Book Review
Some books find you at exactly the right moment. This was one of them.
Get Rich, Lucky Bitch by Denise Duffield-Thomas is a money mindset and manifestation book — but calling it that almost undersells it. It is part excavation tool, part permission slip, part mirror. If you have ever felt that wealth belonged to someone else — someone who looked different, married differently, or was simply chosen by life in a way you were not — this book speaks directly to that feeling and refuses to let it stay unnamed.
I read it. I did every single exercise. And what came up surprised me more than I expected. And this is a booking I am reading again in 2026 because I have bigger financial goals.
Here is what I took from it — and what it cracked open in me.
1. Money blocks are mostly unconscious
The book opens with a concept that sounds simple until you sit with it: money blocks are the subconscious beliefs and thought patterns quietly running your financial life without your permission.
When I looked honestly at mine, I found layers I had never named.
Wealth, in my mind, had a face. It was white. It was being married to someone rich. It looked a certain way, moved a certain way, carried itself with a confidence I had silently decided was not mine to have. I did not choose this belief consciously. I absorbed it — from images, from who got praised around me, from who I watched move through the world without financial fear.
And underneath that was something even older: the belief that wealthy people were simply lucky. Chosen. Divinely favored in some way I had been passed over for. I was a spectator at someone else’s abundance, waiting for a blessing that was slow to arrive.
Then there was the origin wound — the one I had almost stopped thinking about.
I was sixteen when money became a real force in my life. Not in the way of earning or saving or planning. My father got sick, and suddenly money was an emergency. It was lack, it was hardship, it was daily stress. Dreams I had of what my future would look like just crumbled. That was my introduction to thinking about money every single day — not in aspiration, but in pain.
Even writing this now, it feels heavy. Because that is what a money block really is: not a thought, but a body memory. My nervous system learned at important phase of my life that money meant pain and was hard to earn. And the few women who had money had a bad reputation and to be a woman and wants money was dangerous.
Denise names this clearly and without shame. You are not broken. You have been programmed. And programming can be changed. And more importantly wealth looks like you if you choose to have it.
2. Decluttering is the foundation
The first step in Denise’s Money Manifesting Formula is to declutter — not just your home or your inbox, but your emotional history with money.
She asks you to write down every negative memory you have ever had with money. Every sting, every shame, every moment of lack or fear or humiliation. And then — and this is the part that costs something — to forgive them.
I did this. And what I found was not what I expected.
There were things on that list I thought I had fully processed. Things I genuinely believe no longer affected me because I was no longer thinking about them. But the moment I wrote them down; I could feel their weight. They had been sitting quietly in the background, shaping decisions I thought I was making freely.
The word that came to me was not journaling. It was excavation. I was not cleaning up at surface level. I was digging through layers of history to find what had been buried.
What happened after that excavation was something I can only describe as relief. Not fireworks. Just relief. Like setting down something heavy I had carried so long I had forgotten I was carrying it.
Denise writes: clearing out these emotions creates room for a new mindset to actually take root. You cannot fill a space that is still cluttered with the old story.
3. Get specific about what you want
This one stopped me cold.
To that point I’ve never had a money goal. Not a vague one, not even a number I was embarrassed to say out loud. Nothing. I had been so locked inside the reality of my salary — so convinced by what was — that I had never allowed my imagination to reach beyond it.
When I finally wrote down my first real money goal, my mind immediately screamed: you are out of your mind.
That reaction told me everything. The number was not even that extraordinary in the grand scheme of what is possible. But I had never allowed myself to think it, let alone write it down and claim it. I had been policing my own desires before anyone else had the chance to.
Denise explains why specificity matters — it activates the reticular activating system, the part of your brain that filters what information gets let through. When you name what you want clearly, your brain starts recognizing the paths toward it that were always there but invisible to you.
Vague desires get vague results. Clarity is not arrogance. It is a signal to your brain — and to the universe — that you are serious.
4. Surround yourself with positivity
I used to scroll through breaking news the way some people reach for a cigarette. I told myself I was staying informed. What I was actually doing was flooding my nervous system with scarcity, threat, and helplessness multiple times a day.
I stopped.
I started removing everything from my environment that made me feel poor — not just financially but energetically. I stopped buying many things and started buying fewer, better things. Quality over quantity became a form of self-respect, not indulgence.
I stopped listening the January ritual of colleagues gathering to worry whether bonuses would arrive, complaining about taxes and the cost of living and the economy. It is not that these conversations are wrong. It is that they were the only financial conversations happening — and they were training me to expect scarcity. I never took part of it but I was sitting in those rooms when those conversations were happening.
More than anything, I realized I had stopped loving my life. Not dramatically. Quietly. Without noticing. This part of the work — surrounding yourself with positivity — became a relearning. A slow return to joy.
The world you consume becomes the world you expect. Be deliberate about what you let in.
