For a long time I thought I was just bad with money. Not because I earned too little or spent recklessly on big things, but because the standard advice never seemed built for a brain like mine. Spreadsheets I’d start and abandon. Apps that pinged me into anxiety. Budgets that assumed I’d remember a bill from eleven months ago, or that I could simply choose not to buy the thing the advert was waving in my face.
What changed everything was a quiet shift in how I thought about it. I stopped trying to fix my brain and started designing around it. None of what follows relies on willpower, because willpower is the first thing to go when you’re tired, overwhelmed, or having a low day. It relies on structure instead. And structure, I’ve learned, is a form of self-kindness.
Here’s how I do it.
I have three current accounts, and crucially, I’ve named them. Not “Account 1” or a string of numbers, but Business, Bills, and Spending Money. There’s a savings account too, named Tax 25-26, so I know exactly which year it covers.
Naming them matters more than it sounds. When everything is labelled by purpose, the money stops being one anxious lump and becomes a set of clearly defined jobs. I’m not guessing what I can afford. Each pot already knows what it’s for.
My income lands in Business. From there it cascades, and the rest of the system is really just the steps of that cascade.
This is the trick I’d most want another neurodivergent person to steal.
When I get paid, I open my banking app and scroll back exactly one month. Then I read forwards, day by day, through everything that left the account: the 7th, the 8th, the 9th, and so on, across the next two weeks. As I go, I flick between the banking app and my calculator and add it all up. When I press equals, I know precisely how much needs to stay put so every bill is covered.
I don’t have to remember my outgoings, which is the part my brain finds genuinely hard. Last month’s statement remembers them for me. I’m just reading what already happened and trusting it to repeat.
Once I know the figure, I subtract it from what’s in the account, and whatever’s left gets transferred onward to Bills. Then I do the exact same scroll-and-total in Bills for household costs like council tax and water. I leave enough to cover those, plus a bit of breathing room of around £100 a week for food, petrol, and the bits of life that come up. Anything beyond that moves to Spending Money or into savings.
I get paid weekly, but I always make sure my bills are covered for a fortnight in advance. Sometimes a month, if I can.
This isn’t over-caution. It’s a buffer for the reality of being a person. If I’m paid late, or I’m unwell one week and earn less, the bills are already handled and I’m not thrown into panic. I built that cushion in deliberately, because future-me deserves to be protected from a bad week. That single decision has taken a huge amount of background fear out of my life.
My savings goals are named too, and they’re specific: holiday, beauty treatments, a new fence for the garden. Naming them means I know what the money is for, so it can’t quietly become “spare cash” the moment I’m bored or low.
But here’s the part I’m proudest of. I’ve hidden the balance of that account in my app. I can tap in and see it whenever I genuinely need to, but it isn’t glaring at me every time I open my phone.
Before I did this, I had a guilty, almost punishing relationship with savings. If I could see the money sitting there, a voice would start up telling me I didn’t deserve it, that I should get rid of it, that I should spend it down as quickly as possible. Hiding the number turned that voice off. Out of sight, the money simply gets on with the job I assigned it, and I get on with mine. If that voice is familiar to you, please know it’s common, it’s not the truth about you, and a small practical change like this can genuinely loosen its grip.
The day I started treating tax as something to prepare for rather than dread, it stopped being frightening.
Every month I move 20% of my income straight into that named tax savings account. I keep it in an interest-earning account, so it’s quietly working while it waits. By the time my accountant tells me the figure, the money is already there.
I’ve paired this with one tiny habit that saves me enormous mental effort. The moment a receipt lands in my inbox, I forward it to my accountant. No filing, no “I’ll sort it later”, no shoebox of guilt. It’s gone the second it arrives, while I’m already looking at it. Doing things the moment they appear, rather than trusting myself to come back, is one of the most reliable strategies I have.
I have mixed feelings about the term ADHD tax. I don’t love that it describes something real; the extra money so many of us lose to impulsivity, late fees, forgotten subscriptions, and dopamine-driven spending. I’ve lost plenty to it and given myself a hard time over it.
But having a name for it has been surprisingly powerful. When I’m about to buy something, I can now pause and ask; is this an ADHD tax transaction, or do I actually want this? Just labelling the impulse creates a gap between feeling it and acting on it. And in that gap, I often find I’m fine without the thing.
A lot of my old overspending wasn’t really my decision. It was advertising doing what it’s designed to do.
So I removed the worst offenders from my phone. I keep Facebook and Instagram off it, because the adverts there are relentless and eerily well-targeted. I’ve come off those apps before having spent a hundred pounds on things I never wanted, and felt tricked and ashamed afterwards. Now, if I use social media at all, I use it on a computer, where the ads sit politely off to the side instead of leaning into my face.
I also pay for ad-free YouTube. I worked out what I tended to spend because of the ads versus the cost of the subscription, and for me the subscription wins. That maths won’t be true for everyone, so do check it for yourself. I’m not suggesting you spend money to save money unless the numbers actually add up.
I keep an eye on subscriptions generally. They hide in your Apple or Google account, under your profile or in settings, and it’s worth a look every so often to catch the things you signed up for a year ago and no longer use. I’m easily pulled in by free trials, so I’ve trained myself to cancel the trial before it ends, the moment I start it, rather than waiting for it to quietly turn into a charge.
The scroll-back method has one blind spot. It only shows me what went out last month, so the big yearly costs (car insurance, road tax, the TV licence) never appear.
My fix is simple. When one of those is coming, I put a reminder in my Google Calendar a week ahead: “make sure there’s £150 in the account for the TV licence.” That’s it. The calendar holds the thing I’d otherwise forget, and the cost lands softly instead of knocking me sideways.
None of this is about discipline. It’s about building a system honest enough to account for how my brain actually works, on good days and bad ones. The accounts do the remembering. The buffers absorb the wobbles. The hidden balances quieten the unkind voices. The calendar catches what I’d drop.
If you’ve spent years believing you’re simply bad with money, I’d gently offer this; maybe you were just using tools that were never built for you. You’re allowed to build your own.
This article was written by a member of our online Heartbeat community, following conversation in one of our three, weekly zoom connection sessions. If you would like to join, or to support our work, you can use the buttons below to do so. Please remember to share this article and subscribe.
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