This article is free. However, I want to take a second to thank everyone who became a paid subscriber. You jumped in before I had even published the first paid letter, and that trust means more than you know.
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If this resonates with you, join in before Friday, before prices increase: $12.12/month, link here
Kisses x
- Isabella, Founder of the Wealthy Women Guide
I visited my sister recently, and my nosy eyes immediately clocked it.
Her letterbox. Absolutely rammed. Letters piled on top of each other, some clearly months old, at least two that looked official enough to make my stomach drop on her behalf.
Me: hey you need to check those.
Her: Isabella please do not start stressing me.
Me: those are your bills though.
Her: yeah I know. Let them.
I wanted to shake her. But I also understood her completely. Because every single one of us has a version of this. The bank app you have not opened in three weeks. The insurance email rotting in a folder. The letter you moved from the table to the drawer and have actively decided not to think about.
A 2024 Motley Fool survey found that 51% of millennials have literally shielded their eyes from their bank account balance or bills because of financial anxiety. Not metaphorically. Physically looked away.
Research published in Psychological Research found that when people experience financial scarcity, financial information itself becomes a threat signal that the brain actively works to avoid. Your brain is not being dramatic. It genuinely learned that looking at your finances causes pain. So it protects you by making you not look.
The problem is the bill does not care about your anxiety. It just keeps growing while you look the other way.
Fix it: Set a ten-minute “money date” every Saturday evening. Just ten minutes. Open the app, look at the numbers, close it. That is it. You do not have to do anything about it yet. You just have to stop avoiding it. The anxiety decreases dramatically once looking at your finances becomes a habit rather than an event.
My mother. Oh, my dear mother. I say this with love. But she is the absolute victim of this.
Her favourite perfume comes on sale. She buys it. She feels genuinely virtuous about it. She goes home and puts it on the shelf next to the one she has not finished yet.
She did not save money. She spent money on something she already had.
This is one of the most psychologically sophisticated retail tricks ever invented, and it works on almost everyone. The word “sale” triggers a loss aversion response in your brain. You feel the pain of missing a deal more intensely than the pleasure of saving, which means the moment you see 40% off, you stop asking whether you needed it and start asking whether you can afford not to buy it.
You were not going to buy it. You did not save money. You spent money that would not have left your account if the thing had never gone on sale in the first place.
Fix it: Before buying anything on sale, ask yourself: would I buy this at full price right now? If the answer is no, put it down. The sale made it tempting. It did not make it necessary.
You came in for a €25 moisturiser. Then you noticed you were only €15 away from a free gift. Suddenly you are buying a serum you did not need, an eye cream you already have, and a cleanser for your friend’s birthday even though her birthday was three months ago.
You spent €80 to receive a branded tote bag and a travel-size lipgloss.
Research in consumer psychology found that 70% of consumers would switch from their favourite brand for an additional product or service at no extra cost. And a study published in Behavioral Sciences found that “free gift” framing makes consumers feel like smart shoppers even when they are spending more than they planned. You feel clever. The brand got you for €80. That is not a win for you.
Fix it: Never spend more than you planned to reach a gift threshold. The gift is worth less than the extra spending you did to get it. Every single time.
Every September someone in your life gets visibly excited about the new iPhone.
Maybe it is you.
The camera is 0.3 millimetres thinner. There is a new colour. It does something the previous one did but slightly faster. You already have a phone. It works. You are about to spend $1,200 on a marginal improvement to a device you use primarily to scroll and avoid calls.
This is not just phones. It is the new vacuum cleaner when the old one still cleans. The new AirPods when the current ones still play sound. The new laptop because it comes in midnight blue and your current one is space grey.
Research on the hedonic treadmill shows that the satisfaction from upgrades is temporary and returns to baseline faster than we anticipate, so you feel the excitement for approximately two weeks, and then it is just the thing you own. The $1,200 is permanently gone.
Fix it: Implement an 11-day rule for any tech purchase over €100. If you still want it after 11 days AND your current device has actually broken or become unusable, buy it. If it is still working fine, it is an upgrade, not a need.
There is an actual economic term for this now. Treatonomics.
Research found that 62% of Americans indulge at least monthly in a small affordable treat, with 43% considered frequent treaters. Gen Z women spend an average of $28 per treat purchase, about $10 more than their older counterparts.
Here is the psychology behind it. Only 23% of people rated current economic conditions as excellent or good. When the big dreams feel impossible, the brain pivots to what IS possible right now. The Laneige lip mask. The Glossier serum. The luxury candle.
These are not frivolous. They are a rational response to feeling financially hopeless.
And my dear Wealthy Women, I’m a victim of this too.
