Empowering Your Financial Journey: Tips for ADHD Minds

In this episode of Translating ADHD, Ash and Dusty continue exploring the complexities of managing finances as individuals with ADHD. They introduce the concept of “ADHD tax,” which refers to the additional costs incurred due to challenges like procrastination, forgetfulness, or impulsivity. Through personal anecdotes, they highlight the importance of self-forgiveness and radical acceptance when faced with financial setbacks, such as unexpected expenses or late fees. The discussion emphasizes the need for effective strategies, including acknowledging one’s unique relationship with money, understanding spending habits, and making peace with occasional mistakes.

The hosts also delve into practical solutions for improving financial management. They recommend tools to help users plan for future expenses and track their spending effectively. Additionally, they encourage listeners to consider gamifying debt repayment or seeking support through body doubling or daily money managers if needed. Ultimately, Ash and Dusty advocate for curiosity and self-compassion in navigating financial challenges, reminding listeners that it’s about finding what works best for them in their unique financial journeys.

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• Our Process: Understand, Own, Translate.
• About Asher and Dusty
• You Need a Budget (YNAB)

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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. Before we get started today, just a reminder that there are two group coaching courses that I will be hosting starting in January. The first is Purpose, which begins Monday, January 13th. The second is Project X, which begins Tuesday, January 14th. They both meet at 8:30pm Eastern time. For pricing, more information about each course and its content and to apply for one of these courses, visit the website TranslatingADHD.com and click on the group coaching link.

So, Dusty, today we’re going to continue talking about finances. This was a bigger topic than we initially anticipated. So last time we talked about a lot of what challenges us as people with ADHD when it comes to finances, but we didn’t get so far in terms of like, what do you do about it? So today we’re going to talk a little bit more about strategy and how to start changing your relationship with finances as a person with ADHD.

And I want to start with something that we alluded to last time but didn’t all the way talk about, which is the idea of ADHD tax and the many forms that this can take from late payment fees to purchasing things that we don’t need to. I always like to joke that root canals are the ultimate ADHD tax because they’re expensive.

It’s dental work. We’re not necessarily the best at, dental hygiene, particularly the finer bits like flossing. It too is an unexpected expense. They are not fun. And they are incredibly expensive. And they are in large part because I have ADHD and it is hard for me to remember to take care of my teeth to floss every day.

So ADHD tax can crop up in so many different forms and it’s such a huge source of guilt and shame. And so I want to start by saying that one of the ways that I deal with ADHD tax is to just forgive myself. It does me no good to beat myself up after the fact about needing to pay for a root canal, about paying my credit card late and having a fee that month. It just is.

And so in some ways, I’ve kind of considered it like the cost of being a person who is alive with ADHD. It is just going to happen sometimes. And while I have gotten better about it, and I have made some changes throughout the years in terms of how often those taxes show up and where I’m paying them, they still happen. And it doesn’t help to be mad at myself about it.

So I just, I practice radical forgiveness in that area, combined with some gratitude. Like, is it fun to paid the dentist $3,000 for a procedure that is really uncomfortable and no fun to go through? No, it’s not. Am I glad that I have the money to do it, and it’s a fixable problem, and I’m able to get it taken care of? So while I wish it hadn’t happened, I’m also grateful that I have the resources to take care of it, to solve it, to do it. To put those resources towards something that I need.

[00:03:17] Dusty: Yeah, and I just want to define, ADD tax as being the concept of, you end up paying more because of something that you could have paid less for if it weren’t for your ADHD. So procrastinating on things, avoiding things, forgetting things, losing things, and then having to end up paying more for it.

An example is, I had a client once who forgot to pay her car insurance, and then there was a flood, and her car was actually like, underwater. And so because she had no insurance, she had to get a new car rather than the small amount of money relatively that it would have cost her to pay her insurance. She just forgot. She meant to do it. She didn’t go around to it, and it ended up costing her like an entire car.

And we see this in all different kinds of ways. Like you were talking about, Ash. And I think it is a combination of self forgiveness because even with your best strategies, it’s going to happen from time to time.

