Welcome to learn to thrive with ADHD. This is the podcast for adults with ADHD or ADHD like symptoms. I’m your host coach, Mande John. I’m here to make your life with ADHD easier. Let’s get started.

Welcome back today. We are talking about ADHD and finances. Now I have done an episode on YouTube about impulsive spending and told a little bit of my story there, but I went from being a child where there were times that there was very little money. But mostly we had exactly what we needed. But I do remember very specifically, there was a certain time where there was, Like no money.

I remember my dad saying that we had 2 left and it was because of, having quit a job and having not gone into a new job and that kind of thing. But that experience stuck with me and I think led to some of the ways that I spent later on. Also going into college, they gave us a credit card.

As a student ID, which is the worst thing you can do to an 18 year old. So there was that and we, my husband and I, both, we weren’t married at the time, but we were soon to be married a few years later. But we both were very. Immature impulsive spenders. And we took that into our twenties, into our marriage.

It got to the point that I did something really crazy and I sold everything we owned. I was very resentful of the things that I had purchased and how that was holding power over us. And the only thing my husband and I were fighting about was finances. He just could not understand. I was doing the finances.

I was paying the bills and I was keeping track of things, but he couldn’t understand that when he brought a check home, that check was already spent. And that was very frustrating and upsetting to him, which, understandably but when you’ve also taken part in already spending the money, then it’s everybody’s fault.

Between student loans, credit card debt, it was mostly that, student loans and credit card debt. We ended up being, when we calculated it all, when it came to a head, 90, 000 in debt. And that is when I presented the crazy idea of let’s sell everything. We sold all of our furniture.

We were living in a townhouse at the time with our four year old son and we just sold everything that was unnecessary. And what I deduced was that we could get a trailer for much cheaper than rent and park it in his parents backyard until we got this debt paid off. And that is what we did for about a year and we got most of the debt paid off.

We used what’s called a snowball system. We had used a debt consolidation company at the time, but what we found was they were actually paying the bills late. They were causing more problems than they were solving. And so we took that back away from them and we paid the smallest bill, applied it to the next, applied it to the next.

And of course had reduced our expenses greatly by moving into this trailer situation. When your rent went from. I can’t remember what it was at the time let’s just say a thousand dollars a month at the time to, less than 200 a month and having reduced, utilities and everything like that.

And so we were really able to concentrate on that debt and we just had a four year old and so it was great to. Open up to grandma and grandpa’s backyard for him and play and just have a good time. So that was a great time to do that. When we had our second child, we moved back into a house and we started going into debt again.

And it was just because we had not, we had learned to pay off debt, but we hadn’t solved the problems that were getting us there. And what problems were getting us there? It was spending. Because we wanted to, it was not looking at our numbers, not looking at what we were spending on, what was coming in exactly what was going out exactly. And we found a solution for that. So I came home after going to the, some activity and a friend of ours had said, Oh here’s how we handle our budget. And she explained to me the process of a cash budget. Now so many people are against a cash budget. And I understand. I understand the concerns, especially when you have ADHD.

Some people are scared that they’re going to lose the cash. There’s lots of reasons. Sometimes the reason is just the same reason. We don’t want to like necessarily track what we’re eating or something like that. It’s because if you track it, you have to limit it. And if that’s the reason I would go with the cash budget anyway, but you can use the same principles no matter how you decide to do this.

But we chose to do a cash budget. What I’m going to do is I’m going to share with you a new version of this spreadsheet that I used back then. And it’s nice because you reevaluate it every month. And so you can get that at www. learntothrivewithadhd. com backslash free resources. And it will, it’ll have something about budgets on there.

Let’s just say ADHD budget tracker or something like that. And. I will I might even have a little video there to show you how to use it. I’m not sure exactly. It’s probably pretty self explanatory, but this will be the same system that I used. And what we did is we got all of our expenses together.

