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ADHD & money management: what I’ve learned from 3 years with YNAB

Financial ManagementLeave a Comment on ADHD & money management: what I’ve learned from 3 years with YNAB
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Back in November 2017, I reviewed a little app called You Need a Budget (YNAB). I like to follow up on posts like this. Time is the crucial ingredient for us ADHDers. It doesn’t take much to convince us a new tool or strategy is a silver bullet.

However, I’m old enough in ADHD years to know those silver bullets eventually lose their shine. Any new success is just “for now” until proven otherwise.

YNAB has stood the test of time. Over three years later, I’m still using it. I still think it’s fantastic for people with ADHD. And I want to talk about why1.

ADHD makes money management difficult

First of all, unless money is one of your hyperfocus sweet spots, ADHD’s time perception and working memory issues will probably make budgeting a challenge.

The brain’s working memory allows us to hold and manipulate more than one thing in our heads at once. Many ADHDers suffer from a weak, or “leaky,” working memory2. For every consideration we add when trying to think through a problem, another seems to slip away.

This makes it hard to conceptualize our financial situation and get a grasp on all its moving parts. Sometimes we have to look at one number, like our bank account balance or the amount of our next paycheck, and figure out if it’s enough to cover this month’s expenses. Those expenses are often a long and varied list. With so many variables, our financial lives can feel full of surprises.

Add to that our impaired time perception — often called time blindness — and associated problems with hyperfocus and impulse control. It’s no exaggeration to say the past and future often feel unreal to us. We struggle to connect our current situation to our past actions, or to use our decisions now to shape the future we want later. This can leave us wishing our financial outlook was different, yet unable to make those desires a reality.

Low impulse control and hyperfocus can also sabotage our best intentions. When we fixate on something, when it becomes the object of our hyperfocus, it swells to consume our entire perception. Time blindness becomes even more pronounced. This plays into our struggles with impulse control: we fail to pause, consider the long-term consequences, and ask ourselves if this is truly what we want.

Where I started (before YNAB)

This perfect storm of factors can — and does — lead to devastating financial stress for many ADHDers. However, I thought I was doing okay when I started using YNAB to manage our household budget. We didn’t have a budget per se, but we had enough money to pay for what we needed, and I had benefited from a sound financial education from my family.

My blue-collar family’s aversion to both extravagance and debt taught me to base purchasing decisions on my bank account, not my perceived needs and desires. Even as a teenager, I chose a minimum balance I would treat as zero in my savings account: a number I would not go below, so I had enough money to cover emergencies.

As I got older, possible emergencies expanded beyond the likelihood of my eighteen-year-old car breaking down. I started hearing advice like, “always keep three months’ living expenses in the bank.”

I had no idea how much three months’ living expenses actually was, but I increased my minimum comfortable balance — my buffer — in my savings account and hoped I’d guessed correctly. For the most part, this worked out.

Where I am now (after several years of YNAB)

I now realize my poor working memory probably inspired my arbitrary “emergency buffer” method of budgeting. I really struggled to tally up all our expenses. No matter how hard I tried, I always missed or forgot something.

YNAB’s “give every dollar a job” ethos was a total game-changer. The app prompts you to assign dollars to your budget as soon as they come in. Once this month’s budget is satisfied, you can begin filling out next month’s. For tricky categories like household supplies or even alcohol, I let the app suggest a budget based on my actual spending habits. For the first time in my life, I could see how many weeks’ or months’ living expenses I actually had in the bank.

Also for the first time, I stopped feeling like I needed to keep a separate pot of money set aside as an “emergency buffer.” My budget in YNAB was my emergency buffer. As it turns out, my “emergency buffer” was really just a buffer against my lack of a budget.

The biggest surprise for me has been, I stopped paying attention to my bank account balances! Because I’ve assigned jobs to every dollar I have via YNAB, I don’t have to worry and check if the number is getting too low. My financial situation has become completely predictable. No more surprises! Or if there are surprises, I can easily figure out how to absorb them.

