ADHD and Money: Why Your Budget Keeps Going Somewhere to Die (And How to Fix It) Ep 114
You've got a beautiful budget sitting in a folder with all the other budgets you've made. Maybe even a pretty colour coded spreadsheet with all of you transactions categorized. And then real life happens and you have no idea if you can actually afford something before the money is already gone.
There's a massive gap between making a budget and finding ways for it to work with your life. Most people think creating the budget is the hard part. Wrong. The hard part is figuring out how to make that budget work when bills come out on different dates, when you don't know what's already been claimed, and when tracking every transaction feels impossible to maintain.
Sherry and Val break down what's actually missing. It's not more tracking or better categories or higher willpower. It's a system that answers the one critical question before you spend: can I afford this right now? And if you don't have a way to answer that without doing math or scrolling through transactions, there's a gap.
This episode covers the account structure that makes overspending harder, what to do when the dopamine wears off on budget categories, why automation resistance keeps people stuck even when it would solve the problem, and how to build something that works for your brain instead of requiring you to become a different person overnight. We also talk about why budgets that don't account for impulsive spending are doomed from the start, and what boundaries without brick walls actually looks like.
If your budgets keep going somewhere to die, this episode walks you through what to do instead. Less tracking. More structure. Systems that actually work.
Ready to build a money system that works for your ADHD brain? Book a free consultation to learn about financial coaching and see if we're a good fit.
