the wooden table became a writing desk, the plank that held his books became a proper bookcase, the smoky old prints, pinned up without frames, came down and paintings went up, a large mirror appeared over the fireplace. One upgrade at a time, each one perfectly reasonable, until the only thing left of the old room was a scrap of worn rug. He writes that seeing it every morning reminded him where he’d started, and stopped his pride at the door.

The detail most retellings leave out is the debt. There wasn’t any. The pictures and the furniture came from the same patron who sent the gown, so he barely paid for the upgrade at all. And he still sat down and wrote a lament, because the cost wasn’t money, it was ease. I was the absolute master of my old dressing gown, he wrote. “I’ve become the slave of the new one.”

It has a name: the Diderot effect

In 1988 an anthropologist called Grant McCracken gave it a name. His point was that our possessions don’t sit in our lives as separate objects. They come in sets that feel like us: the coat, the boots, the bag, the flat, the mugs in the flat. They hang together at a level of quality, a price point, and a version of you.

Bring in one thing from a level above and it doesn’t blend in. It makes everything around it look like it’s arguing with it. So you start upgrading, not because the old things stopped working, but because they stopped matching. The new thing changes who you think you are, and after that the old things look like they belong to someone else.

The bit that matters for your money is this. The first purchase is a decision. You thought about it, you saved for it, you can defend it. Everything you buy after it to make it fit is a reaction, and nobody budgets for the reaction. That’s where the money goes.

The Frugal Chic® rule: The first purchase is a decision. Everything you buy to match it is a reaction.

Where it gets you now

Retail runs on it. “Complete the look.” “Customers also bought.” The phone that needs the case, then the charger, then the earbuds. The gym membership that turns into leggings, trainers, a bottle and a bag before you’ve done a single squat. The whole idea of an “aesthetic” on TikTok is a Diderot set with a name, and most of the morning routine videos are a shopping list disguised as a personality trait.

The big one is the home. Aviva once surveyed a thousand recent homebuyers and found they’d spent just over £10,000 on the place in the first year, and a lot of that isn’t repairs. It’s new things to go with the new thing. A new flat is the biggest scarlet dressing gown most of us will ever buy, and everything you already own looks shabby in it for about six months.

The timing matters right now, too. October to December is peak Diderot. The party dress needs the shoes. The new sofa needs new tree decorations, because the old ones don’t go. If you’ve read the autumn lock-in article, this is the mechanism behind half the traps in it.

How to buy the one thing and stop there

You don’t beat the Diderot effect by never buying anything nice. You beat it by pricing the whole chain before the first link, and by learning to live with a bit of mismatch.

• Price the chain before the first thing. Before the coat comes home, write down what it will “need”. If the answer is coat plus boots plus bag, that’s the number you’re deciding on, not the one on the coat’s label. Say yes or no to the whole chain.

• Make the second purchase wait a month. You thought about the first thing for ages. You’ve thought about the second for ten minutes, and the only reason it exists is the first. Give it thirty days. Most chains dissolve on their own once the new thing stops being new.

  

• Shop your own house first. Before you buy the thing that matches, look at what you already own. The “wrong shade” cushion is usually fine. The old bag works with the new coat if you stop asking it to be a different bag.

• Keep one old thing on purpose. Diderot’s scrap of rug did more for him than the mirror did. Keep the ink-stained thing that still works, somewhere you can see it. It stops the rest of the room getting ideas.

• Learn the sentences. “It’ll look odd if I don’t.” “I may as well now.” “While I’m at it.” When you hear yourself say one of those, it isn’t you talking. It’s the scarlet.

This week, do one thing

Find your live chain. Take the last thing you bought that you love, and list everything you’ve bought since because of it. Add it up. That number, not the price tag, is what the first thing actually cost you. Then decide, out loud, whether the chain is finished.

The key takeaway here is: nothing in your home or your wardrobe gets worse when you buy something better. It only looks worse, for a while, next to the new thing.

The Diderot effect isn’t a reason to never own anything lovely. It’s a reason to buy the lovely thing with the whole bill in front of you, and to let the old things stay old until they actually stop working.

More taste than fortune is a perfectly good way to live. You just have to be clear about which one is in charge.

That’s all this week,

Mia xx

P.S. Wednesday’s paid post is the tool for this one: the matching tax. Before anything over £100 comes home, you price the chain it brings with it, in five questions, on one page, If you’ve been meaning to upgrade, this is a good week for it.

I know, because I sat two desks away from one for the best part of two years.

This was back in luxury fashion sales. She was a few years older than me, on roughly double my salary, and for a long time I assumed the gap was talent. She was cleverer, or better connected, or one of those people things just happen for. I had a whole story about it, and the story suited me, because if the gap was talent there was nothing I could do about it.

Then I started paying attention, and the gap wasn’t talent, but defaults.

She introduced herself to a client in one sentence, no “just”, no little laugh at the end. She said numbers out loud, in full, and then stopped talking. She left at six o’clock. When someone put a decision in front of her she said “let me have a look and come back to you”, and nobody ever minded. She didn’t apologise for anything that didn’t need an apology. She did the same job I did, in the same building, with the same hours in the week. She just ran on different settings.

Ten of them, by my count which I’ve been borrowing them ever since, and almost every one of them cost nothing.

In this issue:

• Why the income follows the identity, and not the other way round

• What the upgrade isn’t: the hustle version, the spending version, the pretending version

• The ten habits in full, grouped by where they live: her words, her time, her money

• The Identity Audit, with my own scores

• The one-habit plan for this week

The income follows the identity

On Sunday I wrote about what happens when you start doing well and the people around you go quiet. Today is the other half of that: how you start doing well in the first place.

Most of us have the order the wrong way round. We’re waiting for the pay rise, the promotion or the big client to turn us into the woman who earns more. Then we’ll say the number, then we’ll stop apologising, then we’ll leave on time. The income is the permission slip.

It actually doesn’t work like that, and I think, quietly, we all know it. The woman who earns double didn’t get the salary first and the habits second. The habits came first, and the salary turned up because employers, clients and landlords were responding to them. You can’t make a pay rise appear. You can walk into the room as the person who gets one.

That’s the identity upgrade. Not a vision board and not a new personality. Ten specific things she does by default that you can start doing at your current salary, with your current CV, this week. You borrow them before the income catches up, because that is the order it happens in.

What the upgrade isn’t

Before the list, four things it isn’t, because this topic attracts nonsense.

It isn’t the hustle version. Nobody here is getting up at five, cold-plunging or calling herself a CEO. Most of the habits below involve doing less: fewer words, fewer apologies, fewer decisions made on the spot.

It isn’t spending like her.

This is the Frugal Chic® part, so I’ll say it plainly: the woman who earns double does not look like she earns double. The handbag isn’t the upgrade. If anything she spends a smaller share of her income than you do, and that is one of the ten.

It isn’t pretending. There’s no fake confidence in here, no lying about your numbers and no “act as if”. Every habit is something true that you can do now. Confidence is what you feel afterwards.

And it isn’t a personality transplant. I know introverts with all ten. Most of them are sentences, and you only have to say each one once before it stops being frightening.

The Frugal Chic® rule: Become her first. The income is the lagging indicator.

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“You’ve changed.”

Not as a compliment.

There’s an arc here, and once you see it you can’t unsee it. When you’re the starving artist or the naive junior, people root for you. Then you start to do well. Your name gets known, your income goes up, and the same people start treating you a bit differently, there’s less warmth, more little jabs, comments that start with “must be nice”.

I’ve felt this, and if you’re a woman who has done well at anything, I’d bet you have too. So this week I want to name it, explain why it happens, and talk about the strange middle bit that nobody warns you about.

In this issue:

• Why everyone loves an underdog, right up until she wins

• Tall poppy syndrome: a 2,500-year-old habit with very modern numbers

• The awkward middle: too successful to be relatable, not successful enough to be aspirational

• The brain scan that put envy and pain in the same place (I checked)

• The very British habit of saying “I just”, and what it costs you

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Everyone loves an underdog

The underdog is a mirror. When you’re struggling, people look at you and see themselves. Backing you costs them nothing and it feels good, because you’re proof that their situation is normal. You’re someone who gets it.