A good example is I was at a conference last month. I went to my gate. I was sitting at the gate. I missed my flight. I was reading a book. I got distracted. They didn’t do a loud final boarding call. I was right there at the gate so that I wouldn’t miss it. Still missed it because I wasn’t paying attention, right?

And so I had to, well actually in that instance I will say actually they got me in another flight for free so I didn’t have to pay, but like had I had to. I actually have also screwed up like connecting flight times and have had to pay for another flight. But I think aside from like in that case, I had to forgive myself. I did everything I could. I was sitting at the gate. I did everything right. ADHD just got the better of me, right? I really tried.

I think another strategy for dealing with the ADHD tax is getting comfortable doing, as they call it, paying the ADHD tax upfront. So for example, I think a lot of us try to save money. We try to be thrifty, but we’re not taking our ADHD into account. So this might look like paying for a cheaper monthly payment.

And I’ve done this a lot with fitness where I’ve tried to pay the lower rate, but I don’t end up going at all. And so I end up wasting all that money anyway. So even though it’s more expensive to pay for the like one off classes, it’s actually better for me to pay the shorter, higher price now than save money on the longer price later. Because I probably won’t use it. I might forget. I might get distracted.

And I also talk about this a lot in the context of food, right? So, we have our ADHDers who are buying fresh fruits and vegetables, they take them home, put them in the crisper where they go to die, they never get chopped, they never get cut, because there’s a lot of prep involved. Now, it is more expensive to buy the pre cut fruit and vegetables.

And first of all, dear listeners, you should know that like there’s an airline out there running $3,000 empty flights a year just to keep their landing strip priority. I think there was a recent report saying that billionaires cause more carbon emissions than we will in our whole lives. Like it’s not, you’re okay to buy that plastic packaging and recycling it. You are not the straw that breaks the camels back on climate change, okay. So just environmental guilt, put it away. But paying for the pre cut fruit and vegetables up front is more expensive, but not if you actually eat it because you’re wasting all that money on the fruit and vegetables that just go in the bin.

Anyway, I think the other thing we do about the ADHD tax is start to really know ourselves. Accept ourselves and accept where we’re not going to make good use of the lower price thing. Get comfortable paying more money up front to save yourself the heartache, the guilt, and probably more money anyway, later.

[00:06:32] Ash: So I want to go back to your flight for a second, because I’ve certainly had moments like that, that all of a sudden I’ve made an incredibly expensive mistake. And that is something that would have caused me to melt down in a previous life.

And what I do now, it’s -honestly, like this is the phrase that I use to create that pause, disrupt, pivot moment for myself – is a little phrase I like to say to myself. Well, we’re here now. And what that’s really about is just acceptance. The mistake has already been made. It’s not going to serve me to have a meltdown about it. So, okay. Take a breath. Well, we’re here now. Now from this place, what are my options? How can I fix this problem from here? So really appreciate that.

I actually coached a client through something very similar. He did an international trip to Ireland and made a mistake booking a rental car. And I don’t quite remember the ins and outs of the story other than they had to book a second rental car, but still ended up paying for this first rental car, even though it either wasn’t needed or wasn’t available or whatever else happened. And of course we’re dealing with language barriers, time zone barriers, cultural barriers, as he’s letting this item after the trip languish on his to do list.

I finally asked him, is the money even worth it at this point? Is it worth it to you to recover that money to, to go through this painful process from here? The conclusion we came to was no, it wasn’t. So the really interesting perspective shift for that client was going from no choice – I’ve made a mistake, I’ve made a financial mistake because of my ADHD, and I have to fix it – to moving into choice. Do I have to fix it? What’s the worst that happens if I don’t? The money’s already spent. I don’t know even if I go all the way through this painful process of trying to recover it, if I’m going to get that money back, and I can live without that money. That’s not make or break money for me.

