Hacking the Limbic System’s Spending Habits with Christine Lane
Hey Team!
This week, I’m talking with Christine Lane, an accredited financial counselor (AFC) with a master's degree in psychology. Christine has ADHD herself and, luckily for the rest of us, her hyper-fixation happens to be on personal finance. She’s the founder of Mind Over Money, where she focuses on the psychological hurdles that make traditional budgeting feel like a personal failure rather than just a glitch in your executive function.
In our conversation today, we get into her "Four-Bucket Banking System" and why we need to stop making our money multitask. We also explore the concept of using "friction" as a tool for impulse control and why simulating the physical loss of cash can be a great way to get your limbic system to play ball. We also talk about the specific tools she uses to gamify spending, why detailed categorization is often just a form of productive procrastination, and how to set up "set it and forget it" systems that protect your bills from your worst impulses.
Christine’s website: Mindovermoneysite.com.
Also for your listeners who are interested in the 4 bucket banking method here’s a freebie to help: 4 Bucket Banking Calculator
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/296
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
William Curb: Budgeting is such a wild thing for ADHD sometimes. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do and how that works with ADHD?
Christine Lane: Absolutely.
Christine Lane: So I am an accredited financial counselor who completely accidentally has fallen into specializing with folks with ADHD. I come by this pretty honestly. I have ADHD myself, but I actually have a bit of a hyper focus on finances. So I was very lucky. I had parents that taught me early on age appropriate. I had the knowledge and I had the interest. So I've always been really good with my money, but other ADHD type things, keeping a neat environment, managing time, oh my God, managing time.
Can't do that to save my life. I can have money to pay a bill, but that doesn't mean I'm going to pay my bills on time. Thank God for my husband and for auto pay because that part was not working out well for me. But when I started my coaching business, and I used to have a whole other career, but then I was really interested in personal finance, again, hyper focus for me. And I decided I wanted to help other people get good at this. Not because at the time I knew that it was specifically a problem for folks with ADHD. I just saw so many people that were in debt and couldn't save and were afraid of money and were bad with money.
And I said, Hey, this is something I would love to do. I always liked managing my own money. I used to manage corporate budgets. And then this was a career switch for me.
But I was very specific in what I wanted to do. In addition to being an accredited financial counselor, I have a master's degree in psychology, always had a nutrition psychology. And I called my company Mind Over Money, because I really wanted to focus on the psychological aspects of managing money. The math behind budgeting, it's just not that hard, right?
We can all pretty much do it. We're not falling, not failing at our budgets because we can't do the math. We're failing because we don't know what our internal mental structure should be.
And we don't have good external systems. So when I started working with folks, I took what I knew that worked for my brain in the things I was bad at, right? Time management, managing my physical space. And I tried to apply how I would handle a thing like that if I was bad with money.
So I was always taking, here are things I'm not good at. I can't tell people who have, who overspend, just spend less. Just do it. This doesn't work. I can't just give them a budget.
That doesn't work, right? For most people with ADHD, most of my clients were coming to me had Army try the major things out there. They tried the budgeting apps. They tried putting it in a spreadsheet. They tried giving themselves certain limits.
And over and over again, they would blow the limits, not keep up with the spreadsheets and blame themselves, right? The guilt, the shame around all of this. Why can't I just do better?
This shouldn't be too hard. So I was taking what I knew about trying to manage my own brain and possibly more important, what I knew just wouldn't work and trying to coach people the way I would want to be coached through something I was very bad at. And because I knew certain things about how brains work for everybody, but just sort of turned up a lot for ADHD, I was applying some of that.
So I don't want to get too technical, but we can talk about the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system and how they interact to make life difficult for folks in the muddy world.
William Curb: So one thing I want to hit before we get too far into, just so that because people won't know what it means is being an accredited financial counselor.
Christine Lane: So there are a variety of types of financial professionals. Most of the ones that you're registered investment advisors, they are there to help people that have a lot of money turn it into more money, right? They're there to help you with your investments.
What accredited financial counselors do is we all do different things, but my real focus is helping people get out of debt, build savings, learn to budget. But again, what I find is that the problem isn't that people don't know how to write a budget. They don't have a stick to a budget. So I'm helping people spend less, save more. I also do making sure you've got the right information so that you can invest, you are making, that you do have the financial knowledge to make smart decisions. But particularly what it comes with the ADHD clients, information is great and they need that. But even more than information, they need really good systems and tools because you can give them all the great information, but they won't follow through if they don't have the right systems and tools. So accredited financial counselors are more focused on helping people get their finance together, save, get out of debt rather than making sure their investments make a lot of money.