The second you stop struggling, the mirror cracks. You are no longer evidence that their life is normal. You’re evidence that it could be different, and that is a much less comfortable thing to look at.

It’s the tall poppy syndrome

You’ve probably heard the phrase. The origin is worth knowing. The Roman historian Livy tells a story about the last king of Rome, Tarquin, whose son sent a messenger asking what to do with the leading men of a city he’d just taken control of. The king said nothing. He walked into his garden and knocked the heads off the tallest poppies with his stick. The son got the message.

The modern term took off in Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s, where cutting down the tall poppy is practically a national pastime, and anyone who has lived there will tell you Britain has it just as badly. We just call it “don’t get too big for your boots”.

It also has numbers. In 2023 a study called The Tallest Poppy surveyed 4,710 working women across 103 countries. Nearly 87% said they had been cut down because of their success. 77% had their achievements downplayed. Six in ten believed they would be penalised if they were seen as ambitious at work. And here is the money bit: a large share said they’d responded by downplaying their achievements or not sharing them at all. Hiding is expensive. You cannot negotiate a rate for work nobody knows you did.

You can watch it happen to successful British women in real time. Grace Beverley, who built TALA and … before she was 25, has said that people tend to put anything to do with online success, especially women’s, “in a box”. During lockdown she was criticised for sharing productivity tips and then criticised for telling people to rest.

Krissy Cela, who built Oner Active from a fitness account she started while studying law, has spoken about people still looking for reasons not to credit her success to her.

Isobel Lorna. At 19 she was working night shifts at an Amazon warehouse and filming TikToks in between. People loved her for that. “Save the pennies and the Porsche will buy itself” was the whole brand, and for years she was the one who gets it. Then in September she launched Agende, her planner-and-handbag, and sold £250,000 worth in the first hour, with over 100,000 people on the waitlist before she’d even shown the product. Within a day the conversation wasn’t about the seven years that led there. It was “no hate but I thought they’d be max £100”.

Different women, same situation. The moment the hard bit stops being visible, people decide you got lucky.

The awkward middle

Nobody is jealous of a celebrity. Their lives are so far from ours that it doesn’t register. A yacht in Monaco is a cartoon. It costs you nothing emotionally to scroll past.

Then there’s the middle, which is where I am. I’ve done well enough to be called unrelatable, but not so well that I’m completely out of reach. And it turns out that is the worst place to stand. Nobody looks at a yacht and thinks “why haven’t I done that?” They think it about the girl from their course who just bought a flat.

Aristotle wrote this down about 2,300 years ago. In the Rhetoric he says we envy those who are near us in time, place, age or reputation, and we don’t compete with people far above or far below us. His phrase for it was “potter against potter”. When it’s someone you know, their success is a gentle jab, a reminder and it raises a question about your own life that a celebrity never could.

So if you’re in the middle and it feels oddly lonely, that isn’t paranoia. The middle is the most envied place there is, precisely because it looks reachable enough.

Envy actually hurts (I checked)

I saw a Reel recently claiming that envy lights up the same part of the brain as physical pain, and I wanted to know whether that was true before I repeated it. The short answer is yes, with a caveat.

In 2009, researchers in Japan put 19 students into an MRI scanner and had them read about fictional peers. The more the participants envied a character, the more activity showed up in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region heavily involved in processing pain, particularly the unpleasant, distressing part of it. Then the envied character suffered a misfortune, and the brain’s reward system lit up instead. The more painful the envy had been, the bigger the reward when they fell. The study was published in Science and it’s still the one everyone cites.

The caveat: it was 19 people, and “same region” doesn’t mean envy feels like a broken arm. But the broader finding, that social pain and physical pain share machinery in the brain, has held up over the years since.

Which changes how you read the “must be nice” comment. You’re not watching someone be cruel. You’re watching discomfort look for somewhere to go. And when you feel it yourself, scrolling past someone else’s win, that sting is information. It’s telling you exactly what you want.

“I’m just a content creator”

A personal example, because I haven’t given you many. When I was at Cannes Lions, I noticed the Americans could introduce themselves so much more easily. “I’m the CEO of this.” “I’ve built that.” An elevator pitch every time they shook a hand. We Brits did the opposite. “Oh, I’m just a content creator.” “I just make videos.” “I’m sort of in between things.” And then we were surprised when people took us at our word and treated us as slightly less.

The anthropologist Kate Fox calls this the modesty rule in Watching the English: a prohibition on boasting so strong that advertising has to be rewritten to comply with it. We underplay as a reflex, at this point i’s practically a dialect.

It is also a discount. “Just” sets your rate before anyone has asked. If you walk in as “just a freelancer”, you have already told the room what you cost. There is now an actual campaign about this, Project Ambition, launched this year by the founder of HelloFresh and a venture capitalist, to make Brits less reserved about their ambition. The fact that it needs a campaign tells you everything.

The Frugal Chic® rule: Shrinking doesn’t make you more likeable. It just makes you cheaper.

What to do about it

You can’t stop people cutting poppies but you can stop handing them the stick.

• Say what you do in one sentence, without “just”. “I run a personal finance newsletter and a business.” Full stop and let the silence sit.

• Stop pre-apologising for things going well. “It’s been a mad year, I’ve been so lucky” is a discount too. Try “it’s been a good year”.

• Let the mirror people go. Not everyone who rooted for the underdog wants the winner. That is about what they needed from you, not about who you are.

• Keep your own receipts. The years at £0, the evenings and weekends, the thing nobody saw. When someone says you got lucky, you don’t have to argue. You just have to know.

• Use your own envy. When someone else’s win stings, write down exactly what you want. Then go and make a plan for it instead of a comment about it.

  

This week, do one thing

Introduce yourself to one person this week without the word “just”. Say the full sentence, the real one, and then stop talking. Notice how little happens next, and how differently they treat you.

The key takeaway here is: being cut down is not evidence that you’ve done something wrong. It’s evidence that you’ve grown past the point where you’re a comfortable mirror for everyone around you. The feeling they have isn’t about you. It’s about what you now represent. Your job is not to shrink back to a size that makes it go away.

You didn’t change. You grew. Those are different things.

That’s all this week,

Mia xx

P.S. Wednesday’s post is the practical half of this one: the identity upgrade. The ten habits of the woman who earns double what you do now, from how she introduces herself to what she stops apologising for, with a short audit so you can see which ones you already have and which one to start this week. If you’ve been meaning to upgrade, this is a good week for it.

For years, that one sentence did a lot of heavy lifting for me.

It explained the overdraft at uni, it explained why my student loan never seemed to make it to the end of term, it explained the clothes I bought and wore once. And honestly, it was weirdly comfortable, because if being bad with money was just who I was, then none of it was really my fault.

The catch is that it also meant none of it was ever going to change.

I didn’t come from money. I started with £0 and zero leverage, in a fashion job that paid fashion money, in London. If you had told me then that I’d end up building a business from talking about money on the internet, I would have laughed, and then probably gone and bought something.

What changed wasn’t my salary. It was actually a conversation with friends about investing, where it slowly dawned on me that none of them had been taught this either. They had just decided to find out.

That was my first high agency moment with money, years before I knew there was a name for it.

In this issue:

• What high agency actually means, and where the idea comes from

• What it is, and what it isn’t

• The five signs you’re financially high agency, in full

• The asks that pay better than anything in your ISA

• The Agency Audit, with my own answers

• The flowchart I run on anything that makes me feel stuck

What high agency actually means

The term was popularised by George Mack, who wrote a long essay called High Agency which takes about thirty minutes of your time to go through. And trust me, it is worth the thirty minutes.

Mack’s version goes something like this. High agency is a mix of three things: clear thinking, a bias to action, and being willing to be a bit disagreeable when it matters. The way I’ve always put it is simpler. High agency is believing that you happen to life, rather than life happening to you. The ability to act without permission.