And so what that might look like for you is printing out statements from wherever you have spent money for, you could do it for three months if you want to keep it simple. I did it for a year just to like really have the whole year, in view. There are some things that fluctuate. In the summer, for example, I’m in Southern California.

Our electrical bill is going to be a lot more in the summer than it’s going to be in the winter. And I’ll talk about how I resolved bills like that. But the first thing I looked at is what can we cut out? So what are you spending money on that you don’t need to be spending money on? Now the biggest mistake everyone with ADHD that I’ve worked with finances is making not looking at their numbers.

They don’t want to do that. And it’s because you’re facing reality and it’s very important to just go ahead and face reality as uncomfortable as it is and to know, Hey, I’m spending 500 to a thousand dollars over what I’m actually making. That’s just good information. You don’t have to make that mean anything about you.

It doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person for doing that or that you made a huge mistake. It just means that. You don’t want to continue to do that, or it’s going to put you further and further into the hole. I can’t remember who said it, but. There was some author or something was saying like, if you find you’re digging a hole, stop digging, that’s the first thing you need to do.

And that’s what you’re doing when you’re looking at your numbers. So I printed out the statements from a year, grab all your credit cards, all your bank cards. Now everybody’s spending money on Apple pay and Venmo and all those kinds of things. I don’t really know how Apple pay works. Maybe that comes out of your bank account.

Yeah. But gather together any way money is going out and get that all down on a spreadsheet. Or if you want to just start off with a notebook or something like that, a notepad, do that. However it works for you. Get it all down. As I said, what’s the first things you can cut? Get rid of some of the stuff you don’t need.

Do you need six different streaming services? I think that’s what we have now. I don’t know why, but I think we have all of them but that’s my husband’s thing. That’s, he likes that kind of stuff. And we can afford them. So that’s what we have, but were we to make cutbacks, that would be the first thing I’d be looking at.

So where can you reduce? And then the next thing you want to look at is what bills fluctuate. I gave you the Southern California example, right? I don’t want to find that in September, my budget’s in trouble because my electric bill has now doubled from what it was. Maybe tripled. I’m not even sure, but it’s a lot more than it was.

The way I dealt with this back then when funds were very limited was I, you can get on programs sometimes. For example, with Southern California Edison that we deal with here, which is our only electric company that we don’t have any choices. It’s just the one they would put us on a level pay plan.

I chose not to do that because I think when we were coming in, it was in the cooler months. And so what I did is I looked at, okay, last year we paid this amount for electricity. Divide that by 12, the electric company is getting this much money every month. And what would happen is by the time it came around to the hotter times of the year where the electric bill was going up, or if you’re in a cooler country, maybe it’s your gas bills going up, that kind of thing.

Then I had a credit with the company and I just. Didn’t have to pay the bill in the summer sometimes. And so it, it worked to my benefit and I knew what the bill was going to be every month. Right. Which was very helpful for my budget where I didn’t have that fluctuation. So if you can do that great.

If you have ADHD, if you can pay something on a credit card ahead of time. So for example, one credit card that we, besides our business card that we use we are down to two credit cards. Because of my ADHD brain, I really needed to simplify. Now I have my wallet actually right here. I was purchasing something a minute ago.

I have four cards in my wallet. One, I absolutely never use. One is the business card I was telling you about. One is the one I’m going to talk about. And one is the business card for my coaching business. And that’s it. And that one that I never use, I probably should just take out of my wallet. It really doesn’t need to be there, but.

Keeping it very simple, keeping it where there’s not a lot of places money is being spent, the more you can simplify, the better. But where I was going with that is the card, the extra card besides our business card is an Amazon card. Now, Most of us are spending on Amazon, right? If you want something ordered and ordered quickly, I live in a very small town. We don’t even have a Walmart. We don’t have any way to purchase socks or anything like that if we wanted to.

So we are a little bit dependent on Amazon. If we were to drive to a Walmart, it would be an hour and a half away. That’s just not really reasonable to do unless we’re already going out of town for that reason, or for some reason, I should say. So I actually have a certain amount of money going to that Amazon credit card automatically every month.