William Curb: Okay, that makes a lot of sense too. Yeah. And if people are looking for these kinds of things, is there anything they should be... So obviously we'd love everyone to go work with you, but if they're not, are there things they should watch out for when they're looking at financial advisors?
Christine Lane: Absolutely. If you want to find accredited financial counselors, go to AFCPE. They are the organization that does the accreditation and they've got lists and they've got information about what AFCs do, all that good stuff.
William Curb: All right. And then going into some of what you were talking about earlier, I think, yeah, talking a little bit about... So you're saying we really want to make sure that we're working in ways that work with our ADHD brains because it's... We don't want to... There's things that are just difficult for us. So what are some of the things that you've noticed that are really helpful for working with ADHD in this field?
Christine Lane: So one of the things is... So what are your previous guests talked about brain scaffolding? And brain scaffolding can work in terms of time management, task management. It also works in terms of money management. We're not going to do it just in our heads. Actually, I can because it's my hyper-focus.
I can't do anything else that way. So most people need really good systems. And I'll just jump into a couple of tools right away.
So we've probably tried the apps. A lot of people have tried Madhavkar, Mentor, You Need a Budget. I mean, there's Dave Ramsey's Every Dollar.
There's a ton of them out there. What happens with most folks with ADHD when they use the apps is they set it up. It may be a connection to the bank accounts. Maybe they categorize things and they turn it into a categorization exercise. If you've heard the analogy of your rearranging items in the spice rack instead of writing your report for work, categorizing your spending is not a useful tool to keep you from overspending if you have ADHD. So what works better than just categorizing it in an app is making some friction around spending in ways you shouldn't spend. So I've got a few tools that I use to jump straight into the tools.
When I'm working with clients, first of all, one of the hard things for folks with ADHD and myself in particular, at any given task is, we're going to even start. I know I need to write a budget. I don't know what categories to use.
I don't know how much is she putting each category. I'm going to give this is the part where I think a coach, especially one that understands ADHD can help a lot. Some coaches really have, I'm going to help guide you to the right answer approach. I ain't got no time for that. I'm going to give you the system that we're going to, we're going to test it and we're going to change it based on what you need. But I'm going to say, Hey, we're going to try this as your budget. We're going to try it and we're going to see what works.
I am going to give you a number that is for general spending. And I'm going to give you a tool. We're going to gamify it, right? And probably all know dopamine. It's sometimes in short supply.
I mean, I'm exaggerating the way dopamine works, but we need dopamine to keep us on task. Gamification can really help with that. The first simplest game that I have my clients do is, I've given you a number that is your general spending number.
Here are the types of things this encompasses. You're going to get a calculator on your phone, a second calculator or a dead simple envelope budgeting app. Let's say I've told you that you've got $800 to spend for the month on general expenses.
First of all, a month is too long for the ADHD break. You could spend that whole $800 in the first week and now you got nothing. Well, then you're going to pull out your credit card, right?
Because you're not going to have three weeks with no. So I say, right, we're going to take this $800. We're going to break it down into $200 a week.
So at the beginning of the week, we're not even looking into your bank accounts yet. We're just doing this out of calculator. You're typing in $200. Let's say Friday you've got $200. Then when you go spend money on anything that's in this general category, in that moment, you have to subtract it from the $200. So you've got $200, you spend $50 going out to dinner. Now you have $150. In the moment is key because what typically happens, the way money is set up today, is we spend money on a credit card or even a debit card. We get the thing and we get the card back.
Our limbic system, the emotional concrete part of our brain that has more control for folks in ADHD who have ADHD than folks who don't, doesn't realize there was a trade-off. All it knows is it got a thing. And getting things, acquiring things is good for survival, especially when it doesn't cost us anything that our limbic system can see.
So it wants to acquire, and acquire, and acquire. That feels good. Something that feels good is good for survival. Your brain wanting to spend money is your brain working to keep you alive, the limbic system. The prefrontal cortex, the neuro cortex or the neocortex, that's the part of the brain that can do abstractions, that can tell time, that knows actions today, impact that, impact our lives a month from now.
