Transcript
Kristen Carder
Welcome to the I have ADHD podcast, where it’s all about education, encouragement and coaching for adults. With ADHD, I’m your host, Kristen Carter and I have ADHD, let’s chat about the frustrations, humor and challenges of adulting, relationships, working and achieving with this neurodevelopmental disorder, I’ll help you understand your unique brain, unlock your potential and move from point A to point B.
Hey, what’s up? You are listening to the I have ADHD Podcast, episode number 22 I am your host, Kristen Carter, there are lawn mowers outside in the distance. Hopefully you are not hearing them. It is a beautiful, sunny day in Pennsylvania. I am so happy to be alive. I am medicated. I am caffeinated, but I could really use some more, and I am 100% ready to roll. I am sitting here, actually, in my family room, looking at the destructed closet of shame we completely tore it out. And by we, I mean Greg, my husband, completely demolished it last weekend. It’s down to the bare bones studs. I’m so excited it’s going to be our laundry room. We’re going to move our washer and dryer downstairs, and I’m really pumped about it, because we haven’t touched this room, the family room, since we moved in three years ago, and this weekend, my job, while Greg works in the new laundry room form a closet of shame. My job is going to be to start painting the family room. So I’m really pumped about that. We have these built ins that are probably, like, 10 feet long, and I’m gonna paint them black.
And I’m just like, so pumped, because I’ve been wanting some black in my home, and I don’t have it anywhere really, like on the walls or anything. So I’m so excited to paint these built ins black. It’s gonna be so fun. Today we are going to talk about money. And I know I’ve already done a money episode. If you haven’t listened to Episode 10, you should go back and listen to that one. It’s really, really good. And so yes, we’ve already talked about money, but I think it’s the kind of topic that we are going to need to revisit over and over. And the reason for that is that most of us, ADHD ers, are pretty bad with our money, if we’re being honest, we, a lot of us, don’t have much money, a lot of us don’t create much money. A lot of us have a lot of debt, and we make the same mistakes over and over, which is just like a classic ADHD thing. So we seem to make the same mistakes over and over without learning from the past.
And that is something that I’ve realized about myself, 100% I was never good with my money all throughout like high school, college and into you know, my adulthood never had enough money, always coming from a place of lack, a place of not having enough, a place of feeling less than in that area, and not knowing how to fix it, not having the tools that I needed to be able to fix it, and so just kind of living the Same scenario over and over, and that’s kind of depressing. I don’t like that. I don’t like that. I had, you know, lived my life like that for so long, but it kind of is what it is. Kind of goes back to that episode on regrets, episode number 20, where we talk about just like, forgiving the past, and that’s one of the things that I just have to let go of. And so now I’m 38 years old, and I am learning how to have money. I’m learning how to create money. I’m learning how to spend my money on things that I actually want, things that bring me so much joy that I never feel guilty about buying, and that’s a new experience for me, because I used to feel guilty about every single purchase because I just was unsure. Like, is this okay? I’m not sure. Like, I don’t know if I can buy this or not.
I don’t know if I have the money for this or not. I don’t know if I’m actually going to use this or not. I don’t know. If I actually like it or not, and so I just allowed myself to feel guilty about every purchase, or most purchases, I would say, including experiences so like going to an amusement park and feeling guilty all day long that I was there, that I had spent X amount of money on it. And I just am choosing not to live my life that way anymore, where I am living in a guilty place. I’m just not going to allow that for my brain anymore. And so I just wanted to share with you what I have been learning. It’s so fun. So most of it goes back to our episode on living with vision. As you know, living with vision is something new to my life, living intentionally making sure that every aspect of my life is lived out in a very purposeful and meaningful way. Obviously, I’m not perfect at this, but I am making headway. I am making progress, and I’m finding it to be very fulfilling and very rewarding. And so that applies to my money. So questions that I like to ask myself are, what do you want? What vision do you have for the future when it comes to your money? Do you want to have money? Do you care about debt? Not everyone cares about debt.
