ADHD, Emotions, and Rewriting Your Money Story with Nicole Stanley

ADHD Money

Sep 25

Money is rarely just about math—it’s about stories, habits, emotions, and, for ADHDers, often a deep sense of shame. In this episode, Pete and Nikki sit down with Nicole Stanley, financial coach and founder of Arise Financial Coaching, to unpack the hidden ways ADHD intersects with our finances—and how we can finally start to build a healthier, ADHD-friendly relationship with money.

Nicole shares her own diagnosis journey and the challenges of postpartum depression, financial anxiety, and feeling “not enough” as a new mom. From there, she walks us through how our early experiences shape money beliefs (most of us make up our financial mindset by age seven!), and why traditional budgeting advice so often fails the ADHD brain.

This conversation is a blueprint for anyone who’s ever felt overwhelmed, behind, or just exhausted trying to “do money right.” Nicole reframes key concepts: how to spot the real root of your financial stress, why automating your systems might be better than trying to “budget harder,” and how to emotionally connect to your goals so you’re actually excited to follow through.

Plus: what financial coaches really do, how ADHDers can leverage dopamine to create a positive money loop, and the five core financial problems that every person needs to identify before they can move forward. Whether you’re in credit card debt, unsure where your money’s going, or just sick of feeling behind—this episode is your permission to drop the shame and start where you are.

Links & Notes

Books Mentioned in This Episode:

The Simple Path to Wealth by J.L. Collins
Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin & Joe Dominguez
I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi
Happy Money by Ken Honda
You mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid, or Crazy?! by Kate Kelly & Peggy Ramundo
Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life by Bill Perkins