He has a test I think about a lot. If you were locked up in a jail abroad and had one phone call, who would you ring? Not the cleverest person you know. Not the richest. The one who would actually get you out. That person is high agency.

I’ve written about the high agency mindset before, mostly as a way of thinking about your career. Today I want to apply it to money, because I’ve become convinced it is the highest-return thing you can own. It costs nothing to acquire and it pays out for the rest of your life.

Below the line for paid readers: the five signs in full, the asks that pay better than any fund (with the sums), the Agency Audit with my own answers, and the flowchart I now run on anything that makes me feel stuck.

Low agency, high agency

Low agency with money sounds like this.

“I’m so bad with money.”

“I wasn’t taught any of this.”

“Money is for rich people.”

“That’s just what it costs.”

“I’ll sort it out later.”

Every one of those has the same shape underneath: these are my circumstances, and they’re never going to change. It’s a victim mindset, and I say that with love, because I lived in it for years. It feels like being realistic but it’s actually a loop.

High agency people might not have had a privileged starting point either. The difference is that they know the information is out there, and they go and get it. They do what they can from where they are. They negotiate the salary, the rent, the phone bill. They don’t rely on one income. They read the thing instead of waiting for someone to explain it.

Now what high agency isn’t, because this part gets misread.

It isn’t hustle culture. You don’t have to monetise your Sundays or get up at five to qualify. Some of the most high agency people I know are extremely lazy about the things that don’t matter.

It isn’t pretending the playing field is level, because it isn’t. Some people got a head start, a deposit, a surname, an invisible leg up. High agency is seeing exactly where your start line was and running anyway. Not denying the start lines exist.

It isn’t doing everything yourself because, don’t get me wrong, financial advisers are great. High agency is knowing enough to ask them a good question, and to know whether you need one at all.

And it isn’t blaming yourself for everything. Low agency says “it’s all my circumstances”. The opposite of that is not “it’s all my fault”. It’s “what, in all of this, is actually in my hands?”

The Frugal Chic® rule: Your starting point matters but it doesn’t have to dictate the rest of your life.

Read more

And because money isn’t sexy, the conversation often gets postponed. It waits for a milestone, like moving in together or buying a home, otherwise it never gets scheduled at all. The issue is that one day your partner mentions their savings in passing and you’re hit with shock, in one direction or the other.

Most couples think they’re fine. When Legal & General asked 3,000 people in relationships last year, 86% said they had a healthy approach to talking about money. In the same survey, 17% admitted they avoid the subject altogether. And in a confused.com poll earlier this year, almost half of people said they’d lied to a partner about money, mostly about spending, debt or salary.

That’s money on mute. Everything is fine until the moment it very much isn’t, and by then the sofa, the tenancy and sometimes the mortgage are already joint. So let’s turn the sound back on.

In this issue:

• Why “later” is the most expensive word in a relationship

• Why I still split everything 50/50 even though I earn more

• What fair actually means, including the pink tax

• No such thing as a free lunch: the rule I still live by

• The five questions to put on the table this week

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1. “Later” is the most expensive word in a relationship

Money comes up late because it’s awkward early. By the time it does, you’ve usually already committed to something, so you find things out late. The debt you didn’t know about or the savings that are a fraction of what you assumed, or ten times yours. Two completely different ideas of what “sorted” means.

Is money really the thing that ends relationships? I checked rather than assumed, and the honest answer is: not quite. When Divorce-Online surveyed 500 of its own clients, simply falling out of love came top, with a partner being bad with money second. What the research does agree on is that money is the thing couples argue about most. Royal London found people would rather discuss childcare, sex or household chores with their partner than money.

It’s rarely the amount that does the damage but more so that nobody said anything out loud.

One more thing, because I know a lot of you live with a partner you aren’t married to. There’s no such thing as a common law marriage in England and Wales, however long you’ve been together, even though nearly half of us believe there is. The government only started consulting on changing that this summer. Until it does, the conversation itself is the protection.

The Frugal Chic® rule: Money isn’t the most important thing in a relationship. Being financially aligned is.

2. Why I still split everything 50/50

I made a video recently about why I still split expenses 50/50 with my partner, even though I now earn more than him and it divided people. The more traditional camp thought he should be paying for everything. Another camp thought I should be paying a bigger share.

Here’s the context. I spent over a year building a side hustle alongside a very demanding 9-to-5 in fashion, five days a week in the office. I filmed in the mornings, in the evenings and at weekends, and basically gave up my free time for a year. At the start it made nothing but now it’s my business. Splitting 50/50 is simply what works in my relationship.

But there’s no right or wrong here. For plenty of couples, splitting in proportion to income makes far more sense and feels far more fair. In the same Confused.com poll, 36% of couples split their bills equally and 23% split them in proportion to salary. Both are fine. The only wrong version is the one nobody actually chose and/or felt forced into.

3. What fair actually means

Fair isn’t always monetary, and it isn’t always about salary.

Start with invisible labour. Who does more of the household tasks? Who carries the mental list? If one of you earns a bit more and the other does most of the running of the house, 50/50 on the bills isn’t the whole picture in a relationship.

Then there’s net worth, not just income. Say you’re both on entry-level salaries, but one of you has an inheritance or family money behind you. Splitting 50/50 looks equal on paper. Over the years…it isn’t. That doesn’t automatically mean the person with more should pay more, but it should be the start of a conversation instead of an assumption.

And I’ll say this part to the women reading, because that’s mostly who I’m speaking to. Being a woman is more expensive, and most of the cost is quiet. We end up with smaller pensions: the government’s own figures put the typical private pension for women aged 55 to 59 at £81,000, against £156,000 for men.

We also pay the pink tax on products that are the same thing in a different colour. We pay for safety, like the cab home after a late date that he doesn’t have to think about. Plan International UK found young women spending an average of £44 a month on taxis just to get home safely. Then there’s beauty and fashion, an entire industry marketed at us.

None of that is an excuse for men to pay for everything. However, it’s an argument for putting all of it on the table when you work out what fair looks like for the two of you.

4. No such thing as a free lunch

When I was growing up, my parents always said there’s no such thing as a free lunch.They meant that nothing in life is ever truly free.

Not that everything is a transaction, or that generosity always has strings. But if someone pays for your entire meal and all of your drinks, there’s a chance they expect something back: that you’ll be nice about it, that you’ll come for one more after. And as a woman who thinks about safety, I don’t think having someone pay for your entire existence is very safe.

Paying your own way is incredibly empowering. It means you’re never obligated to go along with something you’re not happy with, not that you would be anyway. I’ve said this on TikTok before and I’ll keep saying it: you need to have your own money. If you meet someone who earns more than you, that’s a bonus.

It’s also why I’m wary of the hypergamy and tradwife content everywhere right now. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with one partner staying at home, or with a partner being generous because there isn’t. The tricky part is relying solely on someone else for income, however much you love them. Surviving Economic Abuse found one in seven UK women had experienced economic abuse from a partner or ex in a single year, and nearly a quarter of them said it stopped them from leaving.

For me this isn’t really about relationships at all. It’s about not being too dependent on anything. I moved out of my parents’ home when I didn’t have to, and they weren’t charging me rent. I wanted to pay my own way and understand my own expenses, and I grew up a lot faster for it.

5. The five questions to put on the table

The most important thing isn’t which system you pick. It’s that you picked it, together, out loud. If you’ve never had the conversation, this is where I’d start:

• What do we each earn, owe and own? The whole picture, including the bits that feel awkward.

• How do we split things, and does that split still make sense?

• Who does the unpaid work, and does the money reflect it?

• What happens if one of us stops earning for a while?

• What are we each working towards, and does the other one know?

Nobody enjoys this conversation the first time. The second one is easier, and by the third it’s just a chat you have periodically.

This week, do one thing

Think about it and pick one question from the list but don’t lead with the one that feels like it’s the most difficult. Ask it this week, somewhere relaxed, and let the answer be whatever it is. You’re not negotiating anything yet, you’re just turning the sound back on.

