Overcoming Job Loss and Managing ADHD Finances with Sherry Andrew

Welcome to today's episode of the Wealthy After 40 podcast. I am excited for today's guest. Sherry is an ADHD money coach and the seed for her business was planted the day she got fired after almost 17 years with the company. Sherry share a little bit about, yeah, the seed. And I know you talk about a two by four moment and yeah, tell us a little bit about that. Oh, it was very much a two by four moment. And I actually remember in the weeks before I got fired thinking like, oh, this job isn't that bad. It'll be fine. Like only like 20 more years or however many years it was at the time. And now looking back, I'm just like, oh, thank God I had that two by four moment because. Like, when you're removed from a situation, you're able to look back and really see it, like, without that emotion, you're not attached to it. And it was a high stress job, I worked all kinds of different shifts. I worked with all kinds of different like personalities and it was just so high pressure that probably like once a quarter I had a good cry at work and like in reflecting I'm like, that is not normal. That is not healthy. And fast forward to today and where I am, if that moment hadn't have happened where I got fired, like I don't know where I would be. And it kind of like, I'm so grateful that I'm not there still and it's. Like, the universe gives you signs and I ignored them all until the universe, like, gave me a sign that was completely out of my control. Yeah, a big one. After your 2x4 moment job loss means wage loss. What did you do? So grateful to have a spouse who still was gainfully employed, but we sat down and looked at our numbers and figured out like, what could we cut and where, like, how deep could we cut and Things were slashed from our budget that I never imagined we could live without because when you're in the moment when you have that stability of like a predictable income, it's easy to think about. Oh, yeah, this is this is part of the budget. It's like a need. But when you lose half or more of your income, you make different decisions. And it gives you that, like, that clarity of what can we cut? Like, Anything and everything was cut and basically we were down to the bare bones, but that gave me time. It gave me time to figure out what was next and through working with a career coach myself, but also a wonderful trip to Peru that I was with a bunch of strangers on this trip and talking about, Like their jobs and their careers and I could see them lighting up and like I was on a trip I'd had this plan before I lost my job so I was still going to go of course because it was paid for and but like I traveled to escape my job specifically, and they were traveling for joy, and it's, and it really had me reflecting on like, oh, oh work isn't just a paycheck work is something that you can enjoy and love, and it can pay your bills. I love that. I know we talk a lot as money coaches about our journey as to how we became a money coach. Yours obviously was through that journey of job loss. Share with us a little bit of that journey. You started in 2018 and then I know you had a big pivot in 2022. And just share a little bit about that. Yeah, I've had quite a few pivots in my business. And in reflection, again, I believe that is related to me, very likely having ADHD. I'm going through the process of formal diagnosis. But the joy of being a business owner is that you can adjust your, your niche, you can adjust who you help, you can tweak your business a little bit. And still, to keep that like, Okay. You know, it's really important to keep your business fresh and interesting versus like a job where you have pretty similar like weeks and days, and it can get monotonous. So that's why I really love being an entrepreneur and part of my pivot was to focus on helping entrepreneurs because I love the ability to increase income when you're an entrepreneur, when you get more focused on your finances, but also when you get more focused on like what you need to make and, you know, As an employee, and I'm sure you've had these conversations too. It's challenging when this is your salary, but this is the amount you need to make to have a balanced, enjoyable, like life in relation to your budget. And when you have those conversations with an entrepreneur, they get inspired and they get ideas. Through my journey diagnosis, self diagnosing my ADHD, I realized that that's really where I'm going to have the most impact in helping ADHD entrepreneurs, because managing money is difficult in general for everybody. We don't learn enough about it, but you add in age ADHD, and then you add in self employment and it's like, it triples in its level of difficulty. It's an area that we tend to put our heads in the sand about, especially when we're entrepreneurs with ADHD, because you can't just go and look at one piece. You have to look at all of the pieces and figure out, like, take that step back and figure out, like, what are you making? Is your business profitable? What are the numbers? You work in that tax portion, and I love to help entrepreneurs pivot from being scared about tax time to get it. Getting excited about it because I always encourage them to save a little bit more than