Lymic system can't tell time. It is never going to learn if you're using a credit card that you spent $50 today and now your credit card bill is too high. Yes, you're free for the cortex nose, but your limbic system thinks the threat to its survival is not that you overspent, but that you looked at the bill. And so the feedback that that part of your brain is getting is all wrong for what's actually happening. And your limbic system could adjust if it got proper inputs, if it got the loss along with the gate, but it doesn't get that particularly that when you're spending out a credit card. At some extent, not everyone you're spending out a debit card. So we take this simple calculator, you've got $200, you subtract 50 in the moment, in the moment your limbic system registered a loss. Okay, I can see that.
Along with the game, it is now balancing the input. You start to feel protective of that money. What I tell people is it doesn't usually when we're starting out, it doesn't include your bills, it does not include your groceries, it doesn't include gas for your car. There is nothing in this $200 a week that you can't live without until next Friday. So if you hit zero, you have to stop spending until you get your next $200 infusion. Your limbic system is going to automatically start changing your priorities at an emotional level. You're not going to have to use willpower, not the same way you're used to thinking about it. Not that I just got to do better.
I got to try harder because your limbic system is now pulling the cart in the same direction as your proof of cortex. And the other aspect of gamifying it is if you end up with more money at the end of the week, you can roll it over and now you have more and people get really excited about that. So that is a tool that I had found just that one tool for some of my clients is mind-blowingly game changing. Some clients need other tools, some clients need a mix, but that first one, some people like, oh, it's this hard, this is scary.
Some people find it to be freedom right off the bat. Now I know what I can do. I don't feel guilty when I spend it and it just completely, because it's doing a bunch of things. It's gamifying. It's also creating a level of clarity. It's also, you're not trying to manage 10 things at once because working memory, being able to hold multiple things in your brain at once is in short supply for folks with ADHD. It's hard to keep a bunch of different competing priorities in our brains at once. So simplifying it down to a very small amount, it's like taking a baby step on a task. So that's one of the tools that I use.
William Curb: Yeah. And I mean, I see so many things like as you were saying, because I mean, I have seen the research that like separating your, like the more you separate your money from like how you actually spend it, like the using the plastic instead of cash kind of thing makes you, how you view it not work quite as well. But it's also very impractical for us to try and carry cash around all the time for everything.
Christine Lane: Well, that's the real challenge because I am pretty old. I'm old enough to remember when my parents had to make it to the bank by three o'clock on Friday to get cash to spend over the weekend because there were a lot of places that didn't take credit cards back in the 70s and 80s. You couldn't use them in a grocery store. You couldn't use them at a fast food restaurant. And when I was really young, ATMs were just starting to become a thing.
They weren't on every corner. And so if my parents couldn't get to the bank, they like literally didn't have any money to spend. Other than the only reason I know this is a thing is I was a good little saver and they would come and borrow my allowance.
So that's the only reason I know this was actually happening. That's where they would get the cash. But if you think about that, if you had cash in a wallet that was disappearing and you, you weren't going to have anything to spend over the weekend, you would automatically treat that cash as a limited resource. And but it's not practical.
It is actually the most effective way. It's so physical of it, so concrete, but I don't have any of my clients do that because you can't buy anything off of Amazon with cash. There's no restaurants that don't take cash. And actually cash feels different to people now. It tends to feel like found money, especially for younger folks who used to be using plastic their whole lives. I have had young people tell me, oh, cash doesn't feel like real money to me.
William Curb: That's interesting. Yeah. And then it wouldn't feel like you're actually losing anything when you spend it.
Christine Lane: And that's because they're real money, right? Their paychecks are in cash. They're, usually it's somebody gave them 20 bucks, right? And that's why they have cash. It just feels very different. So the point of the calculator is to mimic what cash does, which is to get your brain to see that there's a loss in the moment the loss happens, so that it is automatically making a comparison between the reward it got and the loss it was stood. And it automatically sees that this is a limited resource. And again, there is a level of adjustment that happens. It happens with emotion, right? Like it feels tight, but it doesn't need the same kind of top-down willpower. It's sort of a bottom-up change in behavior.
William Curb: Yeah, absolutely. Because it's getting you how you feel into your head rather than how you fit your head, what your head's thinking, to feel in your body. Yeah. And I totally see how this is such an important rewiring to do because Yes. I mean, I know how many times I've taken, tried to not do purchases on my phone. But you know, the operation there is amazing, especially when it's like, you know, the Amazon one-click buy.
