In this episode of Translating ADHD, Ash and Dusty explore the complex relationship between ADHD and financial management. They discuss the emotional weight of financial discussions, including feelings of guilt and shame that many clients experience. Drawing from their personal experiences, they highlight how upbringing and context can shape one’s understanding of money, credit, and financial responsibility. Dusty shares her struggles with credit scores and impulsive spending, while Ash reflects on the importance of learning about finances from a young age.
The conversation delves into the impact of ADHD on prioritization and decision-making regarding wants versus needs. Both hosts emphasize the significance of seeking advice from trusted individuals to gain clarity in financial matters. They also touch on the ripple effects that financial decisions can have on other aspects of life, such as self-care and household management. With the acknowledgment that many individuals face similar challenges, the episode sets the stage for a follow-up discussion on actionable strategies for improving financial literacy and management for those with ADHD.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Ash: Hi, I’m Ash. [00:00:02] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:00:03] Ash: And this is Translating ADHD. Quick reminder that there are two group coaching courses coming up in January that I’m hosting. The first is Purpose, which begins Monday, January 13th. The second is Project X, which begins Tuesday, January 14th. Both classes meet at 8:30pm Eastern time. For pricing, more information on the content of each course, and to apply for either course, visit the website TranslatingADHD.com and click on the group coaching tab.So, Dusty.
[00:00:38] Dusty: Yes. [00:00:38] Ash: What are we talking about this week? [00:00:41] Dusty: We’re talking about ADHD and finances. Managing your money. Mostly, yeah. Unless you’re really a numbers guy, which I am not. [00:00:50] Ash: Yeah, I suppose I do have those clients that that’s kind of their special interest. And so it never comes up, but for clients who struggle with finances, it’s a really tough topic. You said something really interesting before we started recording, you equated it to hygiene in terms of the level of like, guilt and shame and fear of judgment that clients bring around the topic of finances.And that really is so true. It’s one of the toughest and most emotional topics to talk about with clients in general, I would say. And it’s one that, Clients are often carrying this limiting belief of I’m the only one. Every other adult on planet earth knows how to handle their finances. And I’m the only one that is this bad with money that doesn’t understand money that has financial problems.
And by the way, the pile of bills on my desk that are late and need to be paid right now, today say, aha, that’s not true.
[00:01:52] Dusty: Yeah, I have a $500 credit card that I had to beg the bank manager to help me get. I had to go in with years of my finances. I was immediately refused for a credit card, and he was like, okay, don’t worry. I’m going to like advocate to visa for you. But I have like an excellent business that’s been going well for years. And my credit score was so bad that I had to like get the bank manager to intervene so I could get a $500 credit card. [00:02:17] Ash: Dusty, based on what we were talking about before we hit record and kind of our own personal financial histories and context, I think we should start with context here does matter.I had parents that were dirt poor. My dad was a carpenter. My mom worked for the family business and did not make hardly any money doing it. Mostly held down that job because my grandparents paid for our family health insurance. And so that was the big benefit there. And so it was very chicken one day, feathers the next in my household.
But my parents were really smart with things like credit and lending, and they taught me how to use those things well. So one thing that I don’t struggle with that it sounds like you have had struggles with is credit score. And it’s so, so challenging when you have credit. I’ve had clients with bad credit. It’s such a life limiter.
But If it’s something you’re carrying guilt and shame around, did anybody ever teach you about credit scores or how to utilize credit? Well, because I know for a lot of my clients who are having similar struggles, they assume that they should know, and they beat themselves up for not knowing. But they were never taught. Nobody ever imparted this onto them.
It’s like, I think we do this thing as people with ADHD in the general realm of quote unquote, adulting, where we think we should just know everybody else knows. Why don’t we know there must be something wrong with us.