That’s all this week,

Mia xx

P.S. Every one of those five questions is an ask, and asking is a skill most of us were never taught. On Wednesday, paid subscribers get the high agency breakdown: why being willing to ask, push back and go first is the highest-return thing you own, and the specific asks that pay better than any fund. I can’t wait to share it all with you.

I’m 25 and I have multiple six figures saved and invested. The sums matter, and I write about them every week. But the sums came after the my money beliefs started shifting, and if you asked me what changed everything, I’d start here.

So I thought it would be helpful if I shared with you the money beliefs list. The four things I will never say to myself about money, what each one is really saying, what I say instead, and the rewrite to run on your own sentences, because I’m quite sure you have some too.

In this issue:

• The four sentences I’ve banned, and what each one is really saying

• What I say instead, word for word

• The money mantras log: old sentence, new sentence, what changes

• The £100 test: how to tell “I can’t afford it” from “I don’t want it”

• The one I used to say

• Why normal is the wrong target, and who to compare yourself to instead

• The rewrite: the log to run on your own sentences

• Where it goes wrong

The four sentences

If you’ve heard me say these before you’ll know them. If not, this is the whole list in four lines:

1. “I’m broke.” Said most often by people who aren’t.

2. “I can’t afford to.” A statement instead of a challenge (“Can I afford to…?”)

3. “Doing that by 25 isn’t normal.” Despite it being true, it’s not the point.

4. “Must be nice.” The one I used to tell myself.

Identifying this list is the easy part. Anyone can stop saying four sentences for a week. The hard part is what you say instead, because if you don’t give your head a replacement it goes straight back to the old one.

Read more

You know that moment when someone drops a link to a villa and everyone else replies with the heart eyed emoji. Before you even get the chance to think about the trip plan that is so quickly developing, there’s a deposit deadline, and you’re doing maths in your head…and somehow, even if it’s not budgeted for you find yourself typing “omg YES”.

If that sounds familiar, you’re in good company. When Aviva asked people who’d been to someone else’s hen or stag do, around a third said they’d turned an invitation down, and in nearly eight out of ten cases the reason was money. Some of them didn’t tell the host that. they gave a different excuse instead.

That’s the bit I want to discuss today. Not the saying no part, you’re allowed to say no, it’s actually good because you’re staying true to your goals if the trip, night out or even Secret Santa didn’t make the cut in your budget.

I want to help you deal with the “making something up” part. December’s invitations are about to land, so here are some things you can say instead of fabricated information.

In this issue:

• The one rule that makes a “no” land softly

• Scripts for seven of the priciest invitations, from the split bill to the wedding abroad

• Three ways to say each one: a soft no, a counter offer and a firm no

• The three habits that turn a no into an excuse

  

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1. Swap the excuse for an alternative

An excuse closes the door to plans. When you say “I’m busy”, that tells your friend nothing, and if they find out you weren’t busy, it tells them something worse.

An alternative keeps the door open. It says: “I want to be part of X, I just don’t want this price tag.” Most friends only ever needed to hear the first half.

Every script below comes in three versions. The soft no is warm, brief and drama free. The counter offer says no to the plan and yes to the person. The firm no is for the second or third time of asking. You will know your friendship dynamics best so pick the one that fits each friend or friend group.

The Frugal Chic® rule: Say no to the plan, not the person.

Ever wondered why making up an excuse feels easier than saying “I can’t afford it”? Usually it’s a line someone handed us years ago. “It’s rude to talk about money.” “Don’t be tight.”

2. The everyday plans

These are the small ones, and they add up fastest, because they can happen every week. If you have a group of work colleagues, this can occur multiple times a week: going out for food during your lunch break, going out for drinks after your shift is over and going out during the weekend.

The group dinner where you split the bill

• Soft no: “I’m in! I’m keeping things light this month though, so I’ll just pay for what I have.”

• Counter offer: “Could we try (cheaper restaurant) instead? I’d love to come and it’s much more my budget right now.”

• Firm no: “I’m going to sit this one out, I hope you have the best night.”

The friend who always picks the expensive place

• Soft no: “Do you mind if I choose next time? I’ve found somewhere you’ll love.”

• Counter offer: “I’m in for dinner, but can we do [place] instead? It’s more my speed at the moment.”

• Firm no: “I love seeing you, but I can’t keep doing places like this every time. Let’s find somewhere that works for both of us.”

“Just come for one”

• Soft no: “We both know one is never one with us! Next time.”

• Counter offer: “I’m heading home, but come round for breakfast on Saturday.”

• Firm no: “Not tonight. I’ve told myself I’m having an early night and I’m sticking to it, but I love that you asked.”

3. The big celebrations

Aviva put the average spend on someone else’s hen or stag do at £779 in the UK and £1,208 abroad. That’s a lot to hand over for a weekend you only said yes to because you felt you had to.

The hen do or the wedding abroad

• Soft no: “I would love to celebrate you, but a trip abroad isn’t in my budget this year. I’ll be at the wedding with bells on.”

• Counter offer: “I can’t do the whole weekend, but could I join for the Saturday? Or let me take you out for dinner before, just the two of us.”

• Firm no: “I can’t make the hen, but I’m so excited for the wedding.”

The birthday with a price tag

• Soft no: “I can’t stretch to the (bottomless brunch) this time, but I really want to see you for your birthday.”

• Counter offer: “Can I take you for a birthday coffee the week after? My treat.”

• Firm no: “I’ll miss this one, but I’ll be raising a glass to you from the sofa.”

4. The Christmas season

This is the hardest one to say no to because everyone loves the festive season. You meet up with people you haven’t seen for months, or all year maybe, and it almost feels illegal to say no to. It’s the end of the year break we are all looking forward to. If you want to change the trajectory of your spending this year, put these in your Notes app now because you’ll need them by November.

Secret Santa

• Soft no: “Could we do a £20 limit this year? I think a few of us would be quietly grateful.”

• Counter offer: “What about a secondhand Santa? Everything has to come from a charity/vintage shop. I think it would make it more fun.”

• Firm no: “I’m going to sit Secret Santa out this year, but I’m bringing the mince pies.”

Work drinks and the collection

• Soft no: “I’ll come for the first one, but I’ll get my own rather than go in on rounds if that’s okay.”

• Counter offer: “Could we do a team lunch next time? Easier for everyone to get to.”

• Firm no: “I’ve signed the card and put in what I can, I need to stick to my budget.”

5. Stop explaining, apologising and inventing

• Over-explaining. The longer your reason, the more room there is to argue with it. “I can’t, money’s a bit tight” is a full sentence. A three-minute voice note about your car insurance renewal is an open invitation for someone to offer to pay, or to fix your budget for you. It’s also an opportunity, for someone else who knows nothing about your budget, to say: “You only live once, you’ll miss out on so much fun.”

• Apologising. “Sorry, sorry, I feel so bad” tells your friend you’ve done something wrong, but you haven’t. Swap “sorry I can’t come” for “thank you so much for inviting me”. It’s the same message, shows gratitude, but sends off a completely different energy.

• Making things up. This is the one from the Aviva survey, and I get it. I’ve done it myself. But “I’m busy” only works once. Next time they pick another date, then another, and eventually you run out of either excuses or money. The truth, said lightly, is the only “no” you never have to top up.

Bonus: you’re the only one who needs to live with the consequences of saying “yes”

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about FOMO: it’s usually someone else’s feeling, and you’re the one who ends up paying for it.

“You’ll regret it”, “Everyone’s going”, “When will we ever get to do this again?” I know these lines well, because at one point I’ve said them myself. They work because they make missing out feel bigger than the money. But once the weekend is over, the group chat moves on to the next thing, the only person still living with the consequences of that yes is you, when the credit card statement lands in January.

And I don’t think most friends mean any harm. Nearly every invitation comes from a good place. They want you there, but they don’t know what’s going on in your finances, and they don’t know what you’re working towards. Maybe you’re building an emergency fund, or you’ve just started investing, maybe you’re saving for a house deposit, or you’re paying off a card and finally watching the balance go down. None of that is in the group chat, and it doesn’t need to be.