What are your hopes and dreams? Do I want to travel? Do I want to go to college? Do I have an amazingly wealthy retirement? What’s my what’s my why when it comes to having money, why do I want to have money? Is it so that I can just buy more stuff? Is it so that I can be free and live kind of a life that’s not dictated by anyone else. So for me, that’s my answer. I want to be free. I want to be able to be the master of my own destiny, and I want to be able to basically do what I want to do, which, you know, is very indicative of my personality. So I don’t really like to be told what to do. I like to design my own life.
And you know, money allows for option. Money allows for choice. And if you don’t have money, you don’t have many options, you don’t have many choices. So those are the questions that I’ve asked myself, What do I want? Why do I want it? Do I want to have money? Do I care about debt? What’s my why? And what are my hopes and dreams? And I encourage you to ask yourself the same questions. Now I remember when I was first married and I moved from the Philadelphia suburbs to reading where we are now. I didn’t have any friends yet. I didn’t have a job, and I spent so much money because there was nothing exciting going on in my life. I had nothing to do. Even though I was medicated at the time, I was still majorly craving dopamine, so we had no money, but I went shopping constantly. It was like the only exciting thing that I had to do in my life. So one thing that I heard from my coach last week is that it’s not your money’s job to give you a dopamine hit. It’s your life’s job to do that. That totally blew my mind. It’s not my money’s job to give me a dopamine hit. It’s my life’s job to do that. So many of us spend our money because we enjoy the dopamine hit that it gives us the rush. I mean, that rush is legit. It’s scientifically documented. It’s no joke. We ADHD ers crave dopamine so much that we often don’t even realize that we’re spending our money to get the dopamine hit. So take a few minutes and reflect on that. Are you getting enough dopamine out of your real life, or is spending the most exciting thing that you do? Do you use your credit card to give you dopamine? If so, you’re doing it wrong. That’s not how we’re supposed to get dopamine. So, you know, we enter a store with the intention to only buy one thing, like I’m gonna go to Target and buy chapstick, and then we walk out the door having spent over $100 how many times has this happened to me at Target? For the love of everything, it’s happened so many times.
I go in for one silly thing and I come out with the whole world, a whole world of things that I don’t actually need. So in the last couple years, my husband and I have really worked hard to get our finances in order as defined by us. So everyone’s going to have their own version of what getting their finances in order looks like, and that’s okay. So we’re trying to get our finances to a place where we feel really. Really comfortable. It doesn’t mean we’re rich and it doesn’t mean we’ve arrived and we have it all together in this area, we’re always looking for ways to do better and improve. But here are some of the things that I’ve been learning along the way. Number one, and this one is fascinating. There is always more money to be made. We can create money by adding value to the world. Now think about it. You have your job because you’re valuable to your employer. If I create a product, people will pay me for that value. My day job company creates value for my community, and so people pay for that service. If you want more money, ask yourself, How can I create value for the people around me? Maybe you have a great idea for a product or a service or a book. Maybe you’d like to start a side hustle. Maybe you want to do a better job at your nine to five so you can get a promotion. I really want you to consider how you can add value to the world, because that’s the only way that more money is created. We don’t create money by taking it from someone else. We create money by adding value to the world, and then people pay us for that value and making money is awesome. I’ve been purposing myself in the last few years to make more money, and I’ll tell you what, it’s super fun. The quality of my life is improving. Things are getting better. I highly recommend figuring out how to add value to the world so that you can increase your income. There are always opportunities around you to increase your income. You are never stuck. I know a lot of us want to think that we’re stuck, and your brain might explode when I say that you’re not stuck, but you’re not there are always opportunities to create and add more value to the people around you so that you can create more money. Now, number two, Greg and I really do not enjoy debt. Some people are totally fine with debt, and they don’t mind it, but we really don’t enjoy it. It feels confining, like a prison to us. So we have really been working hard to eliminate our debt, and last month, we finally became credit card debt free, and it was so amazing for us. The way we did this was we sacrificed the fun stuff for the feeling of being free from debt. So we sacrificed short term pleasure in return for long term freedom. So for me, as someone with ADHD who really enjoys the short term pleasure, I had to imagine how I’d feel when we had no credit card debt. I had to really go there over and over in my mind, so that I felt like the goal was worth it. You know, when we had $100 and I could decide, like, do I want to go shopping with this, or do I want to put it toward the debt, I had to imagine, like, what do I really want next year?
