High ROI Living: How to Invest Your Time, Energy and Money Smarter

Your Habits Are an Investment Portfolio

Your life already has a return on investment.
You just might not like the returns.

Compound interest is touted as the 8th wonder of the world for a reason. Interest that earns interest, quietly doing the heavy lifting while most people are distracted by short-term wins.

Return on investment isn’t just a finance term. It’s how I measure my life.
What I put my time, energy, attention and money into, and what comes back because of it.

Think about it like this:
Compound interest = the mechanism (how growth actually happens)
High ROI = the filter (what you choose to invest in)

Choose better inputs (ROI) → let them repeat (compounding) → get disproportionate results.

That’s how you get 99% ahead of people your age, you choose the needle moving tasks that you want to compound.

-

When I was starting out in my early fashion career, I had zero capital, and I am not just referring to money. Sure, I was on a moderate entry level wage, but that wasn’t the issue. I had no leverage, no cultural or social capital. I was beholden to a boss, or rather 10 bosses (iykyk). I know what you’re thinking, that’s pretty standard for someone in their early 20s. But I’ve always selfishly wanted more. Eventually getting to a six-figure net worth, being my own boss, getting to 500k followers felt like a separate universe, or worse, it didn’t enter my consciousness.

Fast forward to now, I’ve built a lucrative personal brand, coined a term featured in Vogue, and I now work for myself. What shifted? It was a tiny vote everyday to build my dream life. Spending 1 hour a day making TikToks after my 9-5 seems childish and cringe. What I didn’t realise was I was building leverage, which I discussed here. Eventually my work was no longer tied to the hours I put in, it was tied to the quality of my output. I was unknowingly building a body of work, building a brand that could work for me while I slept.

Of course, I didn’t start out being my own boss, or making 5-figure months, at the time I had no clue about social media marketing (having done a fashion business course at university). However, I learnt an important lesson, that entrepreneurship doesn’t always look like a shopify store and 16 hour work days, it sometimes just looks like spending an hour of the day sharing your value with the world, in whatever format that may be.

That’s compounding in real life.

Small messy inputs, repeated daily.

-

Here’s how I live a high ROI life:

Small, messy action:
To make a positive change in our life, we always think we need this big life changing decision. The truth is, we are already voting for the kind of person we want to be with every little choice. I used to feel that to go to the gym, I had to do an hour of training, just going for a light workout wouldn’t be worthwhile. Now, I see any small contribution at the start of my fitness journey as valuable. Like investing, I’m not going to put it off just because I may not have £1,000 a month yet. I’ll start with £20 just to get the ball rolling. The payoff? An identity shift. You start to see yourself as someone who goes to the gym, who’s interested in fitness – perhaps when your prior identity didn’t align with this, it’s proving yourself wrong in the best possible way.

Unsexy habits:
When we want to improve our lives, we gravitate towards expensive LED masks, a £50 journal we may not even write in, that new £500 bag because it signals success, but the things that usually compound are the unsexy, boring purchases that we’re reluctant to make because we can’t show them off on our IG story. For example, ages ago I invested in a Tempur pillow and my sleep has dramatically improved. This compounds because better sleep means better mood, that basically dictates my working routine, social interactions and enjoyment of my day.

Keep your circle small.

Yes, of course, network, broaden your social horizons - but those with access to you and influence over you, keep that limited. By now, we’ve all heard that famous phrase, you are the 5 people you choose to associate with. Well your true friends, therefore, you should pick wisely. This compounds because thoughts become beliefs, beliefs become action, action becomes identity, and soon, you’ve changed your life because of a thought. So, keep those who inspire you around, who set a good moral code and are truly happy to clap for you.

Treat your time like capital:
This is a new one for me as The Frugal Chic. I’ve always said I like to cook everything from scratch. But after getting a real taste of the solopreneur life juggling a 40,000 word book, 7+ short-form videos a week, one long-form, meetings, and two newsletters it’s safe to say I’ve become time-poor (completely self-inflicted, of course). It’s not my fault. I want to do everything and achieve everything before 30. So now my time feels like gold dust. Every unnecessary meeting makes me want to pull my hair out, but I just nod and smile respectfully on the surface. I’ve had to buy back a bit of time with a meal prep service, which I mentioned on my short-form content. Even just the trip to big Sainsbury’s, planning meals, cooking, and washing up adds up. Cutting that out saves a lot of mental energy I can feed back into the business. It’s £3.75 a meal, basically a meal deal. That’s how I’m justifying it to myself.

Build skills that stack, not just pay.
The skill you learn doesn’t exist in isolation, you have to take a step back and think about how it compounds. Sales leads to the art of persuasion, improved social skills. Investing could lead to emotional resilience or greater understanding of delayed gratification. When you learn a skill you’re not just learning the step-by-step processes, you’re affecting other areas in your life. Now, this is simply just my opinion, but the skills I think worth learning right now are personal branding, digital marketing, sales, and AI for anyone wanting to future proof themselves.

A high ROI life is not built through one dramatic decision. It’s built through quiet, repetitive ones.

- What you do after work.

- What you buy to live better, not to look richer.

- Who you let influence you.

- How you spend your best hours.

- Which skills you invest in when no one is watching.

Most people are living with compounding too. They’re just compounding distractions, bad habits, convenience, and short-term comfort.

It’s the same mechanism but different inputs.

The uncomfortable truth is that your future is already being constructed by your present routines.

That’s the compound interest of life.

That’s it for this week,