That’s why protecting your goals can’t be their job, i’s yours. Being accountable to yourself means your "no” doesn’t need anyone else’s approval. You’re not letting your friends down, even though you feel like you do. Your job is to keep a promise to the version of you who set those goals in the first place.

So say it with confidence, you don’t owe anyone a long explanation, and you definitely don’t owe them your house deposit.

This week, do one thing

Find the invitation you’ve been avoiding replying to. Pick a script, change two words so it sounds like you, and send it today.

The key takeaway here is: a no with an alternative beats a no with an excuse. The friends worth keeping don’t want you in the group chat because you always say yes. They want you there because you’re you.

And the version of you who isn’t quietly panicking about her overdraft in January is a much better friend to have.

That’s all this week,

Mia xx

P.S. "You only live once." "You can't take it with you." "Treat yourself, you deserve it." Half the pressure in the group chat comes from lines like these, and most of us picked them up long before we had a bank account. On Wednesday, paid subscribers get my money mantras post: the things we tell ourselves and the things other people tell us about money, how they shape what we believe, and how to rewrite the ones that are costing you. If you've been meaning to upgrade, you’ll love this one.

It’s the delivery fee on a Tuesday because you’re tired, the taxi home when the bus would have been just fine, the insurance you let roll over because the renewal email looked long and you promised yourself you’ll tackle later, the savings account you opened years ago and haven’t looked at since.

None of those feel like much. Together, they’re one of the biggest bills most people pay, but it never arrives as a bill.

If you read Sunday’s post on having an expensive aura without spending money, you’ll know I think the most expensive-looking thing you can be is intentional. This is the money version of that. Comfort isn’t the problem. Comfort you never actively chose is.

In this issue:

• Why the convenience tax is actually two taxes, not one

• What happens to your money when you get too comfortable

• What it adds up to over a year, and over ten

• Framework 1: the three-colour audit

• Framework 2: the hour test

• Framework 3: the friction rule

• Framework 4: Switch Day, with my checklist and the exact words I use on the phone

• The comfort test for anything new

• Where it goes wrong

It’s actually two taxes, not one

When people talk about paying for convenience, they usually mean the obvious stuff. However, there are two very different things going on, and they need different fixes.

The ease tax is what you pay so you don’t have to do something. Delivery instead of cooking, an Uber instead of the bus, next-day shipping instead of waiting. You’re paying someone else for the effort. I am the first to admit that sometimes that’s a brilliant trade but I can put my hands up and also admit that sometimes it’s just habit.

The inertia tax is what you pay because you didn’t do something. The savings account paying next to nothing, the subscription that renewed, the contract you’re still on two years after it ended, the insurance that went up because you didn’t get a quote. You’re not paying for anyone’s effort here, you’re paying for not looking close enough.

The ease tax at least buys you something. The inertia tax buys you nothing at all, and it’s usually the bigger of the two.

What happens when you get too comfortable

Small costs go invisible. A £14 subscription doesn’t feel like money. But the government estimates people in the UK spend £1.6 billion a year on subscriptions they no longer want, at an average of around £14 a month each. Nobody decides to waste that. It just keeps leaving the account while you’re busy.

Defaults are designed for the company, not for you. The standard savings account, the rollover tariff, the renewal quote. Bank of England figures show around £306 billion sitting in UK accounts that pay no interest at all, and AJ Bell estimates that money is missing out on more than £12 billion a year compared with an account paying 4%. When Hargreaves Lansdown asked savers why they don’t switch, 11% said they probably should but can’t be bothered. If I was to summarise it, that’s the inertia tax in one sentence.

Your baseline creeps up. Convenience starts as a treat and quietly becomes normal. Once a Tuesday delivery is normal, cooking feels like effort, and effort starts to feel like deprivation. That’s how a £25 habit ends up feeling like a need or a well deserved treat.

Comfort gets into your career too. Staying in a role because it’s easy, not asking for the pay rise, never checking what the market pays for what you do. That’s often the biggest convenience tax of all, and it never shows up on a bank statement.

What it actually adds up to

Here’s a fairly ordinary version. There is nothing extravagant here, just four things that don’t feel like big decisions but will make a difference in your finances.

• Two takeaway deliveries a week at around £25, against roughly £8 to cook something similar at home: £1,768 a year.

• Three subscriptions you don’t really use, at £14 a month each: £504 a year.

• A £10,000 emergency fund sitting at 0% instead of in an account paying 4%: £400 a year.

• Letting the car insurance auto-renew instead of getting quotes, say £150 more than you needed to pay: £150 a year.

That’s £2,822 a year and about £235 a month, gone on things you never actually chose.

Now say you redirected it instead, and it grew at 5% a year. After ten years, that’s roughly £35,500. Same person, same salary, same life. The only difference is a few afternoons of admin and fewer deliveries.

That’s what I mean when I say comfort is expensive. It isn’t the odd £25, it’s the £25 on repeat, with nothing working for you in the background.

There are some easy ways in which you can tackle this and make the convenience tax lower for you.

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The expensive trip you mostly booked to post about when you’re there. The designer label with its exposed logo. The thing you bought because the influencer showing it off on social media looked so put together.

I don’t think any of that is what makes someone seem expensive. I think it comes down to the way you carry yourself and the choices you make, and almost none of it costs anything.

These are the five things I’d work on first.

In this issue:

• Why cheap and frugal are not the same thing, and what that has to do with saying no

• The £100 cardigan that looks more expensive than the £200 t-shirt

• The speaking habit that makes people listen

• What the research actually says about posture and confidence

• The £420 toothbrush, and why the basics still win

• A bonus: the one meeting you should never cancel.

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Get comfortable saying no

First thing we need to establish: cheap and frugal are not the same thing.

Being cheap is choosing the lowest price every single time. Sometimes that’s fine, and sometimes the cheapest option really is the best one. But often it’s worth paying for quality, and life is for living. Putting a harsh filter on every purchase can quickly get restrictive.

Being frugal is knowing what is and isn’t worth your money. It’s the splurge and save list: once you know where you splurge and where you save, anything on the save list gets a comfortable no.

And that no is a muscle. The more you use it on spending, the easier it gets everywhere else. I am not going to lie, I have people-pleasing tendencies. I say yes to things out of guilt, things I don’t want to do, and then I resent myself for being spread too thin.

So practise the short version. Not a no with a long explanation attached. Just no. It shows you respect your own time, money and attention, and that is what reads as expensive. It also builds taste, because taste is mostly a list of things you turned down.

2. Develop an eye for quality

Think of it like this: you could be wearing a cheaply made, flashy logo t-shirt that cost £200 or you could be wearing a cashmere cardigan that cost £100, and it will look infinitely more expensive. People can tell, even when they can’t say why.

We’ve spoken about the care label many times, but the care label doesn’t tell you everything. Look at the seams, look at how the fabric drapes, on the hanger and on you.

This isn’t about becoming a designer overnight. It’s about taking a real interest in how things are made. I guess this mostly applies to clothes, but it works on furniture, bags, shoes, anything you’d otherwise judge by the logo or the price tag.

3. Slow down when you speak

Most of us rush what we’re saying. I’m guilty of it, usually because I’ve decided for myself that the other person is getting bored.

You should try speaking more slowly. Not monotone, just unhurried. People pay more attention to someone who isn’t racing to the end of the sentence, because it sounds like you expect to be listened to.

People often tell me I’m articulate, and I think it comes from two habits, both of which are free.

The first one is reading. I’m not the biggest reader, but I studied English Literature and I’ve read a lot of the classics. It doesn’t have to be books. Newspapers, long articles, Substack. Reading consistently keeps putting new vocabulary in front of you, and it turns up later when you need it.

The second one is writing. However, I am not exclusively talking about articles. A journal or a diary is enough. Writing makes me go through my thoughts properly, and once I’ve done that on paper, I say it more clearly out loud.

4. Fix your posture

I always forget this one, and it might be the most important. We think confidence starts on the inside and then shows up in the body. Sometimes it’s the other way around. You do the action, and the feeling follows.

