Phenomenally ADHD: Manage Money The ADHD Way

You’ve been making better money decisions, avoiding your numbers less, and handling money differently than you would have six months ago.

Those changes matter.

But when the visible financial result feels small compared with the effort you’re putting in, it’s easy for your brain to fill in the gap with negative self-talk.

In this episode, we’re looking at why progress with money can be so difficult for the ADHD brain to recognize—and three practical ways to make that progress easier to see.

YOU'LL LEARN TO:

Any questions? Email me at [email protected]

RESOURCES

Download the Free ADHD Money Friction Quiz: ADHD Money Friction Quiz

Join the Money Investigation Waitlist: https://www.zarinaboily.com/money-investigation

HOW I CAN HELP

More Free Resources and Information About Coaching: https://www.zarinaboily.com/coaching

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We love hearing from our listeners!

Share your own stories, strategies, or questions. Your insights could be featured in a future episode! 

If this episode shifted the way to think about money and ADHD, share it with another ADHD woman and follow the show so you never miss an episode. 

Leaving a 5-star review to help other women with ADHD find the podcast so they too, can tap into their brilliance more and create a new scenario for their relationship with money 🙂.

You’ve been making better money decisions, avoiding your numbers less, and handling money differently than you would have six months ago.

Those changes matter.

But when the visible financial result feels small compared with the effort you’re putting in, it’s easy for your brain to fill in the gap with negative self-talk.

In this episode of Phenomenally ADHD, we’re looking at why progress with money can be so difficult for the ADHD brain to recognize—and three practical ways to make that progress easier to see.

Because your current financial numbers are information.

They are not a verdict about who you are.

You’ll learn how to:

• Question the thoughts that turn financial information into judgments about yourself
• Separate the actual facts from the interpretation your brain adds to them
• Pause long enough to notice progress you would normally overlook
• Recognize small changes in your behaviour before the big financial payoff becomes visible
• Get the financial noise out of your head so you can decide what actually deserves your attention

Any questions? Email me at [email protected]

Free resource

🧠 ADHD Money Friction Quiz

Socials

📲 Connect on Instagram | Follow us on Facebook

How I can help

Coaching: https://www.zarinaboily.com/coaching
Money Investigation: https://www.zarinaboily.com/money-investigation
Free ADHD Money Friction Quiz: https://www.zarinaboily.com/adhd-money-quiz

We love hearing from our listeners! Share your own stories, strategies, or questions. Your insights could be featured in a future episode! New episodes drop every week. Make sure you hit follow to stay in the loop. 

If you enjoyed this episode and want to help spread the word, here’s a couple of things you can do: 

You may be perfectly capable of managing your money when you have enough energy, focus, and bandwidth.

Then your capacity drops.

Life gets busy. You're tired. Your brain has too many other things competing for attention. And suddenly the financial tasks you normally know how to handle start slipping out of view.

If you have ADHD, that change in capacity can make staying connected to your money much harder—and trying to fix it by demanding even more consistency from yourself isn't the answer.

In this episode of Phenomenally ADHD, we're looking at a simpler way to manage money when your energy and attention aren't always predictable.

I walk you through three practical financial checkpoints that create a way to reconnect with your money without requiring you to monitor everything perfectly every day.

You'll learn:

• Why changing capacity can make financial routines harder to maintain
• How frequent checkpoints can help you reconnect when money falls out of focus
• Why making some decisions in advance can reduce pressure later
• How reviewing your numbers can replace vague financial worry with useful information
• Why ADHD-friendly consistency doesn't have to mean doing the same thing perfectly forever
• How reliable reset points can make a financial system easier to return to when life gets harder

The goal isn't to build a money routine for the version of you who always has plenty of time, focus, and energy.

It's to create one you can still find your way back to when you don't.

Any questions? Email me at [email protected]

Free resources

🧠 ADHD Money Friction Quiz

💸 Join the Money Investigation Interest List

Socials

📲 Connect on Instagram | Follow us on Facebook

How I can help

🌐 Visit the Website

👩‍💻 Breakthrough Consultation with Zarina

📚 Order your signed copy of the book A-Bun-Dance 4 Your Finance

We love hearing from our listeners! Share your own stories, strategies, or questions. Your insights could be featured in a future episode! New episodes drop every week. Make sure you hit follow to stay in the loop. If you enjoyed this episode and want to help spread the word, here’s a couple of things you can do:

1. Share this podcast with another ADHDer who needs to create a new scenario and change how they view ADHD.

2. Leave a comment and a 5-star review to help other Women with ADHD find the podcast so they too, can tap into their brilliance more 🙂.

