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If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you know I write a lot about financial resilience. The habits that shape how we earn, spend, and think about money. Last year I put all of that into a book, Gravitational Habits for Financial Resilience (also on Apple Books and Google Play). And now, the ideas from that book are an app.
Hacking Habits was just approved and it’s live in the App Store.
What Problem Does It Solve?
As you know, I build apps to solve real life problems. I built AI Kiddo to teach my one year old new words in 3 languages, I built MosquiGo to battle the Mekong Delta mosquitoes, Zen Tales to support my Buddhist practice. So, what real life problem do I solve with Hacking Habits?
This one I actually have a very clear answer for: I needed a way to understand how money translates into time.
This is not about budgeting, or tracking expenses in spreadsheets. I also don’t like connecting bank accounts to some fintech app that knows more about my finances than I do. I just needed a simple reframe: how many hours of my life does this purchase cost?
That question, once you start asking it, changes everything. A $200 gadget stops being “$200” and starts being “12 hours of my life.” A $5 daily coffee becomes “an entire working day every month.” The math is simple, easy to understand, even relatable. But the shift in perspective is way more complex.
The Life Hours Calculator
This is the core of the app. Enter any amount, and it converts it to life hours based on your actual hourly rate. But here’s the part that makes it more than a calculator: there’s a built-in 24-hour pause timer. When you’re about to buy something on impulse, you tap “pause” and the app holds that purchase for you. Come back tomorrow. If you still want it, go ahead. If you don’t — and you’d be surprised how often you don’t — you just saved yourself some life hours.
I wrote about this exact mechanism in How to Create a Habit in 15 Days. The idea that you don’t need 21 days or 66 days or whatever the current myth says. Fifteen days of focused, structured repetition is enough to install a new behavior. That post became the blueprint for the app’s habit installer.
The 15-Day Habit Installer
Each financial habit — tracking your net worth, understanding your burn rate, calculating your hourly rate, setting savings goals — gets its own 15-day installation sequence. Daily guidance, progress tracking, checkpoint evaluations. You install one habit at a time, properly, instead of trying to overhaul your entire financial life in a weekend and burning out by Tuesday.
The habits themselves come from the Gravitational Habits framework, namely the idea that some habits act like gravity — invisible, constant, and powerful enough to shape your entire trajectory. The app takes that theory and turns it into daily practice.
Five Meters and Privacy
The dashboard shows five financial vital signs at a glance: net worth, burn rate, hourly rate, savings goals, and debt trajectory. It’s designed for a morning check-in — look at your numbers, ground yourself, move on with your day.
And here’s the part I’m most particular about: your financial data never leaves your device. No bank connections. No server-side storage. No accounts. You enter the data, you own the data. Works in any country, any currency. I’ve been a student of financial habits long enough to know that the moment you hand your financial data to a third party, the dynamic changes. My app doesn’t do that.
What’s Free and How Much It Costs?
The Life Hours Calculator is free and unlimited. You also get 3 jumpstart habits, the ADD diagnostic, and the full Five Meters dashboard. That’s a functional financial awareness tool, no strings attached. And free forever.
Premium unlocks all core and extended habits, the Sunday planning sessions, the 90-day transformation journey, savings goals and debt strategy tools, and removes ads. It’s a one-time purchase — no subscriptions. And if you think about it, the 90-day transformation journey, a three months process, it’s worth way more than that.
To celebrate the launch, use code GRAVITY and get 50% off of the Lifetime purchase. If you’ve read the book, you’ll recognize where that code comes from.
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