we think they're going to need. So then tax time becomes like a prosperous time where, Oh, I owed this much in taxes, but I have this much saves. Like, what do I do with this extra? Because I've saved it diligently. Like it's, it's yours to decide what to do with as an entrepreneur. Yeah. I love that. And once it's a, piece of your saving, right, of your budget, like that is, that leftover is leftover because they're already saving enough for the next year, ? There's already been that process put into place. Yeah, it works the same way for individuals. My next question is, what are the most common struggles Individuals who have this disorder that they have around money. Like what, as, as an outside looking in, you know, to help, what are the common struggles? I think the biggest thing is impulse spending and spending without thinking because you then end up with a credit card bill that you weren't expecting. And I see lots of videos on social media where it's like they're opening these boxes and they have no idea what's in them. So if you're opening a box that you have no idea what's in there, it's obviously not something that you really needed, because if you needed it, you would remember it was in that box. So It's figuring out how to put guardrails around that impulse spending because Personal finance and like how you handle food. There's a lot of similarities there. And if somebody tells me you can never have chocolate, I am going to last about 25 minutes, and then I'm going to want that because somebody told me I can't have it and I love it. So if, if you tell an ADHD or, oh, you just like stop impulse spending, like no more impulse spending, like cut up all your cards, do all these things to that, that work for more neurotypical individuals. We're going to find ways. We're going to call that credit card company. We're going to get a new car. We're going to memorize the number, which is so common, but I love to include a portion. In an individual's budget for like personal spending, whatever you want to call it, we give it a name that resonates with them. And then it's for you to spend on whatever you want, but a specific amount goes into that account every payday or every month, whatever frequency works for you. And that's. You make different decisions because like, oh, there's my impulse spending account. It's got a hundred dollars in it, but I don't put any more money in there until next week. But my Amazon cart has 87 of stuff. I was just about to hit buy for, and that's going to leave me with not a whole lot of money. It's like coming up with these creative strategies. really helps to, again, put those guardrails around it. And if your impulse spending is really specific to one thing, and for a lot of people, that one thing is Amazon, because they make it so easy to hit buy, and it just shows up at your door the next day or the day after. So if that's the case, And it's Amazon or something else specific, get a gift card, get a gift card, remove the credit cards or the debit cards from like being saved in your Amazon account and like get a gift card at the beginning of a pay period or a month. And then that's, that's your guardrails. That's your boundary. So figure out. Where that impulse spending is most likely to happen. Maybe it's Uber eats. That's a big common one as well. Like figure out a way that's going to work for you to put those boundaries around it. So you can still spend on what you enjoy, but it's still in your overall financial plan. You're not derailing the whole thing. Yeah, so smart. My last client her impulse spending choice that we limited right through budgeting was her drinks. And as we worked through, she's like, I feel like it's just too easy to use my app. And then I just run down and grab it. I'm like, Take the app off. So you actually have to go to, you know, Safari or Google Chrome or whatever, log in and do that. And that was actually something I learned from my daughter way back when she was trying to limit herself on social media, she's like, I just get rid of the app. There's so many ways to approach those barriers, the friction, the restriction, the, to make it just make your mind slow down, ? For ADHD years. I love that. Yeah, and just, just anything to have a quick, a quick pause to be, okay, wait, I have to check here because like, I don't want to be at the store and have my like card be declined or whatever that is. Just anything to make that quick pause, like removing your credit card and debit cards from online stores. There have been enough times that I have been sitting on my couch and Instagram ad comes up. I'm almost ready to buy and then it's like, oh, oh, my credit card's over there. I have to get up off the couch to go and get it. Like, that's oftentimes a big enough thing to be a pause, to be a barrier, to help you, like, not purchase that thing that you get time to soak on and realize 24 hours later needing that thing was really, like, a little bit ridiculous. Yeah, so true. See, and I would be the, oh, it's memorized and I can do it, but I do have other areas to make me pause. , what works for one person may not work for another, and hopefully, if you've heard Sherry and I talk, you'd be like, oh, I can do it this way, and that's really what finances is all