So, there’s an element there of being at choice, which speaks to the second scenario you were talking about. That old saying of penny wise and pound foolish, which we so often are as people with ADHD, where we want to get the best value. We want to get the best deal. We want to buy the uncut produce for any number of reasons, because we think we should, because we think adults can cut up their own vegetables. Because we feel guilty about the plastic.

So we let perfect in that case be the enemy of good and to our own detriment. So again, there’s an opportunity there to introduce the idea of being at choice. What does it look like for me to be at choice here? And what is good enough? Because none of us can be perfect, right?

I am very concerned about the environment. I try to do my best as a consumer when and where I can, but I don’t worry about it in the ways that I used to because I can’t. Because when I do, that becomes such an executive function tax and almost a job unto itself, and it makes everything harder.

And to what end my little impact is not going to change global warming or climate change. It’s just not. The problem is not me. The problem is much bigger than me. So, what is the worth in stressing myself out and making my own life harder and not even getting the results, right? Letting this stuff die in the crisper so that I don’t buy plastic, but it’s something I did to myself for years.

[00:10:34] Dusty: Exactly. It’s like you buy this food, and you think that you’re going to eat it, but then it’s too stressful to cook it. So you end up ordering out anyway. Right? So, yeah, what we’re talking about here is managing wasting money, through the ADHD tax.

And another thing that we talked about last week in terms of managing money better is that out of sight, out of mind issue, right? Where, like, we don’t think about the future, or we forget, right? Money and the future are so abstract. We know we need some amount of money for things that we’re going to have to pay for down the road.

And I don’t know about you, Ash, but I know, like, if it’s within a couple months, that’s easy for me to keep in mind. Like, oh, I’m going on a trip next month. I’m gonna need X amount of dollars approximately for that. But what I’m not thinking about is, like, my annual life insurance policy coming out like six months from now, because that seems really far away. Oh, I’m definitely going to have enough money to pay for that between now and six months from now.

But if I just keep spending money on whatever is happening in the now, I may not be putting away the money that I need. And when that policy comes due, all of a sudden I need a big chunk of money, and that might be more stressful.

And so I see a lot of people with ADHD doing this very, like, I’m not sure if it’s a feast or famine thing. Like, they have a lot of money, and they can pay for everything, or they have no money and they can pay for nothing. And it becomes a cycle because when you’re in famine, then you get behind, right? And so then when you’re in feast, not only are you catching up, but you’ve been like, you know, in essence, starving yourself, like financially, for so long that you swing way far the other way and you overspend because you felt like you’ve gone without for so long. Right?

And so there’s this very like push pull, all or nothing, feast or famine way that people are managing their money, rather than being able to make sense of that abstract, not now, you know, all the costs that we have down the road that are over the time horizon.

[00:12:18] Ash: Exactly, Dusty. And this causes us to make decisions not from a place of choice. Thinking about you and your winter coat. 

[00:12:27] Dusty: The winter coat saga returns.

[00:12:29] Ash: Yes. And, how very real that was for you in the moment of this is not an absolute need. And there’s this scarcity mentality of, and I can’t afford this right now. So I’m not going to spend the money on this. So we oscillate back and forth between periods of Impulse spending and periods of extreme frugality and on both ends of that pendulum, we’re not really being at choice.

In fact, this is something that has come up for a couple of my clients recently is how do I know the difference between when I’m being impulsive and when I’m being at choice? Because we’ve all had that experience of being impulsive, buying the thing we don’t use. The snazzy tool, the thing that’s going to make it easier, the thing that’s going to make us do the thing that we know we ought to do, the thing that’s going to finally make it possible and then never using it. Sometimes never taking it out of the package.

I bought a $500 writing tablet. It’s supposed to be no distraction writing that sat in the package for a year. And now that it’s out of the package, I don’t really like it that much. And it really doesn’t work for the way that I write and create.

It does happen. But because we’ve had that experience over and over again, we have this fear that any major purchase is going to be that. And so things that could actually aid us, help us, be support. We deny those things to ourselves.