I wanted to check this wasn’t pseudoscience, so I looked it up. The famous version, the power pose that changes your hormones, didn’t hold up, however, the simple version did.

A 2022 review of around 130 experiments and 10,000 people found that sitting or standing upright makes people feel more confident. It’s a feeling, not a hormone. The feeling is the bit I wanted anyway.

So sit up, shoulders back, chin level, take up the space you’re in. Good posture makes you look more expensive and feel it too, and it doesn’t cost anything.

5. Go back to basics

A lot of what we buy is an attempt to purchase an outcome. The classic example right now is the £420 Dyson toothbrush. It has a camera in it and it jets between your teeth while you brush, which makes it, more or less, a very clever water flosser. What it’s really selling is the idea of perfect health.

It’s the same with supplements and most of the wellness aisle. The best thing you can do is usually the boring things. Eight hours of sleep. A decent number of steps, and it doesn’t have to be 10,000. That number came from a 1960s Japanese pedometer advert, and the biggest review so far puts most of the benefit at around 7,000.

Eat your skincare before you apply it: carrots, vegetables, protein. Your body makes its own collagen out of what you eat, so start there before you buy it in a tub.

I like a bit of skincare. You just don’t need a ten-step routine.

None of this is about doing less, or less being better. You can be a maximalist in style and still be Frugal Chic®. It’s about not patching the need to feel put together with a purchase, because you likely already have what you need: a simple makeup routine, the few skincare products that really work on you, and a good quality wardrobe.

Bonus: keep the promises you make to yourself

You wouldn’t cancel a work meeting ten minutes before it starts. So why is it fine to cancel on yourself?

The gym session you booked or the plan to start waking up earlier. The hour you set aside to work on your business, even the walk you said you’d take yourself on. We treat those as optional because nobody else is waiting for us to turn up.

But you notice.

Every time you go back on your word to yourself, you trust yourself a little less, and that shows. The people who seem expensive are usually the ones who do what they said they’d do, including when nobody’s checking.

So put it in the calendar like a meeting, and turn up like there’s someone waiting, and there is. First and foremost, you are the person who you need to make proud and show up for.

This week, do one thing

Say one “no” this week with no explanation attached. It can be saying no to a purchase, a plan, a favour. Just a simple “no, thank you”. Then notice how little happens next.

The key takeaway here is: looking expensive has very little to do with spending. It’s the way you carry yourself, the way you speak, and what you say yes and no to.

None of that is for sale, which is the whole point.

That’s all this week,

Mia xx

P.S. Wednesday's post is the practical half of this one: how to say no to expensive plans without losing friends. Scripts for the plans that cost the most, from the split bill to the wedding abroad, each in three versions: a soft no, a counter offer and a firm no. Plus the three habits that make a no sound like an excuse. December's invitations are about to land, so if you've been meaning to upgrade, this is the week to do it.

It’s September and so far I’ve bought six.

On paper that’s a win. However, I’ve spent all year telling you to check your cost per wear before you buy, and I’ve never once sat down and worked it out on my own purchases. So this is the log. Every item, what I paid, how many times it’s been out of the wardrobe, which ones I regret, and the sum that made the regret cheaper than it should have been.

In this issue:

• The six items, in order, and what I actually paid

• The log: cost per wear on every one, and the wears each still needs

• The sum most people miss: what buying secondhand does to the real cost

• The two purchases I regret

• Marking myself against my own five rules

• Why 12 was the wrong number, and what to set instead

• The low-buy log template, to copy for your own year

• Where it goes wrong

The rules I set myself

If you’ve followed the challenge on TikTok you’ll know these. If not, this is the whole system in five lines.

1. Secondhand first. Vinted, eBay, vintage, before anything new.

2. Never pay full price. If it has to be new, there’s a sale, a code, or an email sign-up for at least 10% off.

3. The 30-day wish list. Write down the date you first wanted it. If you still want it 30 days later, you can buy it.

4. Cost per wear under £5. The price, divided by the number of times you’ll realistically wear it. Occasion wear almost never passes.

5. One in, one out. Something leaves for everything that arrives.

The rules are the easy part but the log is where you find out whether you actually kept them.

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It isn’t true, you wore autumn last year and you have the clothes. What you don’t have yet is a plan for using them, and the plan is the bit the shops would rather you skipped.

I worked in fashion for a few years before any of this, and I’m nine months into a low-buy year . So this is the wardrobe version of last week’s lock-in : five rules for the season, and none of them start with buying something.

In this issue:

• The summer declutter to do this week, while you still remember what you wore

• Why I wear brown, not burgundy, and what that has to do with your money

• The four jumpers I actually wore last autumn, and the six I got rid of

• Which fibres are worth paying for once it gets cold

• How to plan an investment piece so it’s not an impulse

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Declutter summer now, while it’s still fresh

This is what I am always trying to do before the weather does it for me. After I spent three months in my summer wardrobe, I know exactly which pieces earned their place and which sat there looking hopeful.

I keep a small capsule for holidays and I’m strict with it. Anything I’ve accumulated and haven’t worn this summer gets moved on: sold, donated, passed to a friend. It’s ok to let it go. I’d rather have a curated wardrobe than a full one.

The next thing I do is store what stays in one place and out of reach. This can look like a case under the bed, vacuum bags or the top shelf. You shouldn’t be looking at linen trousers in November, and you shouldn’t be buying a third pair of sandals next May because you forgot about the first two you already have.

Don’t default to burgundy

Every autumn there’s a colour you’re told is essential and that’s usually burgundy. From what I remember, it was burgundy last year too.

I personally prefer brown. It goes with more of what I already own, it suits me better, and I’ll still be wearing it in five years. So that’s what I wear, and no amount of styling videos will change it.

That’s the whole thinking process you should have before you rush out to shop. Not “is this the autumn colour” but “is this my colour”. If someone has to convince you that you need something, you most likely don’t. Stick to your personal style, it’s cheaper, and it’s the reason your photos from three years ago still look good.

Ignore the “new season, new wardrobe” propaganda

You do not need a new set of clothes every six months, nobody does. “New season, new wardrobe” is part of a marketing calendar, not a real one, that you need to adhere to.

So before you buy anything, work out what you actually wore last autumn. I do this through photos. I film myself most days when I create content so I scrolled back to last October and counted. The same four or five jumpers, on repeat, for three months.

Meanwhile there were another six in the drawer that I was keeping just in case and I decided to declutter those last month. Just in case, most of the time, doesn’t come around.

You’ll find the same, I promise. The pieces you love get worn to death and the pieces you bought for a version of yourself that doesn’t exist sit in the drawer. Start the season from your four pieces, not from zero.

The Frugal Chic® rule: you don’t need a new wardrobe every season, you just need the four pieces you always grab anyway.

Natural fibres, more than ever

Natural fibres matter all year, but as it gets colder they stop being a preference and start being the difference between warm and not warm. Wool, heavy cotton knits, cashmere. Alpaca or mohair if you want something more interesting texturally.

Acrylic and polyester don’t breathe, they pill within a season, and they’re why a £20 jumper feels like a £20 jumper by November. You should always check the label before you check the price. A secondhand 100% wool jumper for £15 will outlast a new acrylic one for £40, and look better doing it.

Plan your investment pieces, and be honest about what that actually looks like

I wrote recently about whether your clothes are actually investments, and the short version is that most of them aren’t. An investment goes up in value, whereas a blazer goes down the moment you wear it. The only way it earns the word is if you wear it constantly, or you do the cost-per-wear maths and it comes out cheaper than the fast version.

So if there’s a dream piece this autumn, a coat, a blazer, proper boots, plan it. Decide what it is, find out what it costs, and divide that by the paydays between now and when you actually need it. Mid-range, female-founded brands like GROES and Odd Muse put a blazer somewhere around £150 to £250, which is three paydays of £60, rather than one impulse and a credit card.

Then it goes on the list instead of placing it in the basket straight away. If you still want it in December, it’s the one thing you buy, with a clear head, with money that’s already sitting there.