Christine Lane: And I'm like, oh, they're the champion of the frictionless spending, right? Like that's their whole goal. Make it as easy as possible. And what I try to do with some of my clients is let's add the friction back to spending. So I have had clients where Amazon is their problem, like you've got to delete the app and you got to take your credit card out of the app.
I want you to have to type it in. I am kind of a fan of the Amazon wish list. Sometimes what I tell my folks is you're going to have one day a month that is a buy day, the day that you can buy stuff, physical things. You can shop.
If shopping is fun, you could shop any day you want. You just have to put it on an Amazon wish list or take a picture of it if you like to shop in person and put it on your phone. And then when you go back and look on your buy day, if you haven't thought of that thing since you put it on that list, you don't need that thing.
It has a cross your mind. Of course, impulsiveness goes along with ADHD, right? So having a buy day is one way to reign in that impulsiveness. First of all, you get to give yourself permission to have the thing. I can have this thing in three weeks, assuming I still want it in three weeks and assuming there's still room in the budget.
That takes a little practice, right? Because as a folks with ADHD, delayed gratification isn't really our thing. This is sometimes called temporal discounting or delay discounting.
Something feels less worth it if we're not going to get it until the future, right? And of course, impulse control is part of it. So that is a broader category of tools I use with my clients is let's find ways to add friction to your spending. And they can be different for different people.
William Curb: Friction I love is a concept for all things where you're more friction for things you don't want to do less friction for things you want to do. It is such a good system for ADHD being like, oh yeah, I recently just had a credit card that needed to get in some fraud thing. So I had to get the new number and the number of things where I'm like, I have to reenter this. And I'm like, there are certain things where it's just like, oh, this is perfect because this is good. And there's other things like this is really inconvenient because I have to go downstairs and get my wallet and get this now.
But it is really illustrating to me how important it is to or how that friction works because it's easy to overcome the friction for things that are important when I was like, oh, I'm paying for groceries. Yeah, that was I just walked downstairs and grabbed my credit card. I didn't want to do it, but there was no problem. But had I been trying to buy something that was not necessary, I would have been like, well, I'm not going to go downstairs for that right now. Exactly.
Christine Lane: It gives you a pause to think also, right? The time between stimulus and response, if you can drag that out a little bit, you're giving your executive functioning a little more time to chime in.
William Curb: Yeah. And I love that approach for getting people to think about things because it, yeah, the impulsiveness often is really just like that one second of impulsiveness. And if we go with it, it's great. But if we slow down at all, we're like, oh, yeah, I don't actually care.
Christine Lane: Right. Exactly. Exactly.
William Curb: So we're talking here about regular spending. And then how do you build in this budget idea then?
Christine Lane: So what I do when I'm working with my clients, I usually have a process. The process is give me your fixed expenses, your regular monthly bills. These are your rent, your subscriptions, your cell phone bill, all of the things that come in.
You're paying this bill on a date, right? It may not be the exact same amount. Utilities obviously could vary, but these are sort of your fixed things. They're not necessarily essential.
You could have 20 streaming services, but they are a fix. Then we've got your variable expenses. This is usually your groceries, your gas, and I say everything else. I am not a huge fan of detailed categorizations and budgets. I don't think there is any value to separating your eating out budget from your entertainment budget, from your clothing budget. No value in terms of actually changing behavior. It can give you information. Bowie ADHD folks know that information is often not enough to get us to act. I think a lot of the apps really encourage detailed categorizations, which makes people think that categorizing is budgeting.
It's part of it, but it doesn't change behavior. With variable, this is where I usually go. We're going to separate our groceries and gas, and the rest is one big bucket. This is eating out, but it's also the occasional medical copay. It's also something your kid needs for a report. We're going to manage that bucket as one, but there's two more important buckets.
There's a bucket that most people forget about ADHD even more than most. These are the periodic expenses that come up during the year that you know are coming, but they don't come every month. This is back to school clothes for your kids. Money is spend around the holidays. If you're doing landscaping on your house just in the summer, if you're going on a vacation, if you're going to need a new laptop, anything that's say over a hundred bucks, but doesn't come every month. This is where ADHD folks get into trouble.