I think I said in a previous episode, I have a really nice rice maker that I purchased for myself. Really expensive as far as household appliances go, particularly by my standards. I’m a pretty simple, no frills life. By choice. So I must’ve been looking at this rice maker for 10 years before I finally purchased one.

But that fear of will I really use it? Will I get the value out of it kept me from doing anything about it. And it wasn’t until I stepped back and started to really think through, okay, what kind of meals do I make? How often are we eating rice? How often would we eat rice or how would rice work into our family meal structure if I had an easier way to make rice? What is the actual process of using the machine? How onerous or not onerous is that rather than assuming what’s the actual process? What are the steps?

And what’s the worst case scenario? If I don’t like it, they actually have a pretty nice resale value. So I could recoup a good portion of my costs by selling it to somebody else on Facebook marketplace if ultimately I try it, and it still ultimately doesn’t work for reasons I hadn’t considered until I got the thing.

[00:15:11] Dusty: And I would like also argue that that’s a little bit paying the ADHD tax up front. And the other thing we talked about, which was your life being more difficult when you don’t have the right tools, right?

So let’s consider those 10 years that you were making rice without a good rice maker. Were you avoiding eating meals you really wanted to eat because you weren’t cooking rice? Were you burning rice more often and having to, like, waste it and throw it out and cook it again? Were you, you know, was it, how much, what’s the time cost, right? All of our time is money. And so were you wasting way more time cooking rice by hand that you got back?

So like in the end it was a really good investment and it kind of addressed two things, right? It’s like the ADHD tax up front, but it’s also like, okay, now you have the right tools to do the job.

And again, decision-making is so hard with ADHD. So it can sometimes be really impossible for us to know, like, is this a waste of money? Is this a tool that’s going to make it easier for me to live my life, something I’m going to use, something that’s going to save me money in the end?

And that’s like what I was saying before, my ex-partner would say to me, is this a want or a need? And I’d be like, I really honestly can’t tell the difference between those two things. Because like, if you’re asking me on an absolute level, like will I die if I don’t have this? Most things are not a need, right? But there’s a lot of things that have definitely made my life easier and streamlined things that I would have thought, well, maybe that’s frivolous.

So Ash, when it comes to out of sight, out of mind though, what do you think are the best solutions for people with ADHD?

[00:16:35] Ash: I’m glad you brought it back to that test date because we really didn’t address that thing of money in the future. Those occasional expenses or expected unexpected expenses like car maintenance or house maintenance, things that crop up, but we can’t exactly know when or how much money.

It sounds like you and I actually use the same solution here, and that is the software You Need a Budget [YNAB]. I am a huge fan of this particular software. I don’t recommend tools very often because while we all share this thing that we call ADHD, we’re all very different people in terms of our other strengths and challenges, things like modality preferences, things like who we are at the core that has nothing to do with our ADHD.

You and I often have a good laugh off mic about how we share this thing called ADHD, and we’re doing the show together. And we make very different decisions about what our lives look like, because what works really well for you and what constitutes support for you would absolutely not work well or constitute support for me and vice versa.

But as far as finances go, this is one tool that I pretty universally recommend because it’s not just software. It’s an entire budgeting philosophy that has flexibility baked right into it. And I think what we really struggle with when it comes to finances and future planning as people with ADHD is we can get very into all-or-nothing thinking. And money is not an all-or-nothing thing. Unexpected expenses happen.

YNAB, that’s short for You Need A Budget, calls this rolling with the punches. And so baked kind of into the software and into the philosophy, they teach you how to think about the future, how to be flexible enough with your money, what types of things you ought to be thinking about and saving for.

And I found that by and large, it’s the best product I’ve found to help make sense of money for people with ADHD. Is it the only way? Absolutely not. But it certainly is a powerful tool if the tool resonates with you.

Dusty, do you have other thoughts about how people might start thinking about the future if YNAB’s not an option or it just doesn’t work, it doesn’t click. What does future money look like? How can I think about money in a bigger, more holistic way beyond what is my bank account balance say right now today?