Pete Wright: Hello, everybody, and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright, and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer: Hello everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright: Insert sounds of cash registers, Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer: Oh, wouldn't that be lovely?
Pete Wright: Mm-mm-mm. Mm-mm-mm-mm.
Nikki Kinzer: Speaking of which, did you play the lottery when it was like over a billion dollars? Did you play to win it?
Pete Wright: I don't play the lottery.
Nikki Kinzer: You know, I don't either, but I did that time.
Pete Wright: I don't do that. You did? Sucker.
Nikki Kinzer: I did. Because I told my husband, I'm like, you can't win if you don't play a little.
Pete Wright: Uh...
Nikki Kinzer: And it was so big that I was like, let's try to win. But we won nothing. We won nothing.
Pete Wright: Famous last words of gambling addicts everywhere.
Nikki Kinzer: So I know, right? Yeah.
Pete Wright: We're talking—
Nikki Kinzer: This is what you don't do with your extra cash.
Pete Wright: Yeah, that's right. That's right. We are talking about money. We're talking about building a healthy relationship with money today. We've got an incredible guest to join us and do just that. Before we dive in, if the show has ever helped you feel seen, understood, or just a little more capable in your ADHD journey over the last—nay, fifteen years—we are asking for your support. Join us as a member at patreon.com/theADHDpodcast and help us keep the lights on, keep the server spinning, and keep us growing this show and the incredible community around it. Thank you for your support.
You can also find us at TakeControlADHD.com where you can listen to episodes, join the mailing list, or connect with us on social—pretty much at TakeControlADHD everywhere. And if you're looking for real-time support, hop into our ADHD Discord community at takecontroladhd.com/discord. We would love to see you there.
Nicole Stanley is founder and head financial coach at Arise Financial Coaching. She works with high-earning women with ADHD to simplify money and build wealth without shame and without restrictive budgets. After paying off thirty grand in debt herself in just ten months and saving a hundred thousand dollars by the age of twenty-seven, Nicole built the ADHD-friendly Money Momentum System to help people make real progress with their money their way. She joins us to explore how ADHD intersects with our emotional relationship to money and how we can start rewriting that story today. Nicole, welcome to the ADHD Podcast.
Nicole Stanley: Thank you, Pete. I'm so excited to be here.
The Lottery Discussion
Pete Wright: Step one: always play the lottery, right? I think that's what we learned.
Nicole Stanley: I don't know about that, but I do think there are some moments where it's so big that sometimes you just have to do it, right?
Nikki Kinzer: You just have to throw in a couple bucks, you know, because you never know—you could be the one.
Nicole Stanley: Yeah.
Pete Wright: Oh my God.
Nicole Stanley: It's true.
Pete Wright: You could be the one.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah.
Nicole Stanley: Really, it's the question of optimism. It's the question of: do you have hope?
Nikki Kinzer: Right.
Nicole Stanley: Right.
Pete Wright: Yes.
Nicole Stanley: So I think that that's a pretty good show of that.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah.
Pete Wright: The problem I have—I have a buddy...
Nikki Kinzer: I always have hope.
Pete Wright: We've talked about this. I have a buddy who entered the contest to have a bit part in J.J. Abrams' Star Wars movie, and you had to write a postcard and send it in and get picked. So he bought a rack of postcards and sent like a thousand of them in, and he won.
Nicole Stanley: That's the way to do it.
Pete Wright: And he won.
Nicole Stanley: Really?
Pete Wright: He's in the Star Wars movie.
Nikki Kinzer: Nice.
Pete Wright: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this was some years ago.
Nicole Stanley: That's incredible.
Pete Wright: It's incredible. It's incredible. And I always think about that every time I don't buy a lottery ticket. Like, what?
Nikki Kinzer: Right.
Pete Wright: What? Oh man, ugh.
Nikki Kinzer: Well, that is definitely not the way to feel good about finances.
Pete Wright: Yeah. No, it's not.
Nikki Kinzer: So let's get back on track.
Pete Wright: Let's make that a non-example.
Nicole Stanley: Yeah.
Nicole's ADHD Journey
Pete Wright: All right. Nicole, so you have shared your ADHD journey. Can we start with that? Talk a little bit about your ADHD diagnosis and your journey, and then we'll kind of careen that into your money journey.
Nicole Stanley: Yeah. Yeah, so I am a late-diagnosed ADHDer, but obviously everybody in my life knew when I was a child, when I was an adolescent, young adult—it was clear as day. But I wouldn't say that we talked about it as seriously as we do with boys, just because I was the girl in class who never shut up. I just knew that school was tough. I had these relationship problems. All the classic things. But I didn't ever have an adult, you know, say seriously, like, "I think that you should talk to somebody about a potential ADHD diagnosis." It was more like "She's a space cadet, she never shuts up."
And so when I was in college, I realized in those first stages of adulthood, like, wow, there's a lot of details, there's a lot of task follow-through that it was easy to just trust that my parents were gonna do for me. So I just kind of chalked it up as personality traits. Like, I'm messy. I'm always up all night for exams.