Everybody gets into trouble with this who hasn't done a budget, but ADHD in particular. If I think about my approach to time and when I have to get somewhere, I assume that everything's going to go perfectly, that I will be able to find my keys and my phone when I'm leaving the house, that traffic will not be bigger than average, that I will find the parking space that I won't get lost. Nothing unexpected is going to happen. And of course, when something unexpected happens, then wait. The folks at ADHD are particularly vulnerable to be unexpected because we're also not always great with foresight.
A lot of those things on this periodic list are not unexpected if we stop to think about it. If you pay your car insurance once every six months, you know that bill is coming. If you pay for landscaping, you know that's coming, but we don't think about it. So what we do, that's a separate bucket. In fact, after the calculator, my next big system is the four-bucket banking system. So we've got the fixed expenses, the variable expenses, and then we're setting aside money for these periodic expenses. The overly simplistic way of thinking about it is add them all up, divide by 12, and then create a bill where you're setting money aside for these things every month. Sometimes these are called sinking funds. I said to have called them save to spend funds. That is not the same as emergency savings.
And most people lump these together. We have one savings account. I don't have mental clarity on how much I'm going to need to spend on my vacation versus an emergency that might come up. And we tend to want money to multitask. I've got $5,000 in savings. That means I have $5,000 for emergencies and also that I have $5,000 for a vacation. And you don't.
It's one or the other. This is my nemesis with time. I always think, oh, I've got the whole weekend. I'm going to do these 10 things over the weekend. And I never stop to count how much time each of these 10 things are going to do, they're going to take.
And there's no way I could get them all done because I never did the mental math and how much time they're going to take. Most people don't do the math on how much all these things are going to cost me. Oh, I already have $4,000 planned expenses for this year. They're going to have to come out of savings.
Therefore, I only have a $1,000 emergency fund. Most people don't think about that. If they've even saving it all, like a lot of times it's just all going on a credit card, but even pretending we've got some savings.
So credit cards, so those are the types of things that wind up on a credit card or make other things wind up on a credit card. So that's bucket number three. Bucket number four is a true emergency savings. And a way to create mental clarity and to create some friction around not messing that up is to use the four bucket banking system. So I like to have four banking accounts. Now that sounds like I'm adding overhead.
And then at the beginning it a little bit is, but let me tell you why this works really well. You've got the account that's purely for your bills. You're rent, the things that you have to spend X amount of dollars on every month. You set that up and to the extent to which you can, everything goes on auto payment. You don't put more money in that account than it needs to cover your bills. So month in and month out, money goes into that account to cover the bills, it comes out, where money comes in. You don't touch that for anything else. I don't care what comes up, you can't touch that bank account because you know for sure if you do, you're not going to be able to pay your bills.
It only has enough to pay the bills. Then you've got your variable expenses account. Those are the things that I put on the calculator. The calculator is a short term thing for most people. I say try do it for like four weeks, maybe two months.
That's going to start to grind into your bones what $200 a week feels like. But I don't respect anybody with ADHD to log every purchase in the moment they make that purchase from now until eternity. Not going to happen.
You're going to fall off the wagon. But what you can do from now until eternity is have a banking account with a debit card that you use for all those variable purchases. Most people that I think it pay like every two weeks. So I like that to run on an every two week system. You add just enough to it every two weeks to cover what you're allowed to spend on variable.
Now you can watch that balance and it works almost like a gas gauge on your car. You know when things are getting tighter. You know it's going down, going down, going down. And as you're spending it, your brain is still getting that feedback.
That quite is in real time is when you're subtracting from the calculator. But close enough once you've established some good habits. You know now that does include groceries and gas because those are variable even though they're essential. It's not just fun money. But you're paying attention to the needle on that account.
It gets replenished every two weeks. As you get good at this, as you've learned on your calculator, you're not going to overspend that account. If you run out of money on that account, you're only going to have a couple of options. You could take from bills. But you know you're not going to be able to afford to pay a bill. You could take from savings, but you've got to be honest with yourself.
This is not an emergency. You could take from your future periodic expense. But then you've got to know you won't be able to afford the things you were saving for there. So it creates real obvious or you could pull out a credit card, but it's made it much more obvious that you're doing that. Again, especially if you've practiced with the calculator for a while. It's harder to kid yourself. Your pre-ferptor cortex, your executive functioning has more power over your brain when it's got clear-cut information. So giving it that clear-cut information gives it a fighting chance of impacting your behavior. When it's got murkiness, the immediate limbic system is always going to get rid of it.