I can’t forget to pay the card. It gets automatically paid. Now, whatever is over and beyond that amount, I will pay off as well, but I can do that when I get to it. I don’t have to worry about missing the deadline on bills. So I would say anything you can automate, Automate. Oftentimes with those of us with ADHD, the problem is not that we don’t have the money.

That is true for some of us, right? Oftentimes I hear people tell me it’s not that I don’t have the money. It’s that I don’t remember to pay the bill or I don’t have an organized system so that I’m paying the bill on time.

The next thing I would say is what changes need to be made to change to improve your financial situation. Really? Do you need to make more money? Do you need to spend less money? Or is it a combination of both? When we were fixing our finances, when we moved to this cash budget type thing, which I’ll talk more about, but when we moved to this, we would do things like go on a spending fast.

And I actually thought that this was fun. And so this sounds terrible to you. It might not work, but it was fun for me to just see, could I go a week without spending any money? Could I go two weeks without spending any money? And of course, this wouldn’t include like bills that you have to pay. This would include, money outside of those bills. And also something you want to ask yourself is what are your goals for the future? So a really interesting thing that happened with us is. We do regular date nights and I had gone on a date night with my husband and we went out to dinner and I asked him, what do you want? And this was many years ago, I would say 10 years ago.

And he goes, at first he was like confused. He’s what do you mean? And I’m like what do you want in life? And he’s someday I’d like to have a gym. And I was like, I would too. I was like, but if we do, I would want to set it up just like this gym and there was two gyms in town and I wanted to set it up just like this one.

That was keycard entry. 24 hour access. Just a really smart business setup. And we’re like yeah let’s do that in the future. And what happened is because we got our finances all in line, we got all the debt paid off. We learned to be responsible through the budgets. We continued that on over and over again so that our savings built up and so that things were all taken care of.

We got offered the opportunity to purchase the exact gym that we were describing. And the owner offered it to my husband. They were talking in the grocery store and said, Hey, would you be interested in buying the gym? And he’s yeah. And we were in the position for him to say, yeah, because of the work that we had done on the backend, because of the crazy moving into the trailer.

And I’m not saying you have to do anything that crazy, but you might have to go to some extremes if you’re in an extreme situation. But because we had been responsible with our finances, we had the opportunity to say, yes, no, nothing came of that for a few years and we’re like, maybe she’s not interested.

Maybe she changed her mind. And so nothing came of that. And then at the perfect time, really she came forward again and was like, okay, let’s do this. I got it all figured out. Let’s start the process. And I think it was about a year process of purchasing the gym. Was nothing but a blessing was a turnkey business.

I like to say where, profitable day one has been just an amazing opportunity for us. And we wouldn’t have had that had we not figured this out, had we not figured out how to be financially responsible. Now I will say those of you that are like I don’t want a cash budget. My husband felt the same way.

In fact I came home home after that meeting with my friend and said hey they are doing a cash budget and here is how it works. For being so part of the conversation right now. and What are, what they’re spending on bills and how much is coming in, whatever’s left besides savings is what you can have for your cash budget. So that’s gonna be your entertainment, your eating out, your groceries, your fuel costs, everything outside of your bills that, your regular bills that you’re paying.

And he was just a hard, no, really didn’t wanna do this. And I’d like to ask his reasons. Now I need to ask that. And then, I let it go. And I came back a little bit later after, this was in the time that we were like we’d moved into the house after the trailer or kind of like getting back into financial trouble again.

And I’m like, I really think we should do this cash budget. He’s I really don’t want to. And so I let it go again. And then an article came out in the magazine and I’m like, I really think we should do this. And he finally said, yes. And 18 years later, that is still what we do. And it has helped tremendously.

Now we spend a little bit more on cards. For example, I gave you the example of the Amazon purchases. There’s things that we maybe wouldn’t have purchased online at that time, but that we do now, of course, our cash budget, the surplus of cash that we allow ourselves to have is more than it was when we were in debt.