[00:19:12] Dusty: Yeah. Well, so first I just, I want to second what you said about You Need A Budget. And like, there are a couple of good tools that I find like pretty universally helpful for almost everyone with ADHD and like, You Need A Budget is one of them.

The caveat I’ll say is that like it, there’s a lot of setup cost, and you have to understand how to use it properly. And so sometimes when people are grappling with a large amount of money, shame and avoidance, I won’t recommend it first only because it can be so overwhelming for them to think so much about their money.

So let me take a second and say like why I personally find You Need A Budget very helpful for me. I’m like much more with impulsivity like impulsive spending. And there was actually a study done, I think it was out of the University of Winnipeg. I can’t remember, but it was a study that found – and this is like a little depressing trigger warning – it found that there was a link between ADHD, especially the impulsive kind of ADHD and higher rates of debt, depression, and even, suicidality. And they found that it was much stronger in the category of ADHDers who had hyperactive impulsivity than those who were primarily inattentive.

And so I certainly, you know, I feel that for myself for sure with like impulsive spending. And so one of the things that You Need A Budget does is it helps you to like see kind of like where all your money needs to go.

So let’s say, I used the example when you and I were talking off camera of my daughter’s birthday party. My daughter is, her birthday’s in February. So no matter what we do, it always costs money. I’ve tried doing the parties at home. I’ve tried doing them at like a little play place. I cannot spend less than like 500 minimum, and it’s usually closer to like a thousand. Like she’s a little kid. It’s insane. I never thought it would cost this much to throw birthday parties. It’s nuts. And every year it creeps up on me cause it’s right after Christmas. Right?

So with You Need a Budget, let’s say that I’m like, okay, you know what? I want to put aside 800 for my daughter’s birthday next year. You Need a Budget will take the number of months between whatever day it is today and my daughter’s birthday, and it will break it down into even, like even payments basically, right?

So, you know, if I set up You Need a Budget in like April or May and I tell it, oh, okay, I want to have, you know, 800 saved by February of next year, it’s going to tell me, okay, you need to save such and so much money. But what I did is I actually did this for everything. I did it for Halloween costumes. I did it for like Easter spending.

And so You Need A Budget will tell me like, okay, you need to put, you know, 15 aside this month for, you know, Easter next year or for Halloween. And it’s like small amounts of money because I’m doing it over a year, which makes it affordable.

However, if it wasn’t for You Need A Budget like spelling out the pieces for me and like putting the pieces together and linking the links, I would say, Oh, 15, whatever, like I’ll just spend that, and I’ll just put 30 aside next month. That’s a small amount of money. I’ll put that aside next month. But then the next month it’ll be, oh, 60. Well, you know what? I actually have this other bill that’s a little bit more urgent. So I guess I’ll just do 120 next month. And the next thing you know, I have not saved any money.

So for me, what the real game changer about You Need A Budget is that it maps it out for me so that I can like literally do the math and say, no, this 15 needs to be saved. It is spoken for. It is part of a larger whole that results in me not being stressed off my butt January 31st. That’s why I think it’s really, really effective.

But when I have clients who are too avoidant, and we’re struggling too much, or who find it to be too high a setup cost or whatever, I think that you can do approximately the same thing with like a simple spreadsheet.

And the thing I think that people get wrong about budgeting is you don’t have to be perfect at it. You just have to be better, right? So if somebody has absolutely no idea what they’re spending on anything, and they don’t even really know what their expenses are ’cause they haven’t gone into their bank to look, probably pretty unlikely that they’re going to be able to create a budget and stick to it.

So my first goal with people who are really avoidant is literally just to get them tracking and touching their finances, like logging and seeing where their money’s going without trying to change anything You know what? You’ve been sucking at money for months or maybe years already. What’s one or two more months?

The difference is if we can’t get you looking at your finances and interacting with it on a regular basis, you’re never gonna get to that next level, right? So then once we get there that next level is okay, like let’s put aside. Let’s make sure that we have a rough idea of them the key cost the big costs, right? We don’t know how much, like, you’re going to spend on groceries or variable things, because the things like groceries and gas and things that are variable, it’s not good enough to say, well, I’ve been spending, you know, I don’t know, 800 a month on groceries, and I want to spend six.

