Episode 81: The ADHD Tax: Where Your Money Is Really Going
Host: Sharon Collon
Welcome to the ADHD families podcast. am so happy you're here today. I want to talk about money. Specifically, I want to talk about what happens to a family's finances when you have the perfect collision of the cost of living crisis, the ADHD tax, a fuel crisis, and
And personally, a husband who tries to buy a life-size pumpkin man after giving me a 40 minute monologue about how we need to budget better. True story, I'll get to that. I have been wanting to do this episode for a while, but I wanted to do it properly, not as a budgeting episode because it's like boring, not as you should be on top of this episode because goodness, heavens knows, I really wasn't.
And because honestly, I'm not on top of it either. have dyscalculia. So numbers are not my thing. I tend to avoid them. And yet a few weeks ago, I sat on my bed with our bank statements and I worked out that thousands of dollars were quietly leaking out of our household.
Not in the big purchases, in all the small little admin tasks that I've been meaning to do, but hadn't. So today I want to tell you what I found and why ADHD brains miss this stuff almost every time. And what I did about it. I want to name the ADHD tax properly because most of us are paying it without realizing it has a name.
And at the end of this episode, I'm going to tell you about the money hunt, which is my five day implementation event I've built to help us all get back on top of this. Because once I had a system that worked, I wanted to share it, of course. So settle in, let's go. Now, before we get started on today's episode, I have a really small favor that would mean the absolute world to me.
So many people email me and message me saying that they absolutely love this podcast and really appreciate this free resource. Thank you so much. However, we really do not have very many reviews at all in Apple iTunes or on Spotify. If this podcast has helped you at any point along the way, please, please, please go ahead and leave me a quick review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. I know the reviews feel like one of those things that you're going to get to.
because of admin, right. But genuinely it really helps us bring you this free resource and helps other parents find this podcast. So there might be a mum sitting in the school pickup line right now and she is wondering where she can find this free support. And this review really helps us bring that to her and continue to bring you such quality episodes.
So leaving a review takes 30 seconds. You do not need to write much. Just one sentence is enough and it makes a real difference to this small family business doing this work. Thank you so much. Really. Now I have a very interesting relationship with money. I can't say it's something that I stress about overly. I'm just not really that kind of archetype that counts dollars or worries about it too much.
And my husband is very impulsive with money. He likes to buy things and then has extreme buyers regret. He's like buying things on auctions and then freaking out. And then he'll be like, we've got to cut down. We've got to cut down our expenditure. But then like, we were in Costco one day and he'd just done this like 40 minute monologue about how we had to stick to budget. And then I turn around and I'm no joke. This man is carrying a life size pumpkin man for Halloween. And I was like,
What's that?" he's like, oh, it's a life-size pumpkin man for Halloween. Like, how could I not? And I was like, put that back. That is $500. Put it back. And we had a genuine screaming match in Costco about it. I was like, what, what do want me to cut back with? Like groceries or pumpkin man? Like, seriously, come on. Um, so we've had many a battle about money and I'm sure your household is the same. at my, I'm no-
picnic with this stuff either. Like my dyscalculia means just numbers mean nothing to me. Like honestly, I just avoid looking at numbers. I am not a numbers person. Like I'm not terrible. I'm like, I'm not really a person who spent overly spends either. Like I don't really spend lots on clothes or purchases, but I just don't have the numbers kind of brain. Like I don't even remember my husband's phone number.
Like I don't, I don't know my kids' birthdays. Like my brain just does not hold that information. I can remember every song lyric that I ever heard, but numbers, no. so I usually lean into my strengths and when it comes to numbers, I just like outsource bookkeeping and stuff like that, which I think is a really good strategy, but not for the family finances. So a little while ago,
We had a bit of a panic in our family because we own a transport company. And of course, with diesel prices going up and our whole business needing diesel to run, we were like, my goodness. And a very, very stable business then became a very chaotic, instable one. And so we were looking at our finances like we have to cut back. And honestly, on my first glance of our finances and looking at our bank statements, I was like, okay, well.
there's not actually that much we could cut back. Like we're not really making terrible choices. But then when we started going through it line by line, I actually realized that the ADHD tax was hitting us hard. We were paying out money that we really didn't need to. And I thought I was across it, but I really wasn't. I thought I wasn't terrible with money, but there was still things leaking out.
So the cost of living right now is off the charts. Like, you know, the media is all over it. There's like grocery prices going up, the fuel crisis, all of the things, right? Like everything has gone up and a lot of what I'm hearing from families is they are feeling the pinch right now. and what families are telling me right now is that they are really feeling the pinch.
And so I wanted to do this episode to really support you with this and make sure that you know what the ADHD tax is and what we can actually do about it. So the ADHD tax is the financial cost of having an ADHD brain in a world that was built for neurotypical systems around admin. Now it shows up as late fees because bills got buried and forgotten, perhaps not paid.
Or replacing things, perhaps things you lost or that the kids broke or things that you already owned, but you had to get that like really important drink bottle.
or the second pair of headphones, or perhaps you forgot that you already bought that birthday present, you bought another thing, or impulse purchases, this is when my husband comes in, driven by dopamine seeking or emotional dysregulation, premium pricing because you didn't have the executive function to compare options or wait for sales, or unclaimed money. So sitting in rebates, returns that you never do, gift cards, refunds that you didn't claim because
that just the admin felt too hard or it got lost somewhere along the line or subscriptions that quietly renew because canceling requires a series of phone calls or that maybe that cancellation button wasn't easy to find. Why do companies do that? It makes me bloody furious. but those, subscriptions just keep renewing and you keep meaning to cancel it, but then, you know, life happens and it doesn't get done.