An added bonus: cushioning against unexpected change

2020 was filled with nothing if not surprises for us. We started the year anticipating a job change for my husband. Because he was also changing industries, we expected this to come with at least a little pay cut.

YNAB helped me in two ways here. First of all, I could know immediately how many months’ expenses we could cover even if we completely stopped earning money tomorrow. This gave me the confidence to tell my husband, do what you want. We’ll figure it out.

I also had a sandbox to help me figure out how large a pay cut we could absorb without having to change our lifestyle. YNAB offers several reporting tools to help you get a picture of your expenses over time. If we needed to cut, I could look down the list and identify places to reduce expenses, as well as fixed expenses we had to pay no matter what.

Little did we know, the new job was hardly the biggest change on the horizon. The pandemic affected everyone’s finances. I was so thankful to have YNAB to help me figure out where our expenses had decreased (e.g. gas and tolls), and distribute those decreases to cover increased costs elsewhere. I also took comfort knowing how many months’ expenses we currently had covered, and how much wiggle room we might have if one or both of us got sick and had to face dramatic shifts in income and expenses.

All in all, YNAB has increased my confidence in our ability to adapt gracefully to change and handle surprises with far less stress.

YNAB is almost tailor-made for ADHD

I credit this to YNAB’s focus on exactly the areas where ADHDers struggle most. General advice like “save up a few months’ living expenses” doesn’t work for us. We often find ourselves with too little cash, but no idea how we could possibly afford to save more. 

YNAB takes all the burden off our working memory. It helps us figure out exactly how to reduce spending, increase savings, and adjust to changes in our financial situation. I especially appreciate how YNAB only allows me to budget money I actually have. Every dollar in my bank account already has an assigned purpose. Everything is concrete, nothing is abstract.

This also tempers that ADHD impulsivity by leaving a zero balance for unplanned nonsense. The default setup includes a category called “stuff I forgot to budget for,” but those funds, like everything else, are limited to what you can actually afford to put in there. This makes the impact of impulse buys both immediate and tangible. I, for one, am much less likely to overspend on this week’s fixation if it means moving money away from something else.

Overall, YNAB brings money management out of the abstract and removed — a huge danger zone for ADHDers — and into the present and concrete. I was impressed when I first gave it a whirl in 2017, and I’m only more so now, in 2021. YNAB has seen our ADHD family through an international vacation, transition from private preschool to public elementary school, a job change, and a pandemic. All have impacted our finances, and I’ve been so thankful for a tool to help me manage the details with calm and certainty.

Footnotes

1: Full disclosure: though this is not an ad and I’m not an affiliate or sponsor of YNAB, I do use referral links in this post. YNAB is a subscription-based app, and they advertise an opportunity for all users to earn one free month for every person they refer to the service. It seemed silly not to use my referral link here, but the existence of the referral program (again, available to all users of the app) in no way informed the content or existence of my posts. For more information about my general approach to ads and sponsored content (i.e. why I don’t really do either), see my Full Disclosure Policy.

2: This is summed up well on page 50 of Gina Pera’s book, Is It You, Me, or Adult A.D.D.? Jeff Copper also discusses ADHD working memory issues in an interview with Dr. Russell Barkley on his Attention Talk Video YouTube channel.

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A quick rescue remedy for overwhelming ADHD emotions

Mental HealthLeave a Comment on A quick rescue remedy for overwhelming ADHD emotions
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Many ADHDers believe we experience emotions more intensely than others do. Our neurotypical counterparts accuse us of being “too sensitive,” “too emotional,” or “dramatic.” They might dismiss us as “making a huge deal over nothing.” It’s almost like they think we have an ulterior motive, or we act this way for effect.

Most of us don’t. Our big feelings are quite real. We don’t manipulate them for our own benefit. In fact, intentional self-harm could be at least five times more prevalent among folks with ADHD.

Others may laugh or roll their eyes and tell us to calm down, but ADHD feelings are serious business. We ignore this literally at our own peril.

What causes ADHD’s big emotions?