[00:03:49] Dusty: Well, yeah, and what you’re saying is so interesting, and I mean we could do a whole other episode about this, but I think a lot about the connections between generational ADHD and poverty and we do know that there’s a link between like ADHD and higher rates of poverty.And think about it, right? We know that ADHD is associated with job loss, like sudden quitting, you know, lots of people with ADD are entrepreneurs. ‘Cause like, we have trouble working for other people, but just because you’re an entrepreneur doesn’t mean that you’re like good at it. Right? And so, you know, I think about if you’ve got generations of people who struggle to get and keep jobs or who have personality issues that are costing them jobs, you know, they’re, you know, They’re going to be in a certain class, like an income bracket, and then they’re having kids and like so on and so forth.
And so I do think that there’s like a connection between ADHD and poverty and, and like that it’s bigger than just your own personal issues with ADHD, that it actually is part of a cultural thing as well. And that’s, that’s sort of its whole own thing. Because I mean, that’s not true for every ADHDer.
And it’s interesting because I see it both ways. Like, I see people who come from like a low income background, With ADD and they struggle, but then I also see, and we could talk about this later, like we can loop back around to this, so I also see clients with ADC who come from a more privileged financial background. And because there’s no urgency around learning how to manage money, if they have a good amount of money. And they’re not super good at managing it.
Sometimes they’ll bring it to coaching, but it can be really hard for them if there’s not that urgency, right? If they’re not at risk of losing their home, if they don’t have a job and they can still afford all their groceries, like what’s the reason to get better at impulse spending and not buy everything you want off Amazon, right?
There’s not like a real consequence if you’re losing your home. getting financial support and if you’re coming from a more comfortable background. So it’s interesting because I see it go both ways. As far as the credit thing, yeah, you know, it like, like you said, I think my parents probably thought they taught me about credit. I actually had no idea. I remember when I got my first credit card, I was like 18 or 19 years old and I, nobody told me the thing that like you need to be always paying your minimums on time.
So I would get these credit card bills that said like, oh, you have to pay 20. And I think that’s stupid. I owe 250. You know what? I’m going to have money on my next check. I’ll just wait till my next check and then I’ll pay off the whole credit card. For years this went on. I would miss minimum payments, not pay them, and then pay, like, pay off the whole card at once. And my interest rate kept going up and up, but I wasn’t reading my credit card statements, so I didn’t know. And I didn’t know why, and I didn’t know what to do about it.
And so like eventually I ended up with this super high interest rate and bad credit, and I had no idea why because I was paying my credit card. Yeah, and so nobody taught me. And years later when I I went through a what’s called a consumer proposal where I like settled my debts – it’s like not exactly a bankruptcy, but it’s kind of like that – as part of that, you have to do this credit counseling.
And I learned things that I had still never known as a person in my 30s, like in Canada your your cell phone affects your credit. Like if you miss a cell phone payment, but none of your other utilities, right? So if you’re late on your gas, your hydro. You know, your internet. It actually doesn’t matter. Like, yeah, you might get cut off with the company, but unless they send that debt that you owe to a credit collection agency, okay, if you have two bills and you don’t have enough money, one is your internet or your gas and one is your phone, you should always pay your phone because that actually will impact your credit score, but the other thing won’t.
And I didn’t know that. And when you struggle with prioritization, I’ve got $100, and I’ve got two bills which are each worth $75, which do I pay? Like, now I know so much more about how to manage credit than I knew before. So that’s it. Yeah. No one taught me. And I bet you, I’m willing to bet that like my parents probably didn’t even know because there’s so many like little hidden rules, you know?
[00:07:28] Ash: There really are. And that is something that my parents were really good at. I too took out my first credit card at 18. I did not want to, I was terrified of going into debt because my parents – something back to your context matters – were also necessarily very overly frugal. And that is sometimes a mindset that can be harmful to me.And so I did not want to take out a credit card, but my mom insisted that I do. And I still have that credit card to this day. And it’s got good history on it. And here in the U.S., the length of your credit history and the length of your longest opened account – so here I am 40 years old with this same credit card in good standing – really make a difference in terms of credit score.
