If you know, you know.
ADHD tax is the common term for unplanned expenses or purchases that expire before they can be used—from the veggie drawer to that free trial you meant to cancel.
People with ADHD have trouble with executive function, working memory, and time management, which can make budgeting and financial management a stressful burden. It’s not laziness or a lack of care, it’s a disability. So let’s break down what’s happening in the brain to explain where the disconnect comes in.
Executive Function
Cleveland Clinic defines executive function as “mental processes… that help you set and carry out goals. You use these skills to solve problems, make plans and manage emotions.”
Using the example a dirty kitchen, for example, your executive functioning does a lot of work to prioritize and prepare for the task of cleaning, such as:
- Knowing the steps to clean the kitchen (clean the counters, do the dishes, clean the sink, clean the stove, take out the trash, clean the fridge…)
- Knowing where the cleaning supplies are
- Recognizing items in the kitchen that don’t belong there, and knowing where they do belong
- Being able to prioritize the most important surfaces to clean for health and safety
For a brain with ADHD, a dirty kitchen sounds an alarm that sounds like, “Clean it! Clean it fast! Clean it the right way! Clean it!” but the data about how to organize the multiple subtasks is not accessible. It’s just a huge, incomprehensible task.
And even if the ADHD brain simply chooses a corner of the room to start in, it’s likely to get caught up on re-organizing the food storage containers or making sure all the forks are aligned the same way in the drawer. Those small-scale cleaning tasks seem just as important as getting the dishes done so someone can cook dinner later.
So when we take the metaphor of cleaning the kitchen and consider how an ADHD brain has trouble prioritizing and following a list of tasks, imagine the stakes when it’s your budget on the line.
Managing a budget also requires a lot of executive functioning, like:
- Knowing when payments are due
- Remembering to cancel subscriptions before they renew
- Keeping the budget in mind when making impulse purchases
- Balancing the budget on a weekly or monthly basis
What tends to happen is that you’ll start a new budget (or planner, or daily meditation, or other Really Good Habit), work on it for a few days or weeks, and then forget it ever existed. Then, the longer you wait to get back to the habit you were trying to build, the more difficult it is to get back to.
How to Accommodate ADHD In Your Budgeting
The answer to this issue isn’t to try harder to make your brain behave “normally.”
It’s to change your approach to budgeting (or cleaning the kitchen) entirely, so it works with your brain rather than against it.
The first defense against ADHD distraction is dopamine. Our brains want dopamine, a neurotransmitter that activates the part of the brain responsible for motivation and reward. When a person without ADHD completes a goal, they get a little boost of dopamine, which essentially trains them to keep achieving that goal because it feels good. People with ADHD don’t get the automatic reward—so we need to artificially put some feel-good rewards into the not-so-interesting tasks we need to complete.
Put some dopamine into your routine by:
- Combining a less desirable task (balancing your budget) with something you like doing (eat a piece of candy for every ten transactions you review, or listen to your favorite music while you work on the budget)
- Creating a reward system for coming in on or under budget for each category of spending
- Celebrating with someone who will hype you up and be genuinely excited
- Giving yourself a line in the budget to reward yourself for sticking to your routine (if you balance your books on Friday, you get $20 fun money, for example)
- Color coding your budget—sometimes your brain will get on board as long as something looks interesting while you’re working on it
Another accommodation is body doubling—basically just having someone else nearby while you work. We’re not sure why body doubling works so well, but it does. You could invite a friend over to hang out while you balance your numbers (and then do something fun together), set up a video chat with someone online, or do your budget while someone else in your house cleans or folds laundry so you can both feed off the other’s productive energy. If no one is available to body double, put on a documentary in the background so the narrator can be your work buddy (but only if you won’t get distracted and start watching).
Making a standardized list or flowchart of subtasks and priorities reduces the executive function of remembering the tasks every time you work on your budget. You can make the list to the level of specification you need for your own unique needs. Some people might be fine with a list that says “reconcile bank transactions” but others may need more specificity, like “log into bank account and open budget spreadsheet, reconcile each line from the bank statement into the appropriate budget category.”
Finally, make sure that you’re asking yourself to balance the budget at a time that makes sense for you and your energy levels. If your brain isn’t ready for detailed work until mid-afternoon, don’t try to do your budget first thing in the morning! Pay attention to your body and brain’s natural signals and energy fluctuations to identify the times of day you’re best equipped for different types of work.
Other Neurodivergent Considerations
ADHD is just one of many ways our brains might not be able to stick to typical financial advice. Managing your personal finances can be difficult for people with mental health diagnoses, including anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, OCD, and complex trauma, among others. Autistic brains also have their own specific needs to keep work organized—and the combo of auDHD is its own special situation.
We’re excited to dive deeper into neurodivergent accommodation for personal finance.
If you’d like to get started with a budget, try our Financial Review and Budget Workbook! It’s a free resource to help you become intentional about your spending and savings.