The thing is, that actually represents a behavioral change, right? If you’re going to spend less on groceries, how are you going to do that? Does it mean you’re changing how often you cook? Does it mean you’re changing where you shop? All of these, like sort of this domino effect of behaviors is all really hard with ADHD. So we can’t nail it all at once, right?

So again, like, you have to kind of, I think, practice budgeting first. You have to give yourself grace and be like, okay, it doesn’t matter if I totally failed at the budget I set for myself this month. Even setting the budget In the first place, I just, I’m just practicing, right? And then every month you try to stick to your little budget that you made. And if you blow it, you go, that’s okay. The fact that you’re even trying is progress.

And once we can get people, I think, over that avoidance and that fear and that shame, and they can start to understand why they’re spending the way that they spend, then we can start actually figuring stuff out.

And at the end of the day. I think it’s probably not too like different from You Need A Budget. Whether you’re using You Need A Budget or not, it’s understanding costs in the future, like writing them down, having them be visual.

For some people, it looks like having separate bank accounts for different things that they need to save for. 500 set aside every year for auto maintenance. The best thing for you to do is to open up a separate bank account that you know your goal is to get to 1,500 at some point and put it in this other bank account that you don’t have a card for.

I love to do this. I do this for myself. I have bank accounts that I do not have a debit card for and that I cannot get money out of without like jumping through several hoops because that’s the only thing that will slow my roll.

It could even look like giving money to a friend if there’s someone you trust to hold on to. I’ve done this to other people, and I’ve had other people do to me. I’ve held onto money for my impulsive ADHD friends so that they won’t spend it and vice versa.

So yeah, I think the key thing is to start from where you are and not to try to go too big too fast because perfectionism and budgeting is just going to cause you to fail and then go through that cycle of screw it.

[00:25:30] Ash: It was a long answer, Dusty, but it was a really good one because you speak to a couple of really important things. I love this idea of just approaching it because you don’t know what you don’t know. Where are the problems or challenges for me when it comes to spending, when it comes to budgeting? Where am I noticing that my habits here aren’t serving me?

And if you’re not looking at your finances at all, you can’t possibly know the answers to those questions. And it’s highly individual. Your struggle is impulse spending. My struggle can be the exact opposite. I struggle with being too frugal, too extreme in that regard and making life hard on myself, which then brings up the ADHD tax stuff where I end up paying for it all anyway, in a different way. And it’s a completely unhelpful cycle.

So I love this idea of just approaching it, looking at it, and then looking at one little area that you could start to change your relationship with, because as you said, each challenge with budgeting represents some sort of behavior change, whether it’s opening up another bank account and setting some intention of moving a fixed amount to that account each month. That’s, those are all tasks.

If you’re trying to reduce spending, as you said, where and how is that going to happen? What does that look like for me in a way that’s actually going to accomplish a goal? What are some realistic steps I could try?

And I’m really appreciating bringing it back to practice, which is at the core of everything we do with our clients, just like any other work we do as coaches. The idea here is let’s try it and see what the experience actually is.

So listeners, whatever you are struggling with with finances, whether budgeting is the first place you need to look, or it’s one of the other things that we’ve talked about, what’s the thing that has your attention and how can you start to get curious there? How can you start to look at it? Not from a one down place, not from beating yourself up, but from the place of opportunity. What do you not know that you need to know to even know what the opportunity is for you?

[00:27:45] Dusty: Can I throw like a few more quick tips in here?

[00:27:47] Ash: Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:27:48] Dusty: Many years ago when I really struggled with finances, I had all these debts – and I think this is part of where we get into the problem, too, is like if you find numbers and math boring and money boring, you can know what you need to do and still struggle to do it.

So, you know, stuff like body doubling, working with your coach, accountability are all really important here. But you can also gamify it, right? So one of the things that I did, I had all these little debts, like I owed 50 bucks to this person. I was overdue on a bill, 75 here. And then I had a couple big debts, like a credit card debt.