The problem is not the individual treat. The problem is treat inflation; when the $5 treat becomes a $25 treat becomes a $60 skincare haul that felt affordable in individual pieces but totals $300 a month in the category formerly known as little treats.
Fix it: Give yourself a fixed monthly treat budget. €30 or €50, whatever is realistic. When it is gone, it is gone. The boundary is not about guilt. It is about making the treats feel special again instead of constant. Keep the next “little” treat for next month. It’s about self-discipline, which translates into self-respect.
Bad day at work. You open Instagram. You see a reel. Thirty minutes later, you have bought four things from an app you did not know existed two hours ago.
Alternatively: someone complimented your outfit today, and you feel amazing so clearly this is the moment to finally buy that bag. Celebration spending is just as real as stress spending. Both are emotional. Both bypass the rational brain completely.
Research shows that impulse purchases account for nearly 40% of all online spending and that emotional states including stress, anxiety, boredom AND positive emotions like excitement drive the majority of unplanned purchases. American consumers spent an average of $150 per month on impulse purchases in 2023.
The brain releases dopamine in anticipation of a purchase. Not after. Before. Which means the high comes from scrolling and adding to cart, not from the thing arriving two days later when you have already forgotten why you bought it.
Fix it: When you want to impulse spend, do not close the app and white-knuckle it. Write down what you want to buy on paper or your notes app. Leave it 48 hours. If you still want it after 48 hours AND you have the money AND you were planning to buy it anyway, buy it. Most of the time you will have completely forgotten about it. The desire was the emotion, not the thing.
This one is taboo. Nobody talks about it. So I will.
You lent your friend €200. It has been four months. She has not mentioned it. You have not mentioned it. You both pretend it did not happen while you silently resent each other every time she posts a brunch picture.
Or you split a dinner and your friend transfers you €23 less than her share because she “forgot the tip.” You say nothing because it feels awkward.
Research on financial avoidance in social relationships shows that the discomfort of asking for money back is consistently rated as more painful than the discomfort of the financial loss itself, meaning we routinely choose to lose real money rather than have a ten-second conversation.
Fix it: Set the terms in advance. Before you lend anyone money, say out loud “I need this back by this date.” One sentence changes the entire dynamic because now it is not awkward to bring it up later; it is just you following up on what was already agreed. And if they do not pay by the date, add interest. Not metaphorical interest. Actual interest. €200 after 7 days becomes €210.
18.83% more. On every salary. For the entire length of that job. Compounding into every raise that follows.
I lived this. A brand came to me fighting hard to pay me less than I was worth. Every instinct said just take it. I stood my ground. I rejected their offer. They came back with a better number.
94% of negotiated offers remain intact. The offer withdrawal you are terrified of almost never happens.
Fix it: Research the market rate for your role before every salary conversation. Ask for 10 to 15% above what you actually want. The worst they can say is no. The best is 18.83% more for the rest of that job.
One job. One salary. One employer who can make one decision in one meeting that removes your entire income in one afternoon.
That is not stability. That is a single point of failure with a direct deposit.
I built this Substack between university lectures on my phone. Not because I had spare time. Because I understood early that one income stream is one decision away from zero.
Fix it: You do not need a whole second business. You need one thing that generates any money outside your salary. One freelance client. One digital product. One affiliate link. Start here if you need some guidance on this.
The bachelorette weekend in Barcelona you charged to your credit card because everyone else was going. The wedding gift you could not afford but bought anyway because you did not want to look cheap. The group dinner where you ate a starter but split the bill equally because nobody wants to be that person.
A Fortune report found that 63% of single Americans hide the financial reason for declining social invitations. And 51% of Gen Z and 43% of millennials say social media makes them want to buy things they know they cannot afford.
Girl, I tell all my friends and family that I’m broke and that they should not call me to hang out until next month when I get my salary. This has brought a lot of peace in my life.
Fix it: Loud budgeting. Literally just saying “I cannot do Barcelona this year due to being broke (do not explain yourself more, it is none of their business anyways), but I would love to celebrate you another way when I get my next salary.” 42% of Gen Z now do this and their financial health is improving faster than previous generations at the same age. Saying no is free. Saying yes to everything is not.
You have a savings account. Technically. It is connected to your current account. One click to transfer. One tap to move money back. It might as well be the same account with a different label.
Every time an unexpected expense comes up, or you just want to, the money is right there. Two clicks. Gone.
According to a 2023 study from the Financial Health Network, 47% of Americans say they struggle to control spending when they do not use separate accounts for different financial goals. The physical separation matters psychologically even when the money is technically accessible in both accounts.