You arrive home after a demanding day—but instead of immediately going inside, you sit quietly in the car for a few minutes. Sound familiar?

For women with ADHD, seemingly small behaviors like this can reveal something important about how our brains handle transitions, stimulation and the constant starting and stopping that fills a typical workday.

In this episode, I’m sharing why I’ve learned to stop fighting some of the things my brain naturally wants to do and start asking a much more useful question.

I’ll share how sitting quietly in my car helps me transition after a busy day, what an uncomfortable moment during a work meeting taught me about advocating for my ADHD brain, and why the exact same principle can change the way we approach money.

Because managing money isn’t one simple task. It involves checking, deciding, starting, stopping, remembering and transitioning—and when the system you’re using doesn’t fit your brain, every one of those steps can become harder than it needs to be.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Episode Highlight

One of the most useful questions I’ve learned to ask myself when something isn’t working is: “How can I do this differently?”

The goal isn’t to become better at forcing yourself through a system that doesn’t work for you. It’s to find a way of doing the task that does.

Also in This Episode

I introduce Money Investigation, a five-mission experience where you become a “money PI” and investigate your own finances—what your numbers are, where your money goes and what’s creating the financial chaos or uncertainty you’re experiencing.

It’s intentionally designed around things the ADHD brain responds to: interest, creativity, simplicity and play. The bigger goal? Building your financial self-trust.

If this episode makes you think of another woman with ADHD who keeps trying harder when she may simply need a different approach, share it with her.

Any questions? Email me at [email protected]

Free resources

🧠 ADHD Money Friction Quiz

💸 Join the Money Investigation Interest List

Socials 

📲 Connect on Instagram | Follow us on Facebook

How I can help

🌐 Visit the Website

👩‍💻 Breakthrough consultation with Zarina

📚 Order your signed copy of the book A-Bun-Dance 4 Your Finance

You make good money. You know what you should be doing with it. But staying interested enough to actually manage it? That can be a completely different story with ADHD.

When money feels boring, repetitive, overwhelming, or too far removed from any immediate reward, even simple financial tasks can become surprisingly difficult to start and stick with.

In this episode, I’m exploring why interest matters so much for the ADHD brain and how making money more engaging can reduce some of the friction around saving, planning, tracking, and following through.

We’ll talk about why retirement can feel too far away to motivate action, why money tasks that seem “simple” can be mentally exhausting, and why your brain may naturally look for shortcuts when something feels complicated.

I’ll also share a real coaching example of how simplifying a monthly cash flow plan helped one of my clients make the process much easier to complete.

And I’ll give you one question you can use immediately. Because the goal isn’t to force yourself to become fascinated by money.

It’s to make managing it interesting enough, simple enough, and rewarding enough that your brain is more willing to engage. If money is the one part of your life where you keep thinking, “Why can’t I just get this together?” this episode is for you.

💬 What part of managing money bores your brain the most? Tell me in the comments.

If you want more conversations about ADHD, women, money, and creating financial systems that work with the way your brain actually functions, subscribe to the channel.

Key Takeaways

Any questions? Email me at [email protected]

👩‍💻 Breakthrough consultation with Zarina

Free resources

🧠 ADHD Money Friction Quiz

💸 Join the Money Investigation Interest List

Socials 

📲 Connect on Instagram | Follow us on Facebook

How I can help

🌐 Visit the Website

📚 Order your signed copy of the book A-Bun-Dance 4 Your Finance

We love hearing from our listeners! Share your own stories, strategies, or questions. Your insights could be featured in a future episode! New episodes drop every other Sunday. Make sure you hit follow to stay in the loop. 

If you enjoyed this episode and want to help spread the word, here’s a couple of things you can do: 

You’re successful in areas of your life that require far more complicated decisions than paying a bill or checking an account balance. So why can money be the thing you just… can’t make yourself deal with?