And my parents knew that. And so they told me, take it, keep it for emergencies. Don’t use it. But if you do need to use it, make sure that you only use what you can afford to pay the minimums on each month, and make sure that you are paying those on time. So that was instilled in me.
Here we are two people with ADHD who otherwise struggle kind of similarly with finances, it sounds like, when we get into the next part of this episode, but with very different contexts in terms of where we’re starting out.
Now, before we move on to some of the other topics we want to cover in finances, I just want to take a pause and say that finances is so connected to hierarchy of needs in terms of, for those of you that are really struggling, and it’s a tough economy right now. For those of you that are struggling to meet basic needs with your finances, household income, shelter, food, clothing, etc. That and the way that it interacts with ADHD and the way that we shut down and overwhelm, that’s just an incredibly, incredibly difficult place to be in.
And so if that is where you are, first of all, cut yourself some slack because when you’re dealing with threats to your basic needs, it is really difficult to do much of anything else. In coaching, we talk about is there an opening for change or not? And what that means is, is there an opening to do this incremental work of being curious and learning something new about yourself and then applying that learning and seeing what happens?
And when you’re in a place where your basic needs are threatened, that is incredibly difficult to access because . Fear and curiosity live in different parts of the brain. And when our basic needs are threatened, there is fear there. And that fear is real. That’s not ADHD storytelling fear. That’s real visceral. I may not be able to take care of myself or provide for my basic needs. Fear.
[00:10:26] Dusty: And that’s the thing too, right? , so many people have shame about this and I just really want people listening to know that like you’re totally not alone. There’s more people than you think struggling with this, especially with those with ADHD. And I’m hoping we can sort of get into some of the the why’s around that or like what causes that.If you’re, if you have so much shame and embarrassment and you’re sure that you’re doing money wrong, like, you’re not even gonna stop to consider, like, we know that we’re living in unprecedented times as far as, like, grocery costs and housing costs.
And there’s this, for me, I was saying before we started recording, what really made the difference in my ability to save money and be responsible with money was that, like, I found I needed to understand that bigger why So the example I gave was, you know, if I’m really broke, I won’t buy, like, necessities for myself.
Like, let’s say I need a winter coat. I’ll be like, oh, I can’t afford it. I can’t afford it. But then, if my friend goes through a breakup, all of a sudden, all, all of a sudden I have 100 to, like, send them a bouquet of flowers and a, and a meal, you know, cause they’re grieving and I’m a good friend. And it’s about identity, and that’s how I see myself.
So all of a sudden, oh, that magical thinking, I found that $100 that I didn’t have to spend on a winter coat for myself. But then I put myself even 100 behind, because like maybe I really didn’t have that money, right? And so that’s the why, right? Why should I put aside a little bit of money each check? Why should I save?
Why should I not, you know, impulse buy something I don’t need on Amazon for 50 like at every chance that I get? Because I’m forgetting to remember that I’m going to keep having friends who’s like, Oh my God, their parent dies suddenly, or they’re going through a breakup or something terrible happens and I want to help and helping means having money available.
And so connecting those dots and looking at that bigger why really helped me. And one of the things that I did was I went out and I educated myself about finances on a larger scale. I read a couple of good books that I really recommend. One is called The Index Card and another is called Penny Rich Pound Poor, and it was in that book that it was talking about the finances industry and like financial management sectors, and the author of the book basically kind of broke down in a chapter that idea that we have of like, Oh, millennials eat too much avocado toast. Or like, Oh, if only we didn’t buy so many expensive lattes, we’d be able to afford a home.
And she systematically went through and showed that like several studies have shown that that’s actually not true. These little luxuries that we buy ourselves are not actually what’s contributing to our lack of financial security as a nation or as a people. And it actually does have a lot to do more with like global economic things.
But if you’re a person with ADHD who struggles to not impulse spend that 50 thing on Amazon, or those little lattes, or those little, you know, avocado toasts, you’re just gonna assume that you’re making bad decisions, and it’s all your fault, and like the things you’re struggling with are your issue.
