Getting Off the
Hot Girl Hamster Wheel
— One Share at a Time

In her book Rich Girl Nation, Katie Gatti Tassin — the writer and podcast host behind Money with Katie — opens with a chapter called "The Hot Girl Hamster Wheel." She breaks down how much it actually costs to stay "conventionally attractive" — the manicures, the brow waxing, the products that run out and need replacing — and how that spending quietly compounds against you over a year, even though no single expense feels like a big deal in the moment.

She calls beauty spending an "insidious force in women's financial lives" — not because getting your brows done is wrong, but because it's the kind of cost that's easy to underestimate precisely because it's small, recurring, and socially expected. Her suggested fix isn't to stop caring about any of it — it's to do a "Hot Girl Detox": take an honest look at the spending, understand why it's really there, and decide where that money could better serve future-you.

That idea resonated with me. So I built my own version of it — and once I started looking at spending this way, I couldn't stop seeing it everywhere, not just in the beauty aisle.

The economics term for what's actually happening

There's a concept economists teach in any introductory course, and it's the real mechanism underneath the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel: opportunity cost — the value of the next-best option you give up when you choose something else. It's not just about money you spend versus money you don't. It's about what that money could have done instead. Every choice has a shadow choice standing behind it — the thing you didn't pick.

Most people never run that second comparison. Not because they're careless, but because the opportunity cost is invisible — there's no price tag on the road not taken. Learning to see it anyway is one of the most useful habits a little economics gives you.

The swap I actually make

When I skip a pedicure, or do my brow tinting myself instead of booking it, do my daughter's pedicure at home rather than taking her to a salon, or skip a facial, I take roughly what that expense would have cost and use it to buy a share of a dividend-paying ETF — something like SCYB, SCHD, JEPI, or JEPQ.

The share prices roughly line up with what each service tends to cost, which is part of why this works as a habit — there's a natural, almost one-to-one trade happening. Skip the expense, buy the shares, watch the math line up. It's not about denying myself or my daughter anything — the pedicure still happens, I just do it myself at home, together with her. The money that would have left the house instead goes into something that keeps paying me, month after month, for as long as I hold it.

Why these specific funds

The four I mentioned — SCYB, SCHD, JEPI, and JEPQ — all share one feature that makes this swap feel satisfying in a way a basic index fund doesn't always: they pay regular income distributions, often monthly. That means the "reward" for skipping the expense isn't abstract or far off — you can watch the dividend or distribution show up in your account in the weeks after you buy the share.

Share prices fluctuate daily and the figures above are approximate, used here to illustrate the swap — always check the current price before buying.

Why the "pay me back now" feeling matters for this habit to stick

One of the hardest parts of any savings habit is that the reward is usually invisible for a long time. Money goes into an account, and nothing visible happens for months or years. That's part of why so many money habits fail — there's no immediate feedback loop.

Income-paying funds give you a small, real signal that something happened. You skipped the pedicure, you bought the share, and a few weeks later a small dividend shows up. It's not life-changing money on its own — but it's proof that the swap worked, and that proof is often what makes a habit repeatable instead of a one-time act of willpower.

It's not just beauty spending — it shows up in the kitchen too

Once I started seeing this pattern in beauty spending, I noticed it everywhere else too — especially in how our family eats. Grocery prices have been genuinely, depressingly high. I'm not going to pretend cooking at home is some magic loophole that makes food cheap again. But even accounting for that, the math still tips clearly toward cooking more often than not — a restaurant meal for a family of four routinely costs multiples of what the same meal costs to make at home, even with expensive groceries.

This isn't abstract for us — it's a handful of specific kitchen habits we've built around:

That number isn't a promise — it's an illustration of what this kind of thinking compounds into when you take it seriously over years instead of treating it as a single decision. The bread machine and the Instant Pot aren't retirement strategies on their own. They're the small, repeatable mechanisms — same as the ETF swap — that make the bigger strategy possible.

If it makes you happy, the math doesn't matter

None of this is an argument that the pedicure or the meal out is always the wrong choice. If something genuinely makes you happy — the pampering, the company, the break from cooking — that's a real value, and rational decision-making accounts for it. This isn't a rule that says "always choose the cheaper option." It's a tool for making sure you actually know what you're comparing.

The problem isn't spending money on things you love. The problem is spending on autopilot, without ever running the comparison at all — not choosing the pedicure because you weighed it against the alternative and it won, but because the alternative never crossed your mind. That's the difference between a rational decision and a default.

The benefits cliff is its own version of this same distortion

Here's where this connects to the rest of this site. The benefits cliff is, in economic terms, a real distortion in the market for labor and income. A rational person weighing whether to take a raise should be comparing the value of the raise against the value of their current situation. But the cliff inserts a strange discontinuity into that comparison — a sudden, nonlinear penalty that has nothing to do with the actual value of the work being offered.

I'm not pretending these income limits aren't a real distortion, because they are. A system where earning $1 more can cost you thousands of dollars in benefits isn't rational from a market-design perspective, even if the underlying goal — making sure assistance reaches people who need it — is reasonable.

How this connects to the bigger picture on this site

This habit is separate from the MAGI strategy we write about elsewhere on this site — buying shares in a regular brokerage account doesn't reduce your MAGI the way a Traditional IRA contribution does. But it's a complementary habit: a way to build a taxable investment account alongside your retirement strategy, using money you might not have thought of as "investable" at all.

If you're managing a benefits cliff, it's worth knowing the difference: contributions to a Traditional IRA or SEP-IRA can help protect your MAGI-based benefits. Buying shares of ETFs like these in a regular taxable account does not have that same protective effect, but it still builds real wealth and gives you liquid assets you can access more easily than retirement funds.