If you have ADHD, knowing what to do with money and being able to start doing it are not necessarily the same thing. And that distinction matters.

In this episode, we’re looking beneath the usual “I just need to be more disciplined” explanation and exploring what may actually be happening when you repeatedly struggle to start financial tasks you know are important.

You’ll hear why something as seemingly straightforward as “manage my money” can create so much friction: too many decisions, no obvious starting point, working-memory demands, delayed rewards, boredom, overwhelm, and the emotions money itself can carry.

I’ll also share what I personally do on days when my capacity seems to have taken a vacation—and why asking yourself for the three tiniest things you can start and finish may be more useful than trying to force your brain into a task it currently experiences as enormous.

In this bonus episode, you’ll learn:

• Why knowing what to do doesn’t automatically make starting easier

• Why importance and motivation don’t tell the whole story

• Four common reasons an ADHD brain can struggle to initiate a task

• Why money management contains far more invisible steps than it appears to

• How decision fatigue and working-memory overload can show up with finances

• Why fear, guilt, frustration, and overwhelm can make ordinary financial tasks feel loaded

• What happens when your physical, emotional, or mental capacity is depleted

• How the “three tiniest things” approach can help reduce the activation threshold

One idea to take with you

You may not always need to make yourself try harder. Sometimes you need to make the starting point smaller. As I say in this episode: “Starting becomes easier for your brain when the starting threshold is reduced.”

If you know what you want to change with your money but repeatedly struggle to get started or follow through, my Breakthrough Consultation is designed to help identify the ADHD money challenge creating the most friction and turn one financial goal into a personalized strategy and action plan. 👩‍💻 Breakthrough consultation with Zarina

Any questions? Email me at [email protected]

Free resources

🧠 ADHD Money Friction Quiz

💸 Join the Money Investigation Interest List

Socials 

📲 Connect on Instagram | Follow us on Facebook

How I can help

🌐 Visit the Website

📚 Order your signed copy of the book A-Bun-Dance 4 Your Finance

You’re already juggling work, family, schedules, lunches, activities, and a million little decisions—then back-to-school hits and somehow the spending starts adding up faster than expected.

If you have ADHD, that may not be a coincidence. Back-to-school can amplify the exact challenges that already make money harder to manage: time blindness, decision overload, last-minute urgency, planning friction, and the pressure to make everything work.

And sometimes, overspending isn’t really about impulsiveness. It’s about your brain trying to make life easier. In this episode, I’m breaking down why back-to-school can become especially expensive when you have ADHD—and what you can do to reduce the stress, decisions, and friction that can quietly push your spending higher.

You’ll learn:

• How back-to-school adds dozens of small decisions that can overload your ADHD brain

• Why spending can become a way to reduce friction when you’re stressed

• How time blindness can make planning and saving ahead harder

• Why traditional advice like “start early” or “compare prices” don't work

• How creating defaults helps reduce your mental load

• A simple way to make future time more visible

• How to start putting money aside AND get a dopamine hit

One of the most important questions in this episode is: What problem was I trying to make easier when I decided to buy this?

Because when you understand what your ADHD brain was trying to solve, you can start changing the pattern without simply telling yourself to “spend less.”

If back-to-school has you feeling overwhelmed, behind, or surprised by how much you’re spending, this episode will help you understand what may actually be happening underneath it.

Tell me in the comments: What back-to-school decision drains your brain the fastest—meals, schedules, school supplies, activities, or something else?

Any questions? Email me at [email protected]

Free resources

🧠 ADHD Money Friction Quiz

💸 Join the Money Investigation Interest List

Socials 

📲 Connect on Instagram | Follow us on Facebook

How I can help

🌐 Visit the Website

👩‍💻 Breakthrough consultation with Zarina

📚 Order your signed copy of the book A-Bun-Dance 4 Your Finance

We love hearing from our listeners! Share your own stories, strategies, or questions. Your insights could be featured in a future episode! New episodes drop every other Sunday. Make sure you hit follow to stay in the loop. 

If you enjoyed this episode and want to help spread the word, here’s a couple of things you can do: 

ADHD women are smart. They've built careers, show up, and deliver. But for many of them, money is the ball that keeps dropping. Why is that?  