And like, maybe two things can be true, right? Maybe part of it can be that, but maybe part of it isn’t your fault, and you’re just blaming yourself and automatically assuming that you’re the problem because you have shame around your spending habits.
[00:13:18] Ash: Related to that, I’ve had a couple of clients who have a shopping addiction, which also really makes a lot of sense with ADHD, because there’s a dopamine hit there. You buy a thing for yourself, it gives you a dopamine hit. And if you’re avoiding your finances, kind of sticking your fingers in your ears, la la la, this doesn’t exist. Right.Then you theoretically have infinite money to spend. And when you start to feel bad about your money situation and your lack of understanding of finances, there’s a dopamine hit that you can go for. That’s pretty instantaneous in today’s society. And I think that internet shopping just makes that worse because the ads that we are served even on sites like Amazon, Amazon knows exactly how to serve up to you the things that you might impulse by social media sites know how to serve up to you the things that you might impulse by.
And with ADHD on board, there is also often this thing of, if I buy a thing, maybe that will fix my problem, right? This tool or this, this kitchen gadget, or this thing, or that thing will be the thing that fixes this problem for me. And we. We buy it before we’ve really thought that through. And that’s not to say that you can’t invest in things that are worth it to you.
I spent, I think I said this on another episode. I bought a $200 Japanese rice maker, and that’s something I’ve had my eye on for a couple of years. I was doing the winter coat thing of, I just can’t justify it. I just can’t justify it. We use that thing at least once a week, it makes perfect rice. I have never been able to make perfect rice on the stovetop, and it’s done wonders for me in terms of being able to reliably cook at home because we’ve now got a number of rice based dishes that we make. Most of the other ingredients are already in the house. And it’s five minutes of work on my part, and then an hour where the rice maker does the rest in order to have perfect rice. So that really was a worthwhile investment and something that I’m glad that I purchased.
On the other hand, my Instant Pot that I bought when those were having a huge moment, and I know I have some friends with ADHD who love their instant pots and who think they’re wonderful, and if they work for you, great. Just doesn’t work for me. I find that it’s just as much effort to make something in the Instant Pot as it is to make it any other way. It’s just that effort is expended a little differently.
And for me, it’s because it’s such a different and unique way of cooking something, it flies against a lot of the basic cooking knowledge that I have. And therefore it makes the steps harder to follow, and it makes it more frustrating to use. And that one was absolutely just an impulse purchase. I hadn’t thought through whether or not it would solve a problem for me. It was just the hot, the new hotness, the hot new thing. And I bought it and I’ve maybe used it…I’ve owned that thing 15 years.
[00:16:27] Dusty: Instapot new thing. [00:16:28] Ash: That’s right. And I’ve owned that thing probably 15 years. I have maybe, maybe used it 30 times. [00:16:35] Dusty: Can I have your Instapot? I’ll use it. Maybe. I don’t know. I have no idea, actually. I have that same problem. Yeah. Sorry, go on. [00:16:44] Ash: No, I’m actually, we could, if you have something to say here let’s see. [00:16:48] Dusty: We should do two episodes because honestly, this is such a rich topic. We should do a separate episode about like strategies or client stories. Like we should do another episode. ‘Cause just, just getting into this is like huge, I think. [00:16:59] Ash: Okay. Okay. So let’s keep talking about other challenges then. [00:17:02] Dusty: Yeah. Let’s. And so like what you’re saying, I think gets into some of the like, the why’s behind it.Like my last ex before the person I’m dating now, we lived together and he was very parsimonious, let’s say. And I think that he was often aghast at my spending habits. And he would ask me, he would always say, is that a want or is that a need? Cause I’d be like, Oh, I got to buy this. I got to buy this. And he’d go, but is that a want or a need? And he asked me that so many times I realized, I was like, I actually, I don’t know. Like, I don’t know how to understand those parameters.
