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ADHD And Managing Money
How To Get A Better Handle On Your Finances
Full disclosure: I’m nearly 53 and still learning but I am getting there and have picked up a few things along the way others *might* find useful.
Notice What Your Parents Taught You
Now some parents are really good at managing money, talking about money and not making it a taboo subject for their kids. Others are secretive about money or think it’s rude to mention it. For some families, money becomes a bone of contention meaning that they argue about it and it is a source of stress and tension. It’s also important to understand that when there’s not enough to go around, it’s a massive worry. So whilst I hope you were all raised in a land of plenty with parents who could freely discuss money matters and pass on that healthy attitude to you, if like me you weren’t, I am not here to judge.
My upbringing was by parents who had endured post-war rationing so it’s fair to say that an abundance mindset was not in their vocabulary. They also split up and divorced which also appeared to involve arguments about money and fairness of who had what. In my world, money wasn’t mentioned except to say that there wasn’t enough of it or if people were shouting at each other about it.
I decided very young, I was NEVER going to argue about money. And to be fair I never have. But what was less helpful was that I implemented that vow by more or less deciding to never talk or think about it either. My friends, that simply doesn’t work, whether you have ADHD or not.
So the first think to do if you want to change your relationship with money is to unpick what you’ve learned from your family about the topic, and which parts of those lessons are helpful, and which you need to leave behind.
I’m keeping my vow not to argue about money — because no-one ever got paid to argue unless they were in politics or the law. I’ve ditched my notion about avoiding thinking about it because that creates its own kind of chaos and when you have ADHD you are pretty much going to forget to think about it when you should anyway. So don’t compound the mistake!