The capsule maths

This is the bit nobody selling you a new wardrobe wants you to work out. Four jumpers, three bottoms and two coats is nine pieces. It’s also twenty-four outfits, before you touch a scarf or a belt. Add one blazer and it’s thirty-six.

A small wardrobe where everything goes with everything makes more outfits than a full one where nothing does. That’s what a capsule is. Not fewer clothes for the sake of it, but more outfits per pound.

This week, do one thing

Go through your camera roll from last October and count the jumpers you have. Write the number down. That’s your autumn wardrobe, and it’s probably smaller and better than you think.

Everything else is just the shops talking.

That’s all this week,

Mia xx

P.S. Wednesday's post is the one I've been thinking about writing for a little while. The full 2026 low-buy log: every item, every price, every wear count, plus the tracker I use so you can run your own numbers. It's for paid subscribers only, and if you've been meaning to upgrade, this is the week to do it.

Ask them again in a year, once they’ve got the bit more, and you’ll get the same answer.

I know, because I used to have a similar answer. On my old salary I had a number in my head, and every time I got close to it, it moved. Then I made over £100k profit in my first full year as a creator and the number stopped moving. For the first time I’d actually worked out what enough was, and it was a lot smaller than what I was earning.

If you read Wednesday’s Financial lock-in and worked out your Christmas number, this is the bigger version of that sum. But this is not just for December, it’s for your your life.

In this issue:

• What the research actually says about money and happiness (three studies that disagree)

• Golden handcuffs, lifestyle creep, and the time you’re really spending

• Leverage: the three ways to earn without trading hours for it

• The enough line, turned into a number

• My enough number, my FIRE number and my Coast FI number, worked out line by line

• The enough test for any upgrade

• Where it goes wrong

Obviously, nothing in this post is financial advice. It's how I think about my own money and how I work out my own numbers, and it depends entirely on your circumstances.

Does money actually make you happy?

Depends who you ask, and what season of life each person is in.

• In 2010, two Nobel prize winners, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, went through 450,000 survey responses and found that day-to-day happiness (how people said they’d actually felt the day before) rose with income up to about $75,000 a year, then stopped. Above that, more money didn’t make anyone feel better on an ordinary Tuesday. It did make them rate their lives more highly when asked, which is a different thing. That study became the version everyone knows: past a certain point, money stops mattering.1

• In 2021, a researcher called Matthew Killingsworth pinged 33,000 working adults on their phones, 1.7 million times in total, and asked how they felt right then. Happiness kept rising with income. No plateau at $75,000, and none at $200,000 either. But, and this is the part everyone skips, it rose with each doubling of income. Going from £30,000 to £60,000 gave people about the same lift as going from £60,000 to £120,000. Every step up costs twice as much as the last one.2

• So in 2023 the two sides did something academics almost never do and published a joint answer. Both had been right, for different people. For the unhappiest fifth, the plateau was real: money helped up to about $100,000 and then stopped, because whatever was making them unhappy wasn’t something money could fix. For everyone else, happiness kept climbing with income. For the happiest 30%, it climbed faster.3

Here’s how I read all of that, having now lived on both sides of the first number. The first money changes everything: rent covered, no dread when a bill lands, a buffer in the account. The next money changes less, and each lift costs twice as much as the one before. And the money after that changes almost nothing unless you’ve decided what it’s for. Which is the bit almost nobody does.

When my income increased, I had the luxury to choose what I believed beneficial to splurge on, at what to save on. Some of the things I started doing have been things like getting more taxis especially for safety, I wouldn’t look at the bill when eating out because I’d made a conscious choice to splurge on that area. Also, I go to a luxury gym.

But there’s a lot that didn’t change: I didn’t upgrade my rent, I wear the same clothes, I didn’t buy anything designer but I do have a nice leather handbag already from Demellier.

Work actually allows me to live a more luxurious life because I sometimes go on work trips, meals and brand events. This actually means I feel less inclined to splurge on those things since my work is so intertwined with lifestyle. It obviously took me a while to get there.

Golden handcuffs you put on yourself

Lifestyle creep is what happens to the money in between. You go from £2,000 a month to £2,600 and the extra £600 doesn’t go anywhere you decided. It goes into a slightly nicer flat, a slightly nicer car, the Netflix subscription, a nicer gym membership, the eating out, until you’re earning 30% more and feel exactly the same as before.

Then comes the part nobody warns you about. Every one of those upgrades has to be paid for again next month, and the month after. So the job has to be kept, the hours have to be kept, and the pay rise you were so pleased about has quietly become the minimum you can now afford to earn.

That’s golden handcuffs. Most people think it’s something big companies do to you, but it isn’t. You lock them yourself, one upgrade at a time, trading more and more of your time to keep up with a life you might not even value.

The sum I want you to do:

Every £100 a month you add to your lifestyle is £1,200 a year you have to earn after tax. On a basic rate salary that’s roughly £1,700 before tax and National Insurance, more again if you’re still paying off a student loan. If you take home £3,000 a month, it’s about eight working days of your year, every year, for as long as you keep it. And if you ever want that £100 covered without working for it, you need about £30,000 invested to pay it. (more on that sum in a minute.)

Do that for the car finance, for the gym you don’t go to, for the flat that’s £300 more than the one you’d have been happy in. The more you spend, the more you have to earn, and the more of your time you have to trade for it. You don’t lose your freedom when you earn more, but you lose it when you spend more.

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Here’s the thing: the shops are right.

Financially savvy people have been putting a little aside every month since January. If you haven’t started yet, September is the last month where catching up is still easy. Three paydays go a long way.

So this is the autumn lock-in, 2026 edition. Same idea as last year, but this time the whole thing points at one goal: walking into Christmas with the money already there.

In this issue:

• Why September is the right month to reset your money, not January

• How to work out your Christmas number in ten minutes

• The pot, the standing order and where to keep it

• The conversations to have now, not on the 20th

• What to cull so the pot fills itself

• The autumn spending traps that undo all of it

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Why September instead of January

I wrote about this in Know your financial season. Just like you have seasons in your life where you focus on various priorities, your money has seasons too. Summer is for experiences, winter is for friends and family, autumn is the build season or the “lock in” season as Gen Z loves to call it, when you set the money up so that winter runs itself.

January resets tend to fail because by the time a new year unfolds the damage is already done. September gives you three paydays before Christmas. That’s enough to make a change.

1. Work out your Christmas number

Christmas is the most predictable expense of the year, and it still catches people out.

Nearly one in five UK adults borrowed money to cover Christmas 2025, mostly for presents. The Bank of England estimates households spend around £700 more in December than in a normal month.

It isn’t a surprise. It’s almost an annual subscription most people forget to budget for.

So work out yours: presents, food, travel, going out, the Christmas Party or New Year’s Eve outfit.

1. Go through last December’s statement if you need to, and write the total down.

2. Divide it by the number of paydays between now and when you want the money in hand.

If you’re paid monthly and you want it ready for December, that’s three paychecks.

That’s your monthly Christmas number.

2. Open the pot and automate it

The frugal chic® version of this is putting a little aside every month from January. If you haven’t already, September isn’t too late. It’s just a bit more per month.

• Open a separate pot and name it “Christmas Fund”.

• Set up a standing order for your monthly number, the day after payday, so it’s gone before you can spend it.

The Frugal Chic® rule: never save for Christmas in your current account. If it can be spent, it will be.

3. Decide what Christmas looks like now, not on the 20th

The pot covers the money and this covers the expectations.

In September there’s still room to have the conversations you can’t have in December.

• A secret Santa instead of buying for all eight cousins.

• A price cap with your friends.

• The adults skipping presents this year.

Nobody minds in September.

Then think about what you’d give if money wasn’t the point. A day out you plan and pay for. A printed photo in a frame. Something you cooked or wrote.

The gifts people are still talking about in the years to come and are rarely the expensive ones.

4. Cull before the pot fills

Every September I go through every direct debit and app subscription and ask one question: did I use this in August?

Not “will I use it”. Did I use it.

If not, it goes. I can always re-subscribe if there is a need for it, but most of the time, there' isn’t.