Like, the winter coat story. There was a, there was a year, a few years back, where I had no winter coat. I didn’t have a good winter coat, and I just wore hoodies all winter. Now, I live in the lower mainland, where temperatures rarely dip below freezing, and I come from a northern community where temperatures are often above freezing, so to me, I’m like, do I really need a winter coat? I muddled through the whole winter with like hoodies and sweaters, and so technically I felt like a winter coat was a want and not a need because I didn’t need a coat to get through the winter. But I was definitely uncomfortable, and it would have been convenient to have a coat.
And to me, like honestly, really truly, that question of do I need a winter coat in the winter, yes and no, because no, I can actually get through the winter without it, is the same question as like, do I need this fancy shoe organizer to organize all my shoes because the shoes are messy? Yes or no because to my ex he would say well, that’s a want not a need. But I’m like, okay, but the problem is the shoes are messy, and I can’t find my shoes, and it’s making me unhappy, and when people come to our house, they probably think we’re messy. To me, I’m like so the shoe organizer is a need.
I really cannot tell the difference between a want and a need and that is the ADHD issue with prioritization, right? We have an inability to prioritize, and so part of managing my finances better for me has been prioritizing, like, asking someone who’s got a better brain to help me understand if something is a want or a need, because I honestly, truly do not know. That’s like the Instapot versus rice cooker.
And this is what’s really hard for some of my clients, too, right? They’ve seen themselves spend and waste so much money on crap that they don’t use. How, in that situation, do you differentiate between good money versus bad money? How do you know when you’re investing in something that’s going to make your ADHD challenges easier versus just the next new impulse thing?
[00:19:20] Ash: Dusty, I’m actually really curious about that statement, asking someone with a quote unquote, better brain. What does that look like for you? [00:19:27] Dusty: Well, I think certainly better in terms of understanding the difference between wants wants and needs. So, for me, like, my two big areas of ADD challenges are money and time for sure. I think we got on this call, and I said, yeah, yesterday I was awake from 5:30 in the morning until 4 in the morning the next day.I certainly. I am a really, really bad over committer. And it’s something I have to work on all the time. It’s, it’s better and worse. There’s times that I’m okay at it. And I’m, you know, getting through. And there’s times that I’m not very on top of it. And it has impacts on the people in my life.
And I’m the same way with money, right? Like, I have to work really hard to be responsible with money. Because I will spend like every dollar down to like the oops I spent my like, you know, whatever payment this month. So I have to work really hard at those two things.
And so because those are areas of relative challenge for me, I find it helpful both for my schedule and my commitments and for my money to ask somebody who it has more clarity and insight about like what’s really important, and who can make these decisions easier. So I’ll outsource that.
So I’ll like run commitments by somebody else that I trust. I’ll run purchases that I want to make by somebody else that I’ll trust, that I trust. And I go, like, do I want this or do I need this? I can’t tell, and if it’s a commitment, I’ll go, like, even when you asked me to be on the podcast a full time, like, I asked somebody else. I was like, okay, so here’s the commitment and like, here’s what else I have going on. Should I commit to this? Like, is this a good idea? What do you think?
Because I know that for me, because of my issues with prioritization around time and money, it’s really hard for me to make good choices on those two particular areas. So I outsource them. I mean, not that I, you know, obviously the ultimate decision making lies with me, but I get advice, I guess you could say.
[00:21:09] Ash: You get advice, and you also get your thoughts out in the open. This is something that I’ve found with many of my clients in many different areas. Sometimes it’s solving complicated work problems. Sometimes it’s personal finances like you just described. Sometimes it’s just a general this works for me and this is true for me.Getting your thoughts out into language slows down your thinking. ADHD brains work so fast that we can have all of these factors swirling around of, well, it’s winter, but this, but that, well, it’s not that it doesn’t get as cold here as it gets elsewhere. And I can probably muddle through and is it a need or is it not?
And it can be really hard to distinguish out. Those individual points and what matters to you and what doesn’t. So that act of conversing with someone else, whether or not they ultimately have helpful advice to offer you, just getting the thoughts out can help you make sense of them. I call that practice talking at And I have a few friends for different things that I go to for talking at them.