So I have found those first two things. So an example of client I worked with with ADHD. A woman and a man, a couple, they had always, they said, you know, we've always kind of spent above our means, but we were always able to be saved by a bonus or raise, right? We were making it work. And then we bought a house.
They had two kids. And you know how it is with ADHD. You could have a precarious system that's working until something stress tests it.
And then it all goes hanging wire. So since they purchased the house and she became the stay-at-home mom, their credit card debt was growing, growing, growing. And her description was, I don't understand money and I have ADHD and I can't focus. And he said, I have a bit of an addictive personality. Not in the sense that he had, you know, true drug addiction or anything, but overeating, impulsive spending, he said, that's my thing.
Gave him the calculator as a starting place. She, she, like, I don't even know how to explain how fast it changed her thinking. She's like, oh my God, I know what my limits are now. I know exactly what to do. This is easy. This is fun.
I now feel like I'm contributing to the household again, because I am managing the spending. Now, his psychological psychology was a little bit different. He was able to do it. But for him, it wasn't fun. It was hard. It felt a little bit like deprivation.
For him, accountability was the stool that was really important to him. And also being able to forecast that I'm kind of people with a, everybody sort of has this, they don't tend to think ahead when they're budgeting. When they look at the apps, they go, oh, I went over on my grocery bills. Oh, well, or, oh, I spent more on entertainment that I should have. One of my clients said, you know, the apps are a lagging indicator of behavior.
And I said, you're right. It shows you what you've done. It doesn't help you think through where things are going. So with him, it was always using forecasting tools to say, okay, you overspent this month, I'm going to type this in. Let's pretend you overspend by $50, something like that, but you overspend by $50. Let's see what life looks like in a year.
Here's how much your credit card debt has grown. Because again, your limbic system, because he's dealing with the same limbic system issues. It may not be ADHD, but it's, I want immediate, I want to feel good. It's sometimes we talk about a lesser ability to tolerate a bad mood if you have ADHD, right? So you want even more so than most people you want to fix the mood. So he wants to fix the mood by spending, but we could arm him with better forecasting, better information, again, to give his prefrontal cortex a fighting chance of changing behavior. Like you could do this because you just think it's $50.
It's a little amount of money, but here's what, it's been $50 a week for years, which has given you this $30,000 of credit card debt and $0 in savings. So if we forecast, if we learn about thinking ahead, then you will make better decisions. And actually being able to visualize that forecasting is really important.
It can't be just abstract. So for some folks, like I said, that calculator is a game changer. For some folks, the four bucket banking is the game changer. So I had another client, he had actually gone through bankruptcy, severe ADHD, and with a little bit of autism thrown in for good measure. He had just gone through bankruptcy. He had $0. He'd also just gone through to force.
So he was like, all right, I've got no blank slate. What do I do? I always ask my clients, what have you tried before? I don't usually get the apps or just telling myself, I'm going to do it.
He said, I've tried the apps. I've tried using only cash. I've tried putting cash in a lockbox. I've tried nothing.
Nothing worked. When I had him, when I tried to get him to use the calculator, he couldn't remember to use it. I tried to teach him how to forecast that he's like, no, I'm never going to do this. I'm never going to sit down once a week voluntarily and type numbers into a spreadsheet and see where that ends up. But the banking absolute game changer, he used to always, he paid over $100,000 and he always used to shop on payday because he groceries on payday because if he didn't buy his groceries on payday, there wasn't going to be money to buy them later. Once we separated out into buckets, these are your bills. You can't touch this for anything else.
This is variable. Also, it's how you supposed to be doing a birthday road trip for a son that was coming up and he had Christmas that was coming up. I have these things that were really important to him and nothing's safe for emergencies. No way could he save money for these things and within three months, totally under control. He's like, I don't even, you know, the set it and forget it, right? Like he was like, I can do this now. He had the $3,000 emergency fund by the time we were done. He had the money to do the road trip with his son and that one tool clicked in his brain in a way nothing else had because it created clarity and it created friction because he only has a debit card for one of those accounts, right? You can easily go take it from another account. He's like, I don't have to buy my groceries on payday anymore. I feel safe that there's going to be money in that grocery's account when I need to buy groceries.
William Curb: Yeah. I mean, what I'm really hearing is like, you're not relying on willpower and that kind of stuff.
Christine Lane: I'll die now. Yeah. It doesn't work.
