Adult Add: Stop Add Impulsiveness Cold

With attention deficit disorder, we get an impulse, we want to go act on it. So, ADD people buy things at full price, and pay more than they should for products and services because of this ADD impulsivity.

But, the cool part is that you have a choice.

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.

Why?

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...