Our incomes have increased since then. And so things have changed. And. That’s just good news because if you’re in a position where things are difficult, where you know, you’re feeling like things are tight, don’t be afraid of getting in that position where you’re like, okay, things are tight and I need to tighten my belt.

I need to financially really buckle down because that gets you to end where things are easier. If you never get through that hard point, you’re never going to get to the other side where you no longer have to worry about that. All right.

Oh, and the ending to the story with the gym is . As of this month that I’m recording this podcast, we made our last payment and we outright on the business, which is awesome. And we’re so grateful to the previous owner for the opportunity and All the ways that she like held her hand through the whole process, not just of purchasing, but also of training us on how to run the gym and everything like that.

She’s been amazing and continues to be. But yeah we put. put out a five year loan to purchase the business. And this is the month that we paid it off completely. And so finances are on my mind because of that, but finances are also on my mind because I had a consultation. I think it was last week and he’s I really want to do this, but.

I’m not sure about my finances and it’s back to that same old problem with ADHD where he hadn’t looked at his numbers. He needs to look at his numbers. He needs to gather everything together and really figure things out. And I just thought that so many of us if you have never, gotten yourself in financial trouble in any kind of way.

That’s wonderful. But so many of us are dealing with impulse control attention problems and things, so many symptoms that lead to difficulty with finances. And what I would really recommend, I have several clients that do this and my husband and I had talked about starting to do this as well, just because we’re also now in investments and things like that.

And I feel like he starts to invest all these places. That I’m like, is this all in one place? And where we need to like. Talk about it and discuss it. And so we’re both on the same page, but I have a couple of clients that do financial Fridays and I just thought that was genius. It was interesting.

The one client had called it financial Fridays. Brennan, you’ll, if you’re listening to this, you’ll know it’s you. And then another client had said, Hey, I’m going to meet with my husband on Fridays to go over the finances. And I’m like, Oh, you’re doing financial Fridays. So that’s just a great tip doing financial Fridays.

But meeting together and really getting both on the same page. It’s always more difficult when you’re in a situation where one spouse is in control of the money and the other spouse has no control. That’s not ideal. And if you can fix that situation, definitely fix it. A lot of times there can be challenges with separate accounts and things like that too, but you could work through that with enough communication. But you really want to get your finances under control because if they’re not, it’s causing you stress. And that stress is going to put unnecessary tension on your relationship. If you’re in a relationship, if you’re not, it’s just going to cause you stress, which is going to make your symptoms worse with ADHD.

And your sleep is going to be affected due to stress. And that’s going to make your symptoms worse. And it’s just going to, keep going round and round, and it’s just no way to live. Money problems is not a problem that we have to have. We can always better our position. We can always get a better job.

We can learn more skills. We can do something different to improve that situation in the country that we live in, especially. And if you feel like you can’t, I would really take a look at that and say, where do I have control here to fix my financial situation? I know there was a period where I wanted to be a stay at home mom for my kids.

And I realized that I really felt like I couldn’t improve my financial situation. And that wasn’t true. I was just making a choice. to stay home with them and therefore not work. And but I always had a choice. And I think feeling like I didn’t for a while caused a little bit of issues that I didn’t really need to have.

So I hope this helps. I would love to hear from you. If you found something here that you’re going to implement you can comment if you’re on YouTube, but something new and fun that Buzzsprout actually came out with, which is where I host my podcast. is they have fan mail is what they’re calling it.

But what that means is you can text me. And the number to text me is 904 867 4466. Again, that’s 904 867 4466. You can just grab your phone, shoot me a text, even if you’re on YouTube, either way. And just let me know what you thought, any questions that you have something that you’re going to put into action from this.

It’s one way texting. I cannot text you back. But I can mention your text on the next episode. You can be anonymous or put your name either way. I would love to hear from you. That’s just a fun new thing that they added and I’m super excited about it. So thank you. Guys, this week for your time and especially your attention, and I will see you next week.

Bye bye.