Our relationship to our emotions goes back to time blindness. ADHD expert Dr. Russell Barkley tells us our ADHD “disrupts the fabric of time.” Our brains perceive everything as either Now or Not Now. For many of us, the Now crowds out everything else. The Not Now feels far away and abstract.

This explains how we can achieve a hyperfocused, “in the zone” state when doing something rewarding or enjoyable. The object of our hyperfocus becomes the only thing that exists.

The same holds true for strong emotions. I call this emotional hyperfocus. Sometimes people find this charming. When we’re happy, we’re all the way happy. Our brains leave no space for anything that would burst our bubble.

But ADHDers can get stuck on a negative emotion as easily as a positive one. The feeling will magnify itself until it becomes overwhelming, even frightening. Just like time and responsibilities disappear with task hyperfocus, the spectrum of our emotions disappears with emotional hyperfocus. We sink further down the spiral into a state of self-loathing, hopelessness, anger, or worthlessness.

We need an emotional rescue remedy

In the depths of emotional hyperfocus, we easily forget our value and lose our place in the world. While others may think it’s obvious they still love us after a minor disagreement, it’s not at all obvious to us. We can become convinced our families, friends, and the world in general would be better off without us.

That’s a lot to put on our loved ones every time our rejection sensitivity or emotional hyperfocus get triggered. It’s also too much for us to bear on a regular basis, especially if we lack someone supportive and understanding by our side to help us weather the storm. We need a rescue remedy.

To break the spell, imagine your boring future self

In my book Order from Chaos, I recommend a visualization exercise to help break out of ADHD hyperfocus: close your eyes and imagine yourself in a totally mundane moment sometime in the future. Though I mostly talk about task hyperfocus in the book, I give a prime example of how this visualization technique can also interrupt emotional hyperfocus. I’ll excerpt it here:

Following a disagreement with my husband, I found myself unable to let go. It was late. He wanted to go to bed. The disagreement wasn’t a big deal, but [to me] it felt unresolved. My emotions spiraled out of control until I’d lost all perspective. I knew imposing my emotional state on my husband would only stir up drama, so I left the room to calm down by myself.

Except I didn’t calm down. I convinced myself my family would be better off without me and I would never contribute anything of value to the world. I cried uncontrollably and felt terribly alone. Desperate for a lifeline, I closed my eyes and pictured myself in the middle of my kitchen. It was a normal weekend afternoon. I was cooking food for family and friends, surrounded by people whose company I enjoyed. I tried to place myself there in as much detail as possible.

As my brain grabbed onto that scene, I felt like a fog was lifting. The rest of the world, and my life at large, reappeared and felt real once again.

Source: Jaclyn Paul, Order from Chaos: The Everyday Grind of Staying Organized with Adult ADHD

Why this works

Our brains have different regions for thinking about ourselves and about other people. Have you ever kept doing “one more thing” on a fun project even though you know you’ll regret putting off other responsibilities? We think about that regretful future self in the abstract, with the brain regions dedicated to thinking about other people. We literally perceive the self that exists outside this moment as another person. Someone in the Not Now.

This is true for all human brains. However, ADHD’s time blindness and trouble with Now vs. Not Now intensify the effect for us.

Applying this to feelings and relationships, when we make a mistake or experience rejection, that becomes all we see. The self who is valued and loved doesn’t even feel like us. The mistake or the rejection expands to fill our entire self-perception. It becomes the only thing that matters — or will ever matter.

When we imagine a moment in the future, even something as simple as a trip to the grocery store, we forge a stronger connection to our future self. The exercise places us in a different context. Our future self feels a little more like our present self1. We begin to reconnect to ourselves outside this moment.

“Forget it” and “drop it” don’t really work with ADHD

This is the sort of process that may happen automatically for most neurotypical people. Sometimes, when others have an easier time putting setbacks in perspective and maintaining confidence in their inherent self-worth, they expect it to be second-nature for the rest of us too. They see us spiraling out of control and tell us to just “drop it” or “forget it.”