William Curb: Even though, and it feels, it sometimes feels like, oh, but if I was an adult, I could do that. But it's like, we just have to accept the reality. That's not even what's important here. What's important is what works and what doesn't.
Christine Lane: A million years ago when I was young and I had a credit card, I had a debit card, couldn't have a credit card bill to save my life. Just could. Could pay it on.
I mean, I have the money. To me, saving lights up my limbic system. I love watching the numbers grow.
It's like, watch, it's like earning points on a video game. So I'm not good with money because I'm disciplined. I'm good with money because of the way it lights up my limbic system.
I'd also, again, it interested it. I found when I started using a credit card, but even I started spending more than I wanted. And also I kept getting late fees because I wasn't paying it on time.
And I was like, you know what? I can't make it work with your credit card. I'm just going debit all the way forever.
And this is even before I think I even knew I had an HD because when I was younger, it wasn't even a phrase. And people would hassle me, but points, but fraud, but this and that. I'm like, yeah, but they're like, just paying it on time. I'm like, but I'm not gonna. Like, I know what I will and won't do. So I'm gonna work with who I actually am, rather than your idealized version of who I want to have who I should be. I just, I know how my brain works and I'm gonna work within that structure.
William Curb: That sounds so important to me of because often, yeah, we were like, if I just change this fundamental part of who I am, then it'll all be fixed. It's like, that's a big ask.
Christine Lane: It's a big ask. And we probably all know from experience it doesn't work. You know, one of the things that I tell people generally, I even get into it on the first free call is to try to reduce the shape by explaining, hey, your brain is working exactly how it's supposed to work to keep you alive in an environment it did not ever involve to be in. Spending money, look feels like it's just acquiring resources with no loss whatsoever to your limbic system. So why wouldn't it do that? I mean, that's it's doing it's working exactly as it should in a world you weren't fit to be in.
So let's bend, let's bend the external structures rather than trying to insist you're going to do it better. And I do tell my clients, I do have some willpower boosting exercise where I tell them as well, first month might suck. Some people love the tools from day one and it's game changing from day one. But I said, you're changing habits, you know, without with change, there's discomfort. So you need to be willing to tolerate the discomfort for a month. What I usually say before even take somebody on a client is I say, how badly do you want this on a scale of one to 10?
And how hard are you willing to work for it on a scale of one to 10? Because we ADHD folks want all kinds of things. Have you ever had somebody tell you, well, if you really wanted to, you would?
William Curb: Yeah, it's one of the most like, it feels so like defeating, like you don't understand. Yeah.
Christine Lane: I do want it. I don't want credit card debt. I want savings, right? Like, of course I want that. And then you get the but if you just, and I always say it's, I mean, and this is hard one from, you know, being old at this point, that I have the answers when people say, well, you could just and I'm like, if I could just, I would for me, for you, it's a just for me, it is absolutely not a just. So what I usually am trying to tell my clients upfront is your brain is working as it was meant to an environment it was not meant to be in. But the first month until we start getting the limbic system kicking in and getting excited, because that's what happens for a lot of folks is like, oh my God, it's more fun living on a budget.
I love this. I'm less stressed. I'm running more. I'm getting along better with my, you know, Parker, I once had one woman who was dealing with dysfunctional families. She was she was smoking a lot of weed. She was she was a long haul driver. She had a whole lot of things going on that were a problem with her life. And she came to me and honestly, the thing she was going to be able to do. I said, look, I never want to be selling hope.
I only want to be selling results. You've got so much going on. I don't know. Like, are you really willing to do the hard work? And she said, yes. And I said, are you sure? Because I don't want to just take your money and have you be worse off, right?
Like, that's not the point of this. And man, if she didn't do it all, and I gave her some of the willpower exercises, which I take from a fabulous book by Kelly N'Gottagall called the willpower instinct. She's the only clad ever had that went out and bought the whole book and read the whole book. And she said, oh my God, now I know why I'm so hasty and my choices.
She deleted Amazon app. Every structural thing I had her put in place, she put in place and within a year paid off 30 grand a credit card debt and had an emergency fund and had to take two weeks off of her job because it was a physical job and didn't miss any bills. And she got health insurance, which she originally had not wanted to pay for.
And she told me, she told me at the end of three months, I mean, I checked in in a year to see how she was doing. She's like, this is the thing that changed everything for me. I've changed who I'm hanging out with. I'm not stressed so much anymore.