If you've ever wondered why you can manage a career, a family, a household, and countless responsibilities, yet still struggle to submit an insurance claim, check your bank account, or stay on top of your finances, hit play!  

In this episode, Zarina introduces a powerful concept she calls The Interest Gap — the space between knowing finances are important and having enough interest, motivation, and dopamine to engage with them consistently.  

Maybe you've automated your bills but still avoid checking your bank account. Maybe impulsive spending keeps derailing your goals, or financial tasks that should take only a few minutes feel overwhelming.

If any of that sounds familiar, this episode is for you.  Zarina shares her personal journey from debt, financial anxiety, and avoidance to building a healthy relationship with money. You'll learn how ADHD affects attention, motivation, and money management—and how creativity can become your greatest financial superpower.  

In This Episode: 

✔ What the Interest Gap is 

✔ Why ADHD brains struggle with money 

✔ The connection between dopamine and spending 

✔ How attention creates better financial decisions 

✔ Simple strategies to reduce money chaos

✔ How to stop impulsive spending without relying on willpower 

✔ Why creativity is your secret financial advantage

Any questions? Email me at [email protected]

Free resources

🧠 ADHD Money Friction Quiz

💸 From Financial Fog to Money Momentum Coaching

Socials 

📲 Connect on Instagram | Follow us on Facebook

How I can help

🌐 Visit the Website

📚 Order your signed copy of the book A-Bun-Dance 4 Your Finance

We love hearing from our listeners! Share your own stories, strategies, or questions. Your insights could be featured in a future episode! New episodes drop every other Sunday. Make sure you hit the follow button to get notified and be in the loop. Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a review and share it with someone you love 🙂. It helps spread the message to other ADHDers who need to hear it and creates a new scenario for how we view ADHD.

Are you a Gen-X woman who received a late diagnosis and are just beginning to see the impact it had on your life?

What about your professional life and career which ultimately, reflects on your financial situation due to how ADHD challenges hinder the ability to manage money?

There’s a lot to advocate for with ADHD and even more so when it comes to women and, to a certain extent, gen-x women who fall short as they approach retirement and face many financial struggles.

Despite the beliefs, baggage and habits you carry about money, lack of interest is probably what’s at the top of the list when you live with ADHD.

This episode covers many aspects to help you become knowledgeable about ADHD, the way it shows up in women and what changes when you start paying attention to your money and finances, so you can see what gets in the way and see a beacon of hope pointing toward a brighter future as you enter your third act.

Any questions? Email me at [email protected]

Free resources

🧠 ADHD Money Friction Quiz

💸 From Financial Fog to Money Momentum Coaching

Socials 

📲 Connect on Instagram | Follow us on Facebook

How I can help

🌐 Visit the Website

📚 Order your signed copy of the book A-Bun-Dance 4 Your Finance

We love hearing from our listeners! Share your own stories, strategies, or questions. Your insights could be featured in a future episode! New episodes drop every other Sunday. Make sure you hit the follow button to get notified and be in the loop. Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a review and share it with someone you love 🙂. It helps spread the message to other ADHDers who need to hear it and creates a new scenario for how we view ADHD.

There’s a kind of resistance that shows up around money — and it makes no sense.

You’re decisive everywhere else.
You handle pressure.
You solve complex problems.

But with money? You stall.

In this episode, Zarina reveals the deeper emotional drivers behind financial resistance in ADHDers — and guides you through a powerful tapping exercise to reduce stress instantly.

What You’ll Learn:

Key Takeaway:

You don’t have a money problem.
You have a resistance pattern — and it can be softened. 

👀 Watch on YouTube and subscribe

Any questions? Email me at [email protected]

Free resources

🧠 ADHD Money Friction Quiz

💸 From Financial Fog to Money Momentum Coaching

💥 Book your Brilliance Call

Socials 

📲 Connect on Instagram | Follow us on Facebook

How I can help

🌐 Visit the Website

📚 Order your signed copy of the book A-Bun-Dance 4 Your Finance

I'd love for you to help spread the word by following and sharing this podcast with another ADHDer or someone you love so they can tap into their brilliance 🙂.

Leaving a comment and a 5⭐️ review are also helpful ways for Phenomenally ADHD to reach more brilliant brains like yours 🤙.