The frugal chic rule I live by is to be chic where it counts, and frugal where it doesn’t.

On that note, look for the summer subscriptions: the holiday fitness app, the second streaming service, the delivery membership you needed for that one heatwave. If this isn’t something you use regularly, get rid of it.

Whatever you cancel, redirect it straight into the Christmas pot. That almost makes the pot fill itself.

5. Watch for the autumn spending traps

I’ve been on a low-buy year since January, and for most people, September is where discipline starts to slip.

That’s not because a low-buy is deprivation. It isn’t. At least I don’t see it that way.

It often happens because after eight months of considering every purchase, a small voice says you’ve earned one impulse buy.

The weather is getting cold, you’ve been “good” for so long, the knitwear is calling.

The cosy tax: candles, new pyjamas, home décor. All of these are items you might want but there’s a recurring “need” for it every year. You should remember that last year’s pumpkin pillows are still fine and there’s nothing wrong with the pyjamas you’re wearing at the moment.

What keeps me going is remembering why I started. Spending intentionally has kept my flat clutter-free, my savings have gone up rather than just moved around, and I want less.

So write down the one thing you’re tempted by, and give it until the 1st of December, then reevaluate.

6. Plan December before December

The most expensive thing about December isn’t buying presents. It’s the six friends & family dinners, three drinks and two work parties that land in the span of three weeks.

Look at your calendar now and decide how many you’ll say yes to. Book the train while it’s a quarter of the price. These small decisions you start making now will add up by the time December comes around.

Style lens: the knit goes on the list, not in the basket

The thing I’m tempted by this autumn is knitwear: natural fibres, the kind that’s expensive to buy and lasts for years.

So it goes straight on my Christmas list. If it’s still the thing I want in December, it’s either the one gift I ask for or the one thing I buy with a clear head.

That’s how a low-buy survives autumn: the want doesn’t disappear, it just gets a date.

And if you’re the one buying it, for yourself or someone else, buy it properly.

This is something my friend actually shared with me and it’s quite an interesting fact.

It isn’t only the fibre, it’s the gauge: how densely it’s knitted. Feel the weight, hold it to the light, stretch the cuff. A dense merino outlasts a thin cashmere every time, and that’s what makes it a gift rather than a purchase.

So if you want to start your money reset in September, here’s where I’d start:

The key takeaway here is: Christmas isn't expensive. December is. Spread it across three paydays and it's just another month.

That’s all this week,

Mia xx

P.S. Wednesday's paid post is the one I've been circling for months: how much is enough? I'm going through the studies on whether money actually buys happiness (spoiler, they disagree), why lifestyle creep is just golden handcuffs you put on yourself, and how I use investing, side income and equity to stop trading every hour for every pound. If you've been meaning to upgrade, this is the one.

That might sound relaxed for someone whose entire brand is money but it’s the opposite. That one hour is the reason I’m able to leave it alone without stressing.

If you check your banking app every day and still couldn’t tell me what you’re worth, this is for you. If you read Sunday’s 30 Frugal Things I’ve Done Recently to Save Money and thought about how you can become better with money, this is the how.

In this issue:

• What I actually get paid, and how it’s split

• The accounts my money moves between

• The hour, minute by minute

• My budgeting tracker, free for paid subscribers

• How I pay myself as a limited company director, and why the numbers are what they are

  

One deliberate hour beats fifty anxious glances

The One Hour Rule is the idea I’m most known for: one focused hour a day builds more than eight distracted ones. The Money Hour is the same rule pointed at your finances. One hour per month, on the same day, in the same order, phone in another room.

Obviously, nothing in this post is financial or tax advice. It’s what I do, and it depends entirely on your circumstances.

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There’s a quiet thrill in knowing I’ve ‘hacked’ the system by doing something clever that’s maybe going to save me money, but it also might be more environmentally conscious or it might actually help me build taste.

Overall, consuming less has helped me cultivate a cleaner environment and the by-product of that is I get to save A LOT each month.

So these are some things I’ve been doing lately to save:

1. Used reusable natural loofahs I got from hotels and put them in the washing machine - they also save on soap

2. Started wearing less mascara and makeup overall - I’ve been wanting simplicity lately

3. Did at home manicure using the same set of tools

4. Left my food shop one extra day so I could get creative with the remaining ingredients and use up cupboard food

5. Wore the same silk polka dot dress to yet another event because it’s timeless and no one cares

6. I couldn’t get my hands on a certain book for a book club so I listened to an audiobook version for less £

7. I’ve been watching some silent films and films from the 40-60s as they’re public domain and free to watch. It’s a good way to test your attention span.

8. Went through all my expenses for last month in a spreadsheet to see what I actually spent on different categories

9. Brought home leftovers from a meal out because it would have been thrown away otherwise

10. Kept plastic cartons from grapes as storage for my cupboards - they work well and they’re not seen anyway

11. Swore I’d use up all the beauty products I have before buying anything new

12. For products I wasn’t a fan of, I’ll either give to friends and family or I’ll repurpose: e.g. shampoo as makeup brush cleaner, conditioner as shaving cream

13. Washing my hair at the gym 3+ a week forces me to go and it means I buy shampoo less

14. Spent more time reading Substack articles than scrolling on short form - means I’m much less influenced to buy things

15. Listened to podcasts about money and business inspire me to consume less and create more

16. Still using up razors I’ve collected from hotels to shave my legs

17. Committed to a low-buy year where I only buy one fashion item a month

18. Walks through nature - they’re free and sparked inspiration and gratitude

19. Stopped drinking alcohol (a very personal choice) but I just stopped wanting it, I realised I was only doing it to seem normal

20. Staying in most evenings - with my job I’m usually at a lot of events, conferences and speaking engagements, so time at home is sacred, plus saving money is a bonus

21. Randomly treated others because frugal ≠ stingy

22. Ruthlessly decluttered my wardrobe, because the items you own carry more weight than you realise

23. Kept my nice body creams in the living room and kitchen so I’d use them less quickly and it would be a treat (I also have dry skin so touch points are needed)

24. Burning all my scented candles to use them up (I won’t be repurchasing more). I’ll reuse the jars for cotton buds/makeup brushes

25. Made one big bolognese to eat during the week - this saved A TON

26. Switched to M&S washing up liquid- I’ve tried lots of own brands and this is the only good one

27. Switched from washing pods to laundry liquid because you can use less and choose how much you and to use

28. I started using a Stanley pour over with ground coffee instead of buying coffee pods and having a bulky machine

29. Sewed up a hole in a pair of jeans

30. Buying most of my clothing secondhand because you often get the best discounts

I get some of these are ‘normal’ but tbh I think we need a bit more normal on social media.

Hopefully this gave you some inspo.

Mia xx

P.S. Everything above is what you should do. On Wednesday, I will be going through how you can do it. I’ll be walking you through my actual monthly money routine for paid subscribers, with my real numbers, the tracker I use (yours to keep) and how I pay myself as a limited company director.

I’ve always been an optimist. That doesn’t mean I ignore the challenges, but I honestly feel (as cringe as it sounds) that if you want to achieve something, you very much can - especially in the day and age of social media and content.

Let’s take me for example, on paper, I shouldn’t be doing what I am doing. I am not a finance expert, I don’t have a finance degree I don’t have financially literate parents.

I have privileges. I lived at home for 2 years after uni, I come from a stable home with supportive parents and I grew up middle class.

But I still am a ‘normal’ person. I went to a state school, was shy growing up and didn’t have a ton of financial abundance.

Now I have:

• An £400k+ net worth

• £100k+ saved and invested

• 1m personal brand

And I’m 25.

I know this is completely unusual, but if you have an open mind and you’re actually willing to put the work in, you’re in the right place.

Today I want to break down how to achieve lucky girl syndrome.

And not in the delusional “I just sit there and everything magically works out for me” way.

I mean the kind of lucky girl syndrome where you intentionally put yourself in better rooms, around better people, with better ideas, so more opportunities can actually find you.

Because I think we need to talk about privilege differently.

Privilege isn’t always just something you are born with.

Sometimes, privilege can be created.

Read more