Also, the one that people don't often talk about is the cost of dysregulation. So you know, when you have those hard days and you think, oh my gosh, everything's gone sideways. I'm just going to have to catch an Uber because public transport feels overstimulating or you know, I'm too overstimulated to go to sleep right now. So then you start buying things off Instagram or the extra cost of ordering takeaway because you just don't have any spoons left to cook dinner that night.
So the cost of not doing the boring stuff that protects your wallet, like comparing energy providers or lodging tax deductions or renegotiating insurance, this is all the ADHD tax and it can cost your family thousands. And I really thought that I was going okay with this, but when I did my audit, I just wasn't.
I just wasn't. And so I wanted to share with you this because I think that is important that we raise awareness about it and to really support you to get your money back and make sure we save you as much money as possible. Not because we need to like be super frugal.
So I just rather you spend your money on things that align with your family's values rather than just like it just leaking everywhere. So that night that I sat down with our statements, I found so many things that were leaking out. I found that I had somehow signed up to Hayu I've got a low key below deck addiction. I just love below deck. Like actually boats are my nightmare. I'm really like a cruise boat is my
idea of a worse, like my worst nightmare or, you know, even like a mega yacht, like us on below deck. That's still my nightmare. I just, need to be able to get off. But anyway, I still love watching it. It's like my wind down that I don't have to think about something. It's like, it's my guilty pleasure, but somehow over the years I had some signed up with it with three different email accounts. I don't even know how this happened. And so when I saw, Hayu
on my bank statement, was like, yeah, Hayu. But I didn't realize that I was paying for it three times, three times. That's outrageous. I'm furious about that.
But there were also other things that were just unnecessary, like buying the daily coffee, or perhaps just forgetting to take water bottles out when we went out with the kids. And so we'd have to buy waters. All of these things just added up. And every time I go into a grocery shop or go into a shop, like it's just hundreds and hundreds of dollars. So,
Not meal planning has its cost as well.
Why do ADHD brains really struggle with admin that protects their wallet? Well, there's no getting around it. There is a whole lot of executive functions that come into play when we're talking about money. We have dopamine seeking behaviors, you those quick little shopping things of, oh yes, I will buy that beautiful to-do list because that's going to change my whole personality. And I'm going to change my whole personality with this new list. But also,
The things of novelty, like, oh my gosh, that looks exciting. I'm going to go just grab that quickly right now. What if it's, what if I never see it again? and also the things of executive function, like in terms of the planning and checking ends and asking your mortgage broker to negotiate a new rate.
All of that is admin that has a whole series of executive functions. And I, I realized that I had a system for pretty much everything else in my life. My favorite quote in the whole world is you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your system. And I love a system. My whole life is systems, but I hadn't ever thought of a system for managing my finances. And the reason why I didn't have a system for managing my finances because numbers.
are nothing to me, like they're boring. And so I didn't think about dedicating time to supporting this friction point with a system, but that stops. That stops right now. I now have a system that can support me with this. So this is what I did about it. I started systematically reviewing all where my money was going and then creating
systems for it. So some of it was cancelling excess subscriptions. We've pretty much canceled all subscriptions now, including Netflix. I kept Hayu just one subscription of Hayu because like I have to have some joy in life, right? And also that's only $79 a year. But we renegotiated a lot of our bills and surprisingly we were able to get those down a lot. And then I created actual admin systems so I can keep doing these things.
And I'm pretty proud to say that I did follow my system and I saved our family $2,784 in like a couple of hours of work. And it was amazing. I was just astounded by how much I was able to cull. And so I thought, I want to share this with you. So I created a new five day sprint called the money hunt. It's time for you to get this money back. So it is a
five day live event and it runs from Monday 29 June to Friday 3 July and how it works this is not a course or anything that you have to like do or watch independently we meet on zoom at one o'clock Australian Eastern Standard Time and for 40 minutes a day we do one focused task together so you guys know I love it when the group momentum pushes us forward we've got our own little pop-up support group for this
And of course, because it's me, have gamified the absolute bejeebus out of it so that we can make it fun, have a running tally, have bingo cards. And we're going to do this thing together. We are actually going to take action and implement in these sessions together. So you can get results and see how much money we can save your family using the money hunt system. And this is a system that you can take forward and use again and again, every time you need to do a bit of a reset.
and check out how your family's finances are going. And of course, there's a whole lot of hidden fun in this as well because we gamify it and we make it exciting.
So most hunters get the cost of this program back by day two. It is that simple. So it is $395, but I have discounted it because of the cost of living crisis down to $97. So I'm going to put a link to that into the show notes, or if you are on my socials, just comment hunt, and then you will get sent the discount coupon for that one. But remember I saved like $2,784 doing this. It is...
Absolutely incredible. And it is very simple and you have a lot of fun doing it. And because we're doing it together, it's going to be a really good time. So in the pop-up support group, we've got accountability and you also get a six month replay window. So in case life, life's, you can still watch the catcher. So if you've been listening to this episode and nodding along,
If the bank statement story landed for you, or if you've been meaning to do the admin, but just haven't carved out the time, this is for you. So I'm going to put a link to the show notes so you can head on over and join us for the money hunt coming up and get your money back.