about, is finding your way. My next question, what steps can an individual with ADD or ADHD take to start, so they're at the beginning steps of working with their money to set them up for success, ? They've already got this disorder. They think differently. So normal advice is not going to work. What do they do? That is the biggest thing. And to know that if you've tried budgeting, 5, 10, 20 times before and it hasn't worked, like don't beat yourself up because a lot of the advice that you find out there is geared towards the neurotypical brain and it's easier for them to just like create a budget and not easy, it's a little bit easier. But start by it starts by building the plan and that plan lots of times we think we need to go back through 236 months of spending and I really encourage ADHD years when they're starting to build their first budget is to just. Start with your gut. Yes, you want to go and look and see like, what's your phone bill? What's your rent? You want to have those things that have specific numbers and dates attached to them that are fairly easy to find you want to have Those pretty dialed in but for like your groceries and your entertainment or things that are going to vary month to month You don't have to wade through months of credit card and bank statements just like go with your gut like if you go to the grocery store once a week and You spend around 100 dollars Start with that and see how that works and adjust it as you need to go. Like a budget is a living, breathing thing, and it's not specific numbers. It's going to change. If you've got three birthdays next month or it's Christmas next month, like you're going to change your spending based on the time of year and seasonality and. Start with your gut. Start with your numbers. Don't let feeling like you need to go through months and months of transactions hold you back from getting started. Last month well, the first of the year I was talking about clarity, you know, and getting that vision. And I did. I was like, if you're a numbers person. Go look at all of last year. But if you're not, pick one month. Advisably not December or November because those are different in and of itself, but just go pick one. We don't need to have oodles and oodles of data. Although I geek out over data. I was watching a scientist and I'm just looking at her data and I'm like, Oh my gosh, I love this. This is so real. Let those that geek over it, let them geek over it. . Exactly. My next question is how can friends and family support their loved ones when they realize that maybe things aren't connecting and that possibly it ADHD or ADD? How can they support them on their money journey? Oh, this is a great question. And a big thing is to find a way to provide accountability without attaching it to like judgment or expectation. We often struggle to build habits and talking about things that make us uncomfortable. If you have a friend who, if you've been working to get your finances together and you'd start talking about it with your friend and They have ADHD and they're like kind of piquing a little interest, like maybe it's just booking like a coffee date with this friend once a month to just talk about like just casual, like, Hey, like, what are your goals for next month? And like, what are some things you're going to do to help that? And here are some things that I did to help me. Like one of the big things I find with my clients that have ADHD is that. That accountability, whether we're meeting like twice a month, once a month, once a quarter, that accountability helps them to continue to do those things that they may not necessarily continue to do. Because like when you have your money plan dialed in, it really gets boring. It's, it gets boring and it loses that excitement. Like early on, we can get those dopamine hits from like the excitement of, Oh, I just paid 200 on my credit card that I've never been able to do before above the minimum payment. You get excited and you start to pivot from like spending to saving and paying off debt to get your excitement and dopamine hits. But as you move on months, months, and years into budgeting, it's boring. Like for me on payday, there's lots of automations that happen. And because of the system I use for my business, I have a consistent payday. I just match it up with my husband. So it's easy. And every payday money just goes into these other accounts for different savings goals for travel, for new technology, for when we need new cell phones, for property taxes and things like that. And it's like, the money went in, the money went out and I don't really have to do anything. And it's kind of boring. But then when the car breaks down, there's money in an account. So that it's not derailing our whole budget for a specific month that that car repair fell into. Yeah. I agree. At some point it does, it gets boring, but ideally that's where you want to be. I was so excited when I was heading into retirement before I became a money coach. And I I was like, Oh, I get to redo a whole new budget. I don't know how it's going to work. It's going to be shifting. And yeah, so it's, it is easy to recognize like, Oh yeah, these sweet moments, you know, these dopamine hits and then what do you do to create them? And so I think