While this feedback can be well-meaning, it doesn’t feel that way. It has an effect similar to other oversimplified, neurotypical advice, like “make a list,” “leave enough time to arrive a few minutes early,” or “just buckle down and do it.” We know what we need to do. Knowing is not the problem.

The problem is knowing how to make it happen. Self-regulation skills don’t come so naturally to us. We need concrete, intentional strategies to manage our lives. This is every bit as true for managing our feelings as for managing our to-do lists.

Many people assume ADHD starts and ends with distractibility and difficulty getting things done. This is a mistake. Treatment and coping strategies extend far beyond our performance at work or school, or our ability to pay bills and arrive to social functions on time. A fivefold self-harm risk should give us pause. We need to talk about ADHD emotions, honor them, and learn how to live with them. Someday, our lives may depend on it.

Footnotes:

1: I originally discovered research around this concept in the book The Willpower Instinct (disclosure: affiliate link) by Kelly McGonigal. It’s a really engaging book, and McGonigal provides an interesting perspective on the science of willpower. Not on topic for this post, but relevant to every ADHDer!

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How to regain focus when you’re stuck on a big project (Project Engineering Series, Part 2)

Task ManagementLeave a Comment on How to regain focus when you’re stuck on a big project (Project Engineering Series, Part 2)
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If you have ADHD, you’ve probably gotten overwhelmed with a big project before. And someone’s probably offered you the advice, “just break it down into manageable pieces.”

Life skills like this seem to come naturally to most neurotypical folks. It may sound like common sense to us ADHDers too, but the minute we attempt it we realize we have no idea how.

That’s what I want to talk about in this series of posts: how. We all know we need to break projects into manageable pieces. If you read my previous post, you also know this skill is even more important for people with ADHD. Yet for the same reasons we desperately need it, we also have the most trouble actually doing it.

No matter how we break a project down, the first step is identifying — and remembering — what we set out to do in the first place.

Struggle and overwhelm are your cue to pause.

In the last post I talked about my plans to make over my backyard. As my enthusiasm snowballed, my husband voiced concerns about the project being “kind of a lot.” At first I resented his attitude. Of course it was a lot — that was the point!

However, I’ve bitten off more than I could chew in the past1. I’ve learned to pause when people I trust start raising red flags I don’t understand.

Likewise when a project starts to feel too overwhelming, too difficult, or even downright impossible. ADHDers focus intensely on the current moment — not always a bad thing! — and that makes it tough to manipulate all the moving pieces in our heads at once. Our hyperfocusing brains shut out the larger context.

Have you ever stayed locked in a heated argument even though you can’t even remember how it started? That same tendency makes it easier for us to get lost working on a big project. Contrary to what others may tell us, this is not the time to power through or “just do it.” It’s time to pause, remember why we’re here, and make sure we’re still going the right direction.

First question: what are we doing here?

When I get tangled on a project, I stop and return to my original Why. I talk a lot about finding your Why in my book Order from Chaos because ADHDers seldom work for free. We work best when we can draw meaningful connections between the work at hand and our personal identity, values, and desires.

In the case of my backyard, I wanted:

  • Productive edible gardens
  • Less time spent weeding
  • Pretty surroundings for my hammock
  • Better environmental stewardship
    • Food sourcing
    • Pollinator habitat
    • Water conservation/runoff prevention
  • Less time spent mowing when I rarely use the whole yard
  • Hops vines grown separate from the rest of the garden so they stop taking over
  • More plants chosen by me, not the previous owner who sold me the house in 2008
  • An area of shade to protect me (and maybe some plants!) from the brutal summer sun

There’s a lot of freedom in this list. One action might check several boxes. Another — for example, installing rain barrels — might satisfy only one. This list of desires, my Why, captures the emotions that will motivate me through the work. It doesn’t say anything about how I should accomplish my goals.

The How can be our downfall. When I get stuck or overwhelmed, I’ve usually lost touch with the larger Why and hyperfocused on making a small part of the project work exactly the way I want it to. The first step to getting and keeping a project on track is remembering what brought us here.