Am I really going to want, you know, that fourth jacket, or am I going to want to be credit card debt free? And that was really helpful to me, and I’ll tell you, for me personally, it does feel amazing to be debt free. In that way, we still have car debt, which is fine. I’m totally fine with that. We’re working on paying it off, but it doesn’t feel to me as urgent as paying off credit card debt. And the great thing about life is we all get to decide what’s important to us in this area, right? So maybe debt isn’t a big deal to you. For me, it is a big deal. And maybe you’re the kind of person who would never have a car payment, and that’s okay. That’s great for you. You know, I’m the kind of person where I don’t mind having one car payment, but I would never want to have two car payments. So we all have our own varied comfort level, and that’s okay, but you need to figure out what feels good to you, and then make sure that you keep that at the forefront of your mind. So I decided that being credit card debt free was going to feel really, really good to me, and I kept reminding myself that feeling is going to be amazing. And I’ll tell you what it is, it feels so good, and I hope and pray that we never go back into credit card debt. And if we do, that’s fine, we’ll deal with it, but we are really trying to create buffers around our lives so that we do not have to even go there again, which is really, really fun.
Okay, number three, the third thing that I have learned is that I have to practice having money. So what I used to do when I got paid, actually, even before I got paid, I would decide where all of the money was going to go, and I would basically spend it before I even got it. And I. Um, that practice led me to a place where I was very comfortable having hardly anything in my bank accounts, which is really interesting, right? Because I was so excited to get rid of the money. I never actually had the money. I never created a relationship with that money. So what I’m trying to do now is to really practice the having of money, which is so weird to think about, that we even have to practice that. But ask yourself, what do you do when you get paid? Does it all go out the door immediately, or do you spend some time having that money. The longer that we have money, the more difficult it is for us to part with it for things that you know, impulse buys or things that we don’t really even want anyway. So I would just encourage you to practice having money you know, so many of us, and myself included, for a very long time, we’re so much more comfortable with having stuff than we are with having money. And so instead of having money in our bank account, we want to exchange it for stuff, and we’re totally fine with surrounding ourselves with tons and tons of stuff, but we might feel uncomfortable surrounding ourselves with tons and tons of money. So that’s just something for you to reflect on.
It’s something that I have been becoming aware of in my own life, and so now I never try to determine where my money is going to go before I have it. I first want to practice having it and developing that relationship with it, and practice not spending it impulsively. So that leads me to my next point. Number four, decide what you feel is worth spending your money on, and this is another area that’s going to be so different for all of us, and that’s totally fine, isn’t it awesome that we can be so different, and there’s no black or white or right or wrong in these areas. There’s no one size fits all answer, and that’s great. It’s fascinating to me to watch how people spend their money and to see what they value and what they find to be important, because a lot of times it’s so different from me, but it’s not wrong, it’s just different. So for me, I hate to cook, and there’s a lot of stress around cooking. For me right now, I have little kids. They don’t like the food. I feel like it’s very hard to cook because they are all like in my space, and then when we sit down to eat, they don’t like it anyway, so it’s kind of it feels like two hours of torture to me. And so as we have been creating more money in our lives, I have been very happily spending that money on convenience foods and eating out very happily, and I do not see that as a waste at all. And I’m not saying that that’s how we’re gonna live forever, but right now, in this season that we’re in, it is 1,000%
worth it to me for us to spend our money on taking care of dinners and not even having to think about them. This summer, we’re going to give Hello freshly a try, and I’m looking forward to it so much I cannot wait to give them my money. Honestly, I’m not joking. So the point of this is to decide what matters to you to spend your money on, and don’t look to anyone else to make that decision for you, because it’s just going to be different for all of us, 100% so maybe for you, you absolutely hate cleaning, and you could make so much more money in the three hours that it takes you to clean your house. And so you decide to hire someone to clean your house. I think that’s amazing. You should definitely do that, if that’s the case for you. So for me, it’s giving people money so that I don’t have to think about food all right. And then lastly, resist impulse buys. So I wanted to sandwich this episode with the concept of impulse buys, because I think it’s one of the most important topics for us adults with ADHD as it relates to money. And I want to repeat, it’s not your money’s job to give you a dopamine hit. It’s your life’s job. So be thoughtful. Are you using your money to give you dopamine hits? If you are, you’re doing it wrong. Spending can be a form of self medication that is just as detrimental as using drugs or alcohol or smoking.