So I took painter’s tape, I didn’t want people to see it, so I went to the inside of my pantry. I had like a pantry that was like one of those big Ikea like sort of closets. So I opened up the inside door of my pantry, I took painter’s tape, and I made a grid. And I got two sizes of post it notes, one little, one big, and they were very colorful. And on the little post it note, so the grid had maybe, I don’t know, 12 slots, however many little debts I had. And on each little grid, I named a small treat that I’d been wanting for myself, a little thing that I hadn’t been allowing myself to buy or something that I wanted. And then over top of each one, I put a bigger post it note with the debt on it.

And so every time I paid a debt, I got to pull the post it note off and there was like a little treat for me underneath it that I then got to treat myself to. Did I pay my debts off slower because I was also spending money on my treats? Yes. Was I really eager to pay off those debts? Yes.

And I took the big debt – like say I had like a thousand dollar debt – and I broke it into five payments of 200. Because to me that felt like not so much that I wouldn’t be able to do it like all at once But it was big enough that it made, you know, it turned a thousand dollar debt into five easy steps. And it was really fun and I enjoyed it

And then similarly another thing I did to improve my finances was I decided to go down a rabbit hole and just get really curious about finances in general. I read several finances books. I started understanding stuff about investing, which made me feel smart, which made me get more curious. And that made me also want to engage with my own finances more.

If that doesn’t work for you, dear listeners, maybe it’s just body doubling. Maybe it’s having a buddy that you meet with once a month and you guys both do your budgeting together. Or, you know, you bring it to your coach, or you get the support you need. It’s not just about knowing what to do. It’s about figuring out how to get yourself to follow through.

Because we all know that if we just say, oh yeah, once a month on the first Sunday of every month, I’m going to sit down and do my budgeting, you are absolutely going to blow it off. So like, how are you going to help yourself follow through? 

[00:30:10] Ash: I love that you basically had an advent calendar for taking care of your debts. Like you do the thing, you get to open up a little unexpected treat, and the treat’s covered up. So you may not even know which one you’re going to get. What an innovative solution.

And I think that, at the end of the day, that’s really the moral of the story here. In so many ways, getting nerdy about finances worked for you. The opposite works for me. I do not worry about long term investments. I have some, but I also have a financial planner who knows all of the things about long term investments, because quite frankly, it is a topic that just does not interest me.

I just cannot. I can get really nerdy and really into daily household management. I enjoy that. So I lean into that strength, but when it comes to long term investing, I know that that’s not my forte. I know that it could theoretically be cheaper and better for me if I learned how to do it myself. And I also know that that is simply not ever going to happen.

[00:31:09] Dusty: You’re paying the ADHD tax up front, right? Yeah, you could read a bunch of books and invest all that time, but you’re not gonna, and you’re gonna avoid it and procrastinate it, so just pay the guy. Pay the man. Get it done.

[00:31:20] Ash: Exactly. And so I did want to toss out one other resource in that regard for those of you who maybe struggle the other way, because if you struggle with long term investments, it’s pretty easy to find a financial planner. They exist. People who do not have ADHD use financial planners and do not pay attention to their long term investments beyond the advice they are given as well.

But what about daily money management? If that’s your struggle, if you just don’t find it interesting, and if you don’t have the good fortune of having a friend like Dusty who might body double for you, or hold onto your money for you, there is a profession called daily money managers that does exist.

And so if you really, truly cannot manage your own money, but you have the resources to outsource that. That is an outsourceable thing.

[00:32:14] Dusty: Ash didn’t notice me just writing that down right now, cause I’m like…

[00:32:17] Ash: Oh, no, I did. I saw that light bulb go off that, huh?

[00:32:20] Dusty: Real thing? Oh my gosh, I wonder if we have that in Canada. I definitely know some clients who could use that. I’m not talking about myself. Other people, not me. Just kidding. Just kidding. Yeah, but yeah, that’s hard too, the daily money management.