Sometimes the way we’re trying to do it just won’t work.

My most recent roadblock in the backyard project illustrates this perfectly. I tried to get fancy with my hammock, which I love and want to feature prominently in the new design. One night, I discovered pergola hammock stands at the bottom of a Pinterest rabbit hole. This felt like a perfect project for the backyard. Not only would the pergola create an impressive focal point in the design, I could use it to trellis my hops vines. The hops vines would then add shade and greenery to my favorite hangout spot.

In other words, I could build something really impressive while satisfying at least four of the eight items on my wish list.

This sounded lovely, but it added a lot of new constraints. I now needed a spot that worked well for the hammock, the pergola, and the vines. I went in circles for days trying to puzzle it out. I cursed my lack of spatial reasoning skills and whined to my husband about how I wasn’t “good enough at this kind of thing” to do something as simple as position a hammock in a yard.

ADHD can trick us into thinking every challenge happens because we are, in some essential way, defective or not enough. That’s not true. Often, things feel hard because we’ve either tried to do the impossible or tried to do things in a way that won’t work for us.

Either way, we need to stop and reassess.

I couldn’t find a good spot for my hammock because it didn’t exist. My backyard simply wouldn’t accommodate my epic, oh-so-clever, and very Pinterest-worthy pergola-trellis-hammock idea.

The Why is more important than the How.

I returned to my original list of desires for the backyard. Could I continue to use my boring black metal hammock stand and still achieve what I wanted? Yes I could. I didn’t need the pergola, and I’d have to let it go.

I won’t downplay how hard that was to swallow. When I get swept up by a big, ambitious idea, my hyperfocus latches on for dear life. Our brains hate few feelings quite so much as breaking our hyperfocus before we’re ready. We fight it hard, and we’ll often lash out at whoever — or whatever — tries to pull us away.

However, I’d hyperfocused on the wrong thing: the How. My fixation with this particular hammock stand overshadowed everything else. Eventually, it felt like the primary problem I needed to solve to make the whole backyard makeover happen.

It wasn’t. The project started with my wish list. That was my Why. And the Why is more important than the How.

If your How won’t get you to your Why, change course.

Most of us live and work with other people and have limited resources to make things happen. I can’t pay a landscape designer and a crew of workers to create my dream backyard in a matter of weeks. I also can’t dig up the entire yard myself and make a colossal mess without ticking off my family, neighbors, and quite possibly some city inspectors. These constraints don’t always play nice with ADHD, but we still need to respect them.

When I get pouty, demoralized, and disappointed about a piece of a project not working, I return to my Why. What did I start this project hoping to achieve? Will changing how I do this part of it keep me from achieving any of that? The answer is usually no.

Constraints also foster creativity. They give us that nudge to pause, think about what’s actually important, and recalculate our route if necessary. Roadblocks — moments of intense overwhelm, disappointment, or outside critique — have a lot to teach us, if we let them. Sometimes they illuminate the best way to get what we want.

Bottom line: we will run into trouble in a big project. We can’t leap into action and disregard all other expectations, responsibilities, and humans in our lives. Having to chart a new course is inevitable. Our Why — the original problem we set out to solve — gives us a lighthouse. No matter how we break down our project, each component can rely on that lighthouse as its destination.

Hey there! Are you enjoying The ADHD Homestead?

Here's the thing: I don't like ads. I don't want to sell your attention to an advertising service run by the world's biggest data mining company. I also value my integrity and my readers' trust above all, which means I accept very few sponsorships/partnerships.

So I'm asking for your support directly. For the cost of one cup of coffee, you can help keep this site unbiased and ad-free.

Below you will find two buttons. The first lets you join our crew of Patreon pals and pledge monthly support for my work. Patrons also have access to my Audioblogs podcast. The second takes you to a simple donation page to pledge one-time or recurring support for The ADHD Homestead, no frills, no strings. Do whichever feels best for you!

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