So I'm not smoking pot as much and that saved me money. And it was just this whole upward spiral. And it was because of her that I started asking the questions on the first call. I ask, how much do you want it? And I usually get an eight, nine or a 10. And then I say, how hard are you willing to work for it?
And by work for it, I don't mean filling out a spreadsheet and categorizing and meeting with me. I mean, how much discomfort are you willing to endure for the first month to get where you want to go? Because you can't change without discomfort. And we are all ready to take on that discomfort sometimes more than others. Usually if they're calling me, they're pretty motivated.
But if they tell me a five or a six, say you won't get anything out of this, I can give you the best systems in the world. You want it. I absolutely know that you want it, but you can't muster the willingness right now. And that ebbs and flows in a person. And I've had times where I'm really willing to work on my stuff.
I put systems in the place and it works for a while. And then sometimes the willingness kind of drops off. And sometimes the systems can carry me for quite a while. I try to set up my systems for my ADHD folks saying, Hey, I want to set this up for when your mom gets sick and you're busy dealing with that or work becomes crazy so that you can go three, four, six months without giving this a thought.
And it still works. But you've got to not be in that state when we first start. You need to be able to give it some attention and feel some discomfort in order to get past the initial hump. So being at least temporarily willing to feel some discomfort is an important part of getting the process started.
William Curb: Yeah. And I think that's a really important thing for people to understand because yes, it's the like, you know, if you wanted it enough, you do it kind of thing. But that is, it's not because that this is the point here is that often it's like, okay, but we have to have this other piece that was is going to keep us pushing when it's because it's going to be hard.
Christine Lane: But you can't use that piece forever. That piece has, you have to like minimize the amount of that, right? The goal is like, you're going to need a little bit of willpower in the beginning. I'm going to give you some exercises to help boost it. But you just got to hang on for a few weeks with some willpower before the internal rewards, the intrinsic rewards of this behavior start kicking in and get your limbic system on the same pace. And once the systems are set up, it requires so much less brain space, right?
Let's another thing that's in, I call it brain space in sort of a premium for people with ADHD, how many things can you track and focus on it once? So like, you need to give me a month of brain space on this topic and a month of willingness to feel discomfort so that we can get things set up and then we don't need to use that or at least not nearly as much anymore. And then you can use your brain space to run more, get along better with your partner, just the reduction in stress that people who are really worried about their their finances, that is taking up brain space, which again is a premium. So like, just repurpose the brain space that spent worrying to focusing and doing for a month and then you're going to get that brain space back to do other things with.
William Curb: Yeah, I think this is some really fantastic stuff. I was just talking to someone the other day about regulation work and I'm like this self-regulation and this seems like a piece that is often like not really thought about there too because like, even though it's very external from who you are, it does affect how much stress you are experiencing and you're not going to be able to really focus on yourself that much if you always have this like nagging stress of like, oh, things are going to go wrong and I can't do anything about it.
Christine Lane: And it's like a program in the background using a bram in your brain, even if you're not actively thinking about it all the time.
William Curb: So I was wondering if you had any final thoughts you wanted to leave the audience with.
Christine Lane: Fixing this is more doable than you think, even if you have failed many times. If you've got the right systems, if you've got somebody who understands the ADHD brain, I have seen people succeed working with a coach, working with these systems when they have failed trying to do it in other ways. So do not give up hope, but also don't just keep repeating the I'm going to do it, I'm going to be better next time. You need different processes and systems. You cannot just insist your way to change it. Absolutely.
William Curb: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been fantastic.
Christine Lane: Oh, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.
This Episode's Top Tips
Modern digital spending, such as our cards and phones, provides a "gain" without the physical feeling of money leaving. To help bridge this gap, tools like a calculator, where you can subtract the cost at the moment of purchase, can help the limbic system register the loss, balancing the emotional input so you feel protective of your remaining funds.
When we let our savings accounts multitask, we can end up imagining that the same $5,000 can cover both an emergency and a vacation. By using something like the Four-Bucket Banking System (Bills, Variable, Periodic, Emergency), you create "object permanence" for your money, ensuring that essential funds are physically separated from your spending urges.
Willpower is a finite resource that often fails when we are stressed. Instead of "trying harder," we want to focus on bending external structures (like deleting the Amazon app or removing saved credit card info) to create enough friction to let our executive function outpace some of our more impulsive spending choices.