Pete Wright: But that's so charming.
Nicole Stanley: Like, I'm so charming and funny and cute, right? I remember that's just kind of the way I viewed it. I was never like, "I think something is wrong with the way that I think." But it wasn't to say that I didn't have struggles. I just thought, you know, hey, I'm just gonna get through this. C's get degrees. Here we go.
So when I got married, I got married very young, and I didn't necessarily have the support of my father emotionally because I was getting married to someone that didn't make a lot of money. So he really was very like, "This is not something you should do." So being a classic Latina daughter, I wanted to prove him wrong, which meant I wasn't going to talk to him about my struggles as a new mom or as a new wife—things that made me feel like, "Man, what is wrong with me?"
So I ended up developing pretty severe postpartum depression. When I was first married, I started to learn that I had an anxiety issue. This mostly manifested in money. So this is how this comes back. But it was when I became a new mom that I would say my ADHD cute factor—she's funny, she's cool—just stopped. She could no longer be cute or funny. She was crying with the amount of diapers she had. She was feeling like, "Why is this so hard?" A lot of low self-confidence during that time and reaching out for help then.
And so it was through raising my daughter who—spoiler alert—she has ADHD...
Pete Wright: Shocked, I tell you. I'm shocked.
Nicole Stanley: So as I'm struggling through early motherhood, all those things, I start to read about her behavior stuff. And I'm talking to my husband about it, who's extremely neurotypical. And I'm like, "But this is normal. This is what I was like as a kid, right? Like, this is normal." And then I'm reading more and more about how difficult it is for adults with ADHD to parent kids with ADHD. And as I'm reading it, I'm feeling like, "Holy crap, they're like a fly on my wall." And my husband's telling me, "That's not how I was as a kid. That's not how my sisters were. I don't think it was a girl thing."
Nikki Kinzer: "I don't think this is normal."
Nicole Stanley: "That's right."
Pete Wright: Right, right.
Nicole Stanley: "Like, maybe this is different."
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah.
Nicole Stanley: And so I kind of fought that for a little bit. I had a coworker who really was like, "You know you have ADHD, right?" And so I decided to get evaluated. Fast forward, I'm like, "I'm gonna get the real diagnosis because I don't wanna just find out online." Nothing against that. But I was like, "If I really have ADHD, I need to freaking know this."
So I do one of those six-hour evaluations, and at the end of it I look at the psychologist. I'm like, "Okay, how'd I do?" And he looks at me with this concerned face and he was like, "I think you know."
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Nicole Stanley: And I was like, "What? But how bad is it?" And then he is like, "Well, let me show you the data." And he shows me all my results. He's like, "If I was to line up a hundred women with ADHD, from the least to the most, you would be number ninety-nine."
Nikki Kinzer: Wow.
Nicole Stanley: Meaning—
Pete Wright: Outstanding.
Nicole Stanley: —you have one of the worst cases ever.
Pete Wright: That is pretty good ADHD, right?
Nicole Stanley: And I started laughing and then I started crying.
Nikki Kinzer: Wow. Wow.
Pete Wright: Yep.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah.
Pete Wright: Yep.
Nicole Stanley: And so it's been—I mean—
Pete Wright: There's a cycle.
Nicole Stanley: —it's been a whole thing of really understanding myself. It's been great for my marriage to understand just... I mean, basically I grew up thinking I was stupid. That's it. I just thought I was stupid. And I thought I was selfish and I thought I was lazy. And literally when I asked the psychologist, I'm like, "So I'm not stupid?" And he goes, "Well, one of the books I recommend is you read this book."
Pete Wright: "You're Not Late."
Nicole Stanley: It's called "You're Not Lazy, Stupid, or Crazy" or whatever.
Nikki Kinzer: Right.
Pete Wright: Right.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah, yeah.
Nicole Stanley: And I was like, "Okay."
Pete Wright: Yeah, yeah.
Nicole Stanley: So anyways, that's how I found out I have ADHD, and it makes sense why entrepreneurship has been such a great journey for me as a small business owner because it provides all that ADHD stimulation that I never found working in a W-2 job, as well as the financial aspect of it. I had to learn how to be good with money because I couldn't let anyone know that we were really struggling with money. And so it forced me to be really creative. And after going through that process, I realized like, "Oh wow, a lot of people want new ways to think about this and new ways to manage their money," and thus that's how my company got started.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah. Oh, I love that.
ADHD and Money Assumptions
Pete Wright: We have assumptions that we talk about all the time about what ADHD and money—the collision that occurs when ADHD meets money—and there's a lot of the sort of assumptions around impulsivity, you know, spending without thinking, spending without planning. Where do you find in your coaching with folks that poor executive functioning impacts someone's finances and money mindset?