Fix it: Open a savings account at a completely different bank from your current account. No debit card. No instant transfer. Make it mildly annoying to access. The friction is the feature.
You stopped to fill up. You are in there for two minutes. You come out with a Red Bull, a Kinder Bueno, a bottle of water because the Red Bull suddenly felt unhealthy, a lighter you do not need, and a scratch card because why not.
73% of customers who stop for fuel enter the store to make an additional purchase. This is not an accident. Every product placement, every checkout display, every “only €1 extra” offer is designed to capture the three minutes you are in there waiting.
You are not weak. You are being outmanoeuvred by a billion-dollar retail psychology operation every time you need petrol.
Fix it: Pay at the pump when you can. If you have to go inside, decide before you walk in what you are buying and buy only that. Or always have snacks and drinks in your car!!! No need to enter the convenience store.
The expensive gym membership for the person you are going to become. The professional wardrobe for the career you have not gotten yet. The skincare routine of a woman who has her finances sorted while your savings account sits at zero. The aesthetics of wealth before you have built any actual wealth.
Research on aspirational consumption found that people systematically spend more on items associated with an identity they want to claim than on items associated with who they currently are. Your spending is not reflecting your life. It is auditioning for a life you have not yet been cast in.
I did this for years. I bought the planner of a highly organised person. The investment books of a financially literate person. The supplements of a healthy person. I used approximately none of them because the problem was never that I lacked the tools. It was that I had not done the internal work that makes you actually become those things.
The quietly wealthy woman does not buy things to feel wealthy. She builds things that make her wealthy, and eventually the stuff follows.
Fix it: Before any aspirational purchase, ask yourself: am I buying this because I am already this person, or because I want to feel like I am? If it is the second one, the purchase will not get you there. The internal work will.
This one is deeply rooted in financial trauma and almost nobody in the personal finance world talks about it honestly.
You get a tax refund. Or a bonus. Or you finally get paid back that money someone owed you. Or a brand deal lands. For about thirty seconds you feel amazing. Then something happens. Within two weeks, sometimes less, the money is gone. Not on anything specific you planned. Just... gone. A meal here. A delivery there. A thing you had been wanting. A small treat that became a medium treat that became a weekend that somehow cost €400.
This is not irresponsibility. This is a documented psychological phenomenon called the windfall effect.
Research published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes found that people treat windfall money fundamentally differently from earned income — they spend it faster, less carefully, and with less guilt, because the brain categorises it as “extra” rather than “real.” The money does not feel like yours in the same way. So it leaves in the same spirit it arrived: quickly and without ceremony.
But here is where financial trauma specifically amplifies this. If you grew up in a household where money was scarce and unpredictable, your nervous system learned something very specific: money does not stay. It arrives and then something bad happens and it disappears. So when money arrives now, your nervous system does not feel safe holding it. Spending it feels like neutralising a threat. The money cannot be taken away if it is already gone.
Research on financial trauma consistently identifies this “money cannot be trusted to stay” belief as one of the most common inherited patterns — and one of the most expensive ones, because it ensures that every unexpected financial opportunity evaporates before it has a chance to change anything.
Fix it: The moment any unexpected money lands, move it to your separate savings account at the other bank before you do anything else. Not most of it. All of it. Then sit with it for 72 hours before making any decisions about what to do with it. The urgency you feel to spend it is the trauma response talking. It is not real. The money is not going anywhere unless you move it.
This one gets its own number because the data is genuinely unhinged.
But it is worse than that. Late 2025 saw subscription price hikes of just $1 to $3 per service quietly pushing many households $15 to $30 higher per month. Each increase is too small to notice individually. Combined across every service you have, they add up to a meaningful monthly drain you never consciously agreed to.
The gym membership you joined in January and have been to four times. The meditation app you downloaded during a stressful week in March and opened twice. The cloud storage that auto-renewed. The premium version of an app you downloaded for one specific feature and forgot about. The streaming service you share with your ex and neither of you cancelled it because that would require a conversation.
You are funding a small company of services that you have not consciously chosen to keep.
Fix it: Open your bank app right now. Filter by recurring charges. Write every single one down. Then go through the list and for each one ask: did I use this in the last 30 days? If no, cancel it today. Not tomorrow. Today. You are not alone — each person wastes about $127 a year on unused subscriptions alone. That is not money you spent on something you enjoyed. That is money that left your account while you were not looking.
Every single one of these habits has a financial trauma root. The full audit, including my own personal numbers from applying this to my own finances this month, is in Friday’s paid letter.
$12.12 a month. Cancel whenever.
With love, ambition and a little rebellion,
Isabella, Founder of Wealthy Women Guide 💋
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