And funnily enough, my co-parent, my ex-husband, is the person I go to when it comes to finances. We interestingly came from like two completely different sets of what we were taught and what we weren’t taught about finances when we got married. His parents also had an amount of financial savvy, but differently than my parents, and weren’t so savvy about things like credits or budgeting because they were coming from a different situation.
So when we got married, his whole budgeting system was I spend X amount on the credit card per month. And so long as it’s under X amounts, I’m good to go, which worked well enough for him as a single person. But when we became a two person household, and particularly when we decided that I would stop working full time when I got pregnant with our daughter, we needed to bring that in, and I was really good at budgeting.
So I took over our household management there, and I taught him a lot about budgeting. But I also came with a really like toxically frugal mindset, where if it wasn’t an absolute can’t live without it need like toilet paper, I hesitated to spend money on it, whether or not there was money.
And my father-in-law has this thing that he says every once in a while, he says, I like problems I can solve with a credit card, right? This is a solvable problem. I like a problem that I can solve by spending money. That’s okay. Right. And has the means to be able to do so to a reasonable degree. Right.
And so the time that sharing a household and sharing household finances with him for 13 years was a growth opportunity actually for both of us, because he’s gotten immensely better at daily household management. I sat down and showed him how to use the budgeting software that I had been using to run our household finances for the many years that we were together. He still uses them. And he taught me to think differently about that want and need thing to see the gray area between. To see that sometimes it may not be a need in terms of hierarchy of needs, I cannot live without this, but it might be a worthwhile expense to alleviate stress or to solve a problem by way of spending money that I have available to me versus spending time and energy that I may not have available to me.
And that was just such an incredibly valuable relationship in that way for both of us in terms of growing our understanding of finances, and kind of brings it back to you don’t know what you don’t know. Your context and what you did or did not learn about finances, what you grew up with, what was normal, all of those things are on board alongside the ADHD, having an impact on your relationship with finances.
[00:25:09] Dusty: Well, and something you just said there was like really sparked something for me because you mentioned like, yeah, you know there’s like need, like you’ll die if you don’t have it. And then there’s, you know, just want, and there’s like something in between.And something my roommate said to me the other day was that like, getting things done with ADHD can also be harder because we don’t always have the proper tools. Like, if we’re cooking and we don’t have the, like, enough knives and cutting boards and pots and pans. In my case, it’s like, anything handy.
I never had, like, the prop, like, proper tools. And I mean actual tools, like measuring tape, stud finder. And so if I had to put up shelves, I would put them up wrong. They would fall down. Everything would break if I had to, like, fix anything in my house, because I didn’t have the proper tool. Because I never bought them because they felt like not necessities, you know. I couldn’t do things the right way.
So there’s, there’s a lot of connections here, right? Like, if you don’t have the shoe organizer, and you can’t organize your shoes, then you’re spending more time cleaning your front hallway because you’re picking up 30 pairs of shoes to sweep under them. And that’s going to take three hours versus having a shoe organizer that you buy once. It’s, you know, 40 bucks, but now the shoes stand on the shoe organizer, and you can sweep the front hall in five minutes, right? Like all of these things are connected
And so they do have ripple effects into other areas of our ADHD, like how we feed ourselves, how we clean, how we perform hygiene, how we perform friendship. There’s connections there.
[00:26:38] Ash: Dusty, this is such a rich topic. And what we haven’t gotten to yet this week is what do you do with all of this information? What do you do with what we’ve shared about ADHD and why we struggle with finances? And, unfortunately, we are out of time today. So this is now going to be a two part series on finances.So that is what we will come back to next week, listeners, is here’s what you can do about it. Here’s how you can start to change your relationship with finances as a person with ADHD.
So until next week, I’m Ash.
[00:27:18] Dusty: I’m Dusty. [00:27:19] Ash: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