Nicole Stanley: So I think statistically ADHDers have it really tough because everything with executive functioning typically shows itself negatively with money, right? So people with ADHD are statistically—they have a higher chance of being in debt, they have a higher chance of having less for retirement, they have a higher chance of more job turnover, right? Like all of these things that negatively impact their money, as well as just the amount of executive functioning it takes to manage a budget.
Like when we think about budgeting today, it's like, "Well, why don't you just think about everything you're going to spend money on and try to plan it ahead and have like thirty different categories and then every day check in and just see how you're doing." Most ADHDers are like, "I'm never going to do that." Therefore, we kind of opt out of the budgeting conversation. We opt out of the investing conversation because we feel like, "Well, my brain doesn't go that way. Therefore, I'm bad at this."
And so I think that that kind of sets up a snowball where there are other ways of managing money that don't involve a ton of executive functioning-type budgeting, or ways of thinking about investing, ways about thinking about building wealth that I actually think are perfect for the ADHD mind, right? Like we're dopamine-seeking, we want to win. Many of us are very competitive. There's a reason why more of us are entrepreneurs. It's because when the stakes are high, we like to perform at our highest level. We actually have a lot of traits that can make us really good at money.
I think the problem is that the financial industry is typically talking to neurotypicals, which is not the language that we talk in and it's not the language that our brains want to opt into. So all that's to say, I think that our ADHD can make us amazing with money. It's just statistically right now we don't have a lot of places to learn about how to do that.
The Emotional Connection to Money
Pete Wright: It's so fascinating because you're making me think about sort of—I know how my emotions, how my general executive functioning state impacts the way I think about money. But the converse is also true, right? Like if I'm doing well with money for a time, my mood tends to be vastly better. And I don't know that I play with that enough, right? I don't know that I tune that enough to really leverage the good feeling to do more. It's usually just sort of accidental.
Nicole Stanley: Yeah. And that's something that I've started doing in my coaching since the beginning—I call it "baking dopamine into your relationship with money." So because a lot of ADHDers have this negative relationship because of either low savings, high debt, whatever it might be, what it does is it creates this neurofeedback loop of: "I check into this, I feel bad about myself, I want to avoid it. I look at this crap, I'm not good at it," and it just gets bigger and bigger, right? Where we just have this identity where—if we can actually start to change that, where we change the experience of what working on your money feels like, the types of wins you're trying to create for yourself, it creates something more positive where you say, "Crap, I'm really good at this." And the ADHDer says, "Well, I want more of that." Right? "I want to do more of that." And that's where we get the positive feedback loop, which can really change somebody's trajectory financially.
Pete Wright: If I was neurotypical, then it would seem so obvious that I could engineer my experience and my activities in a positive way. And I struggle because of all the ADHD stuff around time blindness, executive functioning, trouble to be able to do that with any regularity. And if I've heard anything, regularity and consistency is pretty important in financial management.
Nicole Stanley: Yes, but the problem is that many people think that that consistency has to be manual. And that's where I think that there's a lot of tools that are new in the financial world that didn't exist thirty years ago in the same way. So it's not like your grandma could tell you, like, "You know, honey, I struggled with the same thing and this is what I did to improve it," because...
Nikki Kinzer: "I put money in each envelope for groceries and..."
Nicole Stanley: Yeah. Where there's so many robust automation tools out there so that people can set up their financial goals and their financial actions that don't require their manual consistency. And that's like, you know, when you mentioned at the beginning, my Money Momentum System—that's ultimately what it comes down to. I realized when I was a young person, like, "Why the heck am I supposed to do all this manually when there's so much of it that can be automated?"
And that's kind of new and exciting. And I think that that's why ADHDers, if they have the time and the education to set up a system, they can have a lot more positive financial outcomes versus saying, "Well, I'm just gonna do it the way that my friend does it, or the way that I saw on Google to do it, because that's how neurotypicals do it." Which they would never say it like that. They would just say, "Well, this is the way that I learned how to budget. Therefore, if I don't do it this way and succeed, I suck." Not "the method sucks."
Nikki Kinzer: Right. Yeah, I think that's very much the go-to—that I'm doing something wrong—when really maybe you just change a little bit of the method or the routine around it and you might find more success. But it's so immediate to blame yourself.
Nicole Stanley: That's a different way of saying it.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah.
Where to Start: Short-term vs. Long-term