in some sense, you've got to look at the stacking of that savings, and those different milestones that hopefully you're achieving. Yeah. And now one of my dopamine hits is like, How much interest did we make from our high interest savings account this month with those sinking funds accounts that we're saving up for. That's, that's a nice hit once a month as well. I had got my daughter into the high yield savings just as it was starting to tank, ? As Economy was doing really well. High yield savings wasn't paying as much. So I said, it's fine. It's fine. You know, and then she was telling me, cause I wouldn't see the email before her. She'd be like, mom, did you see, mom, did you see? And so, she was getting the dopamine hit just from the interest increase, not even from the total amount in there. You got to look for different ways. Do you have one last piece of advice for listeners in general, or, you know, With the disorder or as an entrepreneur? For everybody. And this specifically does help ADHDers more, but this works for everybody, is to separate your money into an account based on what you want it to do for you as soon as possible. If you can get money out of your main checking account into an account that has a specific job, it creates some friction when you're going to take that money out of it. Years ago, and this is how we got to having a new technology account. Years ago, I went into the store to get a new phone because mine broke. The alarm didn't wake me up that morning. So that was, that was a bit of a deal breaker. So I went into the, the store that my telecommunications company has and like, I need a new phone. And they told me my bill was going to go from 55 a month and cell phone plans in Canada are, are crazy. We have so few options. So 55 a month to 105 a month. Because this phone paying for the phone was going to be wrapped up in there, but then my gut told me I'm never getting back to that 55 a month plan if I do this, so I walked down the mall and I went into the Apple store and I purchased a phone outright pulled out my credit card. And then that next week when I was paying off our credit cards, I'm like, Oh, I don't have a plan for this. This was a sound financial decision from a cell phone bill perspective, but I didn't have a plan for it. So then the only thing that made sense was for me to take that money from our like travel and fun account, which like didn't feel good because I liked that account. I like to see it grow. But then that, that uncomfortableness of like, Had me then thinking, okay, how can I avoid this in the future? And a little bit of budget tweaking, adding in an automation. And we have a new technology account that when it's time to buy a new phone or something like that, there's funds specifically set aside for it. So like setting it aside in a separate account helped me know if it was just a general savings account, I wouldn't have felt that pain of, Ooh, it's coming from travel. And it wouldn't have like had that. Okay, what's next? How do I prevent this? thing that makes me feel really uncomfortable and like a little bit disappointed in our finances. How do I change that? So separation by account for entrepreneurs, taxes, an account to pay yourself out of, an account that you're saving up for larger things in your business. Like I have an account for everything and Some people think it's overkill, but it works for the way my brain works because I can see this is for my sales tax. This is for my income tax. This is for car maintenance. Everything has its place. I love that. And that is , so important. Yeah. Especially if your mind doesn't bleed very well from one to the other and you just see that. . Awesome. And one, one more quick tip. Create friction, especially for ADHDers. Create friction to access the funds that you don't want to spend. So your savings accounts, your business, like income tax savings account, does it need to be at a different bank than your regular bank? So you don't like you log in and you see like your checking account and your personal spending account, but you don't see those savings accounts because that out of sight out of mind, which can be a struggle for ADHD years can work to our advantage. When we've got money, we don't want to spend in another account. And maybe, like you said, that maybe that app isn't on our phone. Maybe we have to go and log into our computer to spend that money or transfer it to an account that we need it for. Oh, friction is huge. Friction is such a great friend as you're trying to build this new relationship. Love that. Thank you, Sherry, for being here. If people want to connect with you, where do they find you? The main place that they can connect with me is on social media. I love Instagram and TikTok are my main platforms. My handle is at MoneyMindsetFC. So MoneyMindsetFC as in financial coach. And if you've got questions, send me a DM. I love to hear questions from my followers and my audience and use those to create informational social media posts because If you have that question, somebody else has that question, and they're just too afraid to ask. So I love using that as inspiration for content to help my followers. Awesome. Well, thank you again, and we will see you guys next week. Thank you so much.