And sometimes it looks like, a lot of the times I think it looks like deleting your card out of Amazon or the like, whatever, you know, just uninstalling, uninstall the Amazon app. I had a teacher at my ADD training institute who said she just never went into bookstores. She just didn’t go. Right?

And here’s the ADD tax up front. I don’t know about you, but I love a grocery store because all the stores that I go to have, right now they’ve got all the Christmas decorations and stuff, right? And they have homewares. So I’m very likely to be tempted to overspend if I go into, a Walmart or a store like that.

So even though it’s more expensive to have Instacart and the delivery fee, it actually saves me money in the end because if I will only buy what is on my list, then I’m saving money in the end.

I think we’ve learned a lot about each other and especially about my spending habits in this episode. Oh, you know what? That’s why I have a lot of strategies because I’ve had a lot of challenges, right? And so I have to do all of these extra things, but at the end of the day, it feels good, right? It feels good to go to sleep at night knowing that I have a roof over my head and that things can be paid for.

[00:33:38] Ash: Absolutely. And I think above all else, your context matters. We said this last time. What you do or do not know about finances currently, what you were or were not taught and what your individual strengths and challenges are. Investment makes no sense to me because it just doesn’t, I have given it a fairly good go, but it just makes no sense to me. It just bores me to tears. I hate meeting with my financial planner once a year, because he really wants to explain everything to me in fine detail. And it’s literally all going in one ear and out the other. It just doesn’t work for my brain.

So like anything else, it’s about finding what will work for your brain. Dusty, you gamified your debt. You made an advent calendar out of it that worked for your brain.

So I think so much of when it comes to finances, it’s one of those things where we get into that story of, well, if I was adulting correctly, if I was a proper adult, this more than anywhere is somewhere to let go of that and to just roll with whatever wacky thing ends up working for you.

For Dusty, it’s advent calendars and removing access. And for me, it’s exactly the opposite of that because I have the opposite problem where I won’t spend when I need to spend.

[00:34:58] Dusty: I need to come to your house and take you shopping.

[00:35:00] Ash: Funnily enough, there’s a massive hole in my shed right now. 

[00:35:03] Dusty: Dear listeners, what we’re hearing is that Ash needs my bad influence.

[00:35:07] Ash: It’s not that I need your bad influence. It’s the two things can be true. Our struggles exist on opposite ends of the spectrum. I have a massive hole in my shed, which means my lawnmower has nowhere to go because a tree limb fell on it, which means I need to shell out a few thousand dollars to have the trees trimmed.

And I also need to shell out a few thousand dollars to replace the shed. I am very debt adverse. This is very true. For three months now, taking out a home equity loan to take care of these problems because I’m so debt adverse. Even knowing that this is not bad debt. This is good debt. This is debt that I can afford. And it’s really nice that I have the equity in my house to be able to take care of these problems at a time and place where I don’t have the cash on hand to do it. But it is still a struggle.

And it’s been more of a struggle for me because I have been struggling to stay on top of my budget. So I don’t know that I know what I can afford per month right now. So you see how that all comes full circle.

[00:36:09] Dusty: Get that finance manager guy on the phone. 

[00:36:10] Ash: Ah, well, you see how it comes full circle that the solution for both of us to some degree is having a budget, but that budget performs different functions for us, right? For you, it helps you restrict your spending to plan ahead, to have money available when you need it. And for me, it helps me see, okay, this is what my income looks like right now. And this is what I can comfortably within my own very conservative approaches to money. This is what I can comfortably take on or afford to do here.

So in both cases, it’s giving us the information we don’t currently have. It’s just addressing very different struggles because we are different people.

So listeners, whatever your struggle might be, the opportunity here, as Dusty said earlier in the episode is to get curious and to just look for a place where you can start to find out what you don’t know about your own relationship with your finances.

So Dusty, I think that’s a good place for us to wrap for today. So until next week I’m Ash.

[00:37:09] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.

[00:37:10] Ash: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.