So what I recommend, and obviously I did not come up with. This concept, but I think it’s amazing give yourself 24 hours before you make any significant purchases. So maybe that’s anything over $20 or anything over $50 give yourself 24 hours to think about it, before you hand over your credit card or before you press Add to cart on Amazon Prime. Okay, give yourself 24 hours to really think about. Do I want it? Why do I want it? Does it fit into my vision for my life? Is it going to create, you know, tons of happiness and joy for me, or am I going to feel guilty about it? Those are awesome questions to ask yourself, in a month from now, am I going to want this thing, or am I going to wish I had the money? And maybe the answer is yes, you want it, and that’s awesome, then get it and don’t feel any guilt about it. But if the answer ends up being, eh, you know what, I don’t really need another one, or I don’t really like it that much in the first place. Or, you know, whatever the case may be, then you’ve just saved yourself from an impulse buy. So give yourself 24 hours before spending $20 $50 or $100 whatever amount that you set. Now you might want to write that down on a sticky note and tape it to your computer, because, as someone with ADHD, your memory is probably really bad, and that’s okay. It just is what it is, but you’re probably going to want to write that down Wait 24 hours before spending X amount of money, you fill in the blank. Now, side note here, I’ve asked several times, are you using spending to give you a dopamine hit? And if you answer yes to that question, I really want to encourage you to think about how you can create more excitement in your day to day, how you can be more amazing at your job, how you can create value for people, how you can invest in your relationships, how you can continue learning about certain things. There are lots of other ways to create dopamine for yourself that don’t include spending money. So think about how you can create that dopamine without having to spend and get it that way. There’s always more money in the world to be created, and there’s enough money to go around. Money is an amazing tool for creating the life that you want.
Obviously, it’s not the only tool, but it is an important one. I used to walk around saying that I hated money, I had major money issues, and I was frustrated and graspy and always wanting more, but feeling completely powerless to create it. So if that’s you today, let me just say I’ve been there. I get it. I totally understand I am 100% still on this journey learning as I go, I want to encourage you. You have so much more control than you realize. You are a smart, lovely, kind human who can add so much value to the world and get compensated for that value. Maybe you want to watch your neighbor’s kids twice a week to create money for yourself, or take a few speaking engagements. Or maybe you want to develop that product that you’ve been thinking about, or write that book that you’ve always wanted to write, or join that multi level marketing company. There’s an abundance of ways to create money, so go figure it out. You’re smart. You can totally do it. You probably already know what to do. You just need to do it then practice having it. Don’t be so quick to give it away. Don’t be so quick to spend it. Don’t be so quick to exchange your money for things and decide what you love spending your money on guilt free. Decide what improves and increases the quality of your life, and enjoy that guilt free. And lastly, don’t allow yourself to self medicate by spending money impulsively. It is just as detrimental to use money as a self medicating tool as it is to use drugs or alcohol or sex, tobacco, anything like that. It’s not good for us and it doesn’t ever fix the root cause of what’s going on, which is a lack of dopamine in your brain. Do you know what fixes that? Medication, supplements, diet, exercise, human connection, add. Value to the world, and feeling like you’re really making a difference, and all of those things that make you feel alive, that’s what fixes the dopamine void. You can do it. Friends, I believe in you. I’m on this journey with you, and I’ll tell you, it’s amazing. I’m enjoying every second of it. I hope you have an awesome week, guys, see ya. Hey, you know I have ADHD, which means that I have major dopamine deficiency in my brain.
So I’m asking a huge favor of you. Would you be a PAL and rate this podcast on iTunes. It is the most amazing burst of dopamine. When I see those rating numbers go up, my friend major dopamine hit, and if we’re being honest, it’s probably gonna save my bank account from major impulsive spending. So friend, Be a pal. Rate this podcast on iTunes. My goal is to get over 100 ratings this summer. I’m up to 87 now. I know I have 1000s of listeners, so scroll down in the iTunes. In the iTunes, I said that’s super weird, but that’s okay. Scroll down. Give me an honest rating. I would appreciate it so much I love you guys. Have a great week. Bye.