5. Take inspired action
Manifestation is not passive. Denise is very clear about this, and it is one of the things I love most about how she writes. You cannot sit in a room and wait for money to arrive. You have to move toward it.
My version of inspired action was to finally get close to my money.
I started looking at it honestly — how I was earning, where it was going, what the numbers actually said. This led to investing for the first time. It led to being more strategic rather than reactive. And it led to one of the most significant shifts: I nearly stopped lending money.
I say nearly because it is still a practice although extremely rare. But I began to see lending not as generosity but as a pattern — a way of people-pleasing that left me financially drained and quietly resentful.
Inspired action means moving in the direction of what you want, even before you feel fully ready. This channel is my version of that. I started before I felt qualified. That is the whole point.
Luck, as they say, is when opportunity meets preparation. Be prepared. Be moving.
6. Learn to receive
This one was subtle. I almost missed it in myself.
I was staying at a five-star hotel in Cambodia. The kind of place where staff open the door for you before you even reach for the handle. And I noticed something: I kept rushing to beat them to it. I felt deeply uncomfortable letting someone do something for me that I could do myself.
I noticed the same thing with men — a reflexive reach for the door, a deflection before anyone could offer to open it for me.
And at work, when I receive recognition for a project, I would immediately share it with the whole team. Which is not wrong. But I was doing it to disappear. To not have to stand in the acknowledgment.
Receiving is a skill. And many of us — particularly women who were raised to be grateful, undemanding, and self-sufficient — are genuinely terrible at it.
This is still something I am working on. But I have learned to pause before I deflect. To let the door be opened. To say thank you without immediately redirecting the credit.
If you cannot receive small gifts, you are training the universe that abundance is not for you. Practice receiving, even when it feels uncomfortable.
7. Repetitive sabotage
Denise talks about RSI — repetitive sabotage injury. The same self-sabotaging pattern showing up in different disguises, again and again, until you identify it and learn the lesson,
One of mine was lending money, falling for another sob story, putting people’s needs first, because I had no plan for my money.
Someone would call about their urgent situation — a crisis, an emergency, a need. And without thinking, almost before they finished explaining, I would log in to my bank account eager to transfer the money to them.
First it felt good to be the person, people would come to for money, after being broke for a long time. Then an unease started to take root because the same people constantly had the same money issue monthly. I told myself it was what people do, help others that’s what I saw around me growing up. But after a while it became pure anxiety — the fear of being seen as selfish, the weight of someone else’s disappointment.
The clearest turning point came when a friend called—not in crisis, but to discuss plans—and casually mentioned that she was counting on me to fund her short holiday.
- She had not asked directly.
- She had simply assumed I would pay.
- That assumption existed because, over time, I had taught people to expect it from me.
The situation stressed me deeply. She had supported me in many ways, and I could feel the familiar guilt rising. But I had to remind myself of something important: I had paid her for those services. It was a transaction, not a debt. Other people cannot build their financial plans around my bank account.
I said no. It was one of the harder things I have done. And one of the more important ones.
Your pattern of sabotage is not random. Find it, name it, and stop funding it.
8. Pretending is rehearsing
This is the one that changed everything for me.
Denise writes: at the beginning, it might feel forced, like you are pretending to be happy. But that is okay. Pretending is rehearsing for success, and your brain cannot tell the difference anyway. And I can attest to how identity work is powerful.
This year, my word for my year is: SOVEREIGN.
I did not pick it up casually. It came to me when I was at a crossroad in my life, I sat with it for days before concluding it was the right one for me at this season of my life. Sovereign meant something specific to me — a woman who owns a castle, who understands her resources, who multiplies them strategically, who moves through her financial life with intention and authority.
I began living from that identity before it was fully true. Every morning I log into my accounts. I check my investments. I track my expenses. Not from anxiety, but from the energy of a woman who manages wealth because she is one.
And here is what has happened: as I write this, we are in the process of adding another property to our financial portfolio. I have already set our money goals for those assets over the next three years. I have a plan. I have a number. I have a vision.
I did not arrive here by waiting until I felt ready. I arrived here by acting like the woman I was becoming, before I fully was her.
I just became a Sovereign woman.
Final thoughts
Get Rich, Lucky Bitch is not a get-rich-quick book. It is a get-honest-with-yourself book. It asks you to look at where your money story began, who wrote the early chapters, and whether you are still living out a narrative that was never actually yours.
For me, it unlocked grief I did not know I was carrying, goals I did not know I was allowed to have, and a version of myself I had been circling but never stepping fully into.
If money feels heavy, icky, complicated, or just out of reach — this book is for you. Do the exercises. All of them. Especially the ones that feel uncomfortable. That discomfort is the clutter speaking.
Denise Duffield-Thomas writes like a friend who has already walked the path and is reaching her hand back to pull you forward. I needed that. Maybe you do too.
With all my love,
Salima
