You can choose to be impulsive and say, “Oh well, I have ADD and that's just the way I am. I guess I'll just be stuck spending more money than I care to for the rest of my life,” or, you can say, “Okay, I know I'm impulsive because of the attention deficit. What are the areas I can make some tweaks right now, make some changes right now that would immediately reduce the amount of money that I'm spending?”
Here's an example about parking your car at the airport when you're leaving town for a while and have ADD impulsivity:
You park in the lot that's right next to the door to the terminal and pay $16 a day to park your car, or you could have arrived 10 minutes early and spent $4.00 or $5.00 on one of the surface lots and taken a little bus to the terminal.
You're now spending $160 on parking. Imagine, you could have spent $50 dollars instead, if you'd been just 10 mintues earlier. That's $110 difference right there. You'd have saved $110.
We know you've probalby had experiences like this, especially if you have ADD. We are in this cashless, paperless society, so we use credit cards, and everything is on paper. If you want to start managing or saving money, physically put cash into your wallet, and get a receipt back so you can start to see what your spending habits are.
You'll realize that you throw $15 out there to do this, and $20 out there to do that, just for the convenience. But unless you see this, you probably won't where your money is going, especially not if it's on a credit card, because you make a purchase and then forget.
We like to call these "ADD Training Tips" that you can use to immediately transform your ability to keep track of your money, and make sure that you don't bounce checks, make sure that you don't go really far into debt, and these are things that we applied out of necessity when we were in money trouble. We'd like to share some of these concepts because they worked for us, and we both have ADD, but some tactics are very extreme.
Number one, literally—not figuratively, not generally, not conceptually—we mean literally, right now, while you're reading this, take out your credit card and cut it up. We're not joking! You may have six credit cards that are all maxed out, trying to help you pay for groceries, for loans, for rent, and you're just going further and further into debt that you'll never get out of.
Get out a pair of really tough scissors and cut up all your credit cards into little, teeny, tiny pieces, and throw them away in a whole bunch of different garbage cans. You won't be in debt again.
Because you won't do anything that will allow you to go further into debt. All sorts of people out there will train you to leverage your credit, and that's fine if you can do it, but many people with or without ADD can't do it and find out that they're going further and further and further into debt. They aren't making anymore money, and they'll just find themselves in trouble.
Credit cards allow people with ADD to be more impulsive than they really want to be, so that's the first thing people with attention deficit should do is get rid of the temptation.
We'll talk more about steps you can take to stabilize your financial situation in the next few posts. Stay tuned...
Symptoms Of Adult Add
You can't remember where you're going because the time and place are on a sticky note, or you put the information on a note card, and then lost it. It's on paper, but you can't find the paper!
You definitely need to plug into things that work for you based on how your brain works when you have ADD.
Don't be a sticky note person. If you have ADD, you probably have issues with cluttering things up. Try making things really clean, neat, and organized, and stay that way.
But, let's say you're a work-at-home mom with adult ADD. How are you going to keep your schedule straight? How are you going to remember when your spouse is coming home from work that day (if they have no steady schedule), when the kids have events, when you're trying to make progress in your business all at once?
Simple. Schedule your engagements.
But ADD may give you a problem with scheduling in a physical planner or any type of time management system where you have to write or type the same thing down every day. It's much better to use a technology-based solution, where you can set-up your appointment reminders to recur every week for the next year.
Every so often, change any alarms that sound for appointments, so you get a different sound every seven days or so in order to grab your attention. After a certain amount of time, your ADD may start tuning out that alarm. Variations won't let you forget.
The major point is that time bends. We think it's steady, but it's not. You can joke about it, but at the end of the day, if you learn how to master time and how to shape it and form it like a piece of clay, it's very powerful. You can actually control time to work with your ADD. It's amazing!
Use your ADD to focus on making time.
Ask yourself, “Is this the best use of my time in order to leverage the rest of the day?” When you get really good at this, even with ADD, you start thinking about leveraging the rest of the week, the rest of the month, even the rest of the year.
Though your ADD may tempt you to ignore the routine of organizing your life, it's the only way you'll succeed. Schedule your tasks and appointments and get rid of the clutter. Control time and never let it control you.
Both Tellman Knudson And Stephanie Frank & Tellman H. Knudson are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Tellman Knudson And Stephanie Frank has sinced written about articles on various topics from Family Concerns, Finances and Careers and Job Hunting. Tellman Knudson, certified Hypnotherapist, is CEO of Overcome Everything, Inc. Stephanie Frank is an internationally known speaker and author of "The Accidental Millionaire.". Tellman Knudson And Stephanie Frank's top article generates over 5400 views. to your Favourites.
Tellman H. Knudson has sinced written about articles on various topics from Personal Desktop, Computers and The Internet and Internet Marketing. Tellman Knudson, a certified Hypnotherapist, is CEO of Overcome Everything, Inc and Hyperfocus. See more information about controlling ADD at .. Tellman H. Knudson's top article generates over 60500 views. to your Favourites.