Pete Wright: Let's walk through the areas of our financial life, please, if you will. I'm thinking about both short-term and long-term—where ADHD impacts your wallet and where ADHD impacts your, God knows, end-of-life planning. I don't know. Where do you start when you're coaching folks?
Nicole Stanley: So I always like to start with the now, meaning I like to get a good picture of how somebody spends naturally, not necessarily the story that they tell themselves about how they spend or the story that they tell me about it. Most people are actually pretty negative in their viewpoint of themselves. Like people will be like, "I spend so much money." I can't tell you—I've coached so many people. They come to me, they're like, "I overspend." Maybe thirty percent of the time, they're actually right.
So the first place I always start is to remind yourself that whatever story you tell yourself about money, it is a story until you can verify it.
Pete Wright: Yeah, yeah.
Nicole Stanley: Right?
Pete Wright: Well, and it's the only place in our life, I think—maybe it's the only place in our life where a negative assessment actually has a negative symbol next to it, right? We're spending money and that is negative everywhere—in the bank, on our stubs, everywhere you're taking things away and it might as well be just chipping away at my psyche.
Nicole Stanley: Right. And so the first thing I want to do is I want to get that picture of: how does this person spend and make money naturally? And that's just numbers, right? The best part about finances is that if you can start by looking at the data, all you do is you become a problem solver. Most people don't look at the data. They're very concerned with, "I'm this way, I'm that way, I'll never be able to do that." And it's like, "Well, yeah, of course you won't ever be able to do that because we gotta start somewhere."
So the first place is like—if you can pretend like your finances are your friend's, okay? Pretend you have a friend that you're looking at their finances. And you're just curious. You're not looking to diagnose them. You're just saying, "Okay, you would like to save to buy a house. You would like to be able to retire early. You want to go to Disney twice a year with your kids. How can we do that?" And then all of a sudden the shame-filled brain starts to die a little bit because it has to focus more on the problem-solving side of the brain.
And ADHDers, we're really good at solving problems, especially when we know that if we solve the problem, we get something better out of it. And so I find that the first thing for ADHDers is: "Okay, why are you even—why do you even want to do this? What is it that you really want?" And someone might say, "I just want to be good with my money." No, you don't.
Pete Wright: Yeah, I don't really care about that, right?
Nicole Stanley: Nobody wants to be good. Who cares, right? "Oh, I want to have more in savings." No, you don't. What do you want? What in your life do you want that you feel that because of money you can't have? And if you can get an ADHDer to connect with what they really want in life, and then I say, "Okay, there's a few admin executive things we need to do, right? Let's do these. And then we can just run like hell that way," you're gonna get a lot more success from the ADHDer, including me. That's how it changed for me. That's how it changes for my clients—we have to stop looking at finances as just this boring, tedious task and something that connects us with what we really want out of life that unfortunately takes money to do.
Finding Your True Financial Goals
Pete Wright: Yeah. The big goals though—two things stick out to me. First of all, when you say ADHDers are really good at solving problems, I think that is true. I also think we're really good at solving other people's problems. We're much better at solving other people's problems than our own problems. And when it comes to money, I have a feeling that if I sat down with someone else and was just asked—based on having no idea about real financial intelligence—I could probably see patterns that would allow me to help them solve their problem. If I sit down in front of a mirror, I would have a very big problem seeing those patterns, right? Confronting—I could see the patterns, but confronting those patterns, it's very easy to go into ostrich mode, right? So that's the first sort of emotional challenge.
The second challenge is—you say like, I really appreciate everything you're saying about "put the goals to things," but when I say I want to retire well or I want to—you know, those seem truly rational, but non-specific when I sort of apply your lens over them. What does it mean to retire well? How do you walk through that process when your goals—the internal emotional experience feels so true and yet ends up being nebulous?
Nicole Stanley: But what does that mean to you to retire well?
Pete Wright: Right, I don't know.
Nicole Stanley: Right. Exactly.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Nicole Stanley: So like I'll give you an example.
Nikki Kinzer: I don't mean to laugh at you, Pete.
Nicole Stanley: When somebody says—
Pete Wright: Oh, I'm laughing at me, believe me, I get it.
Nikki Kinzer: I just—it's just ironic, right? Because that is what she's saying.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer: Is like, what is it that you want?
Pete Wright: Exactly.
Nikki Kinzer: Is it savings? No, it's not about savings. What do you really want?
Pete Wright: The bottom line is I would like to have food on the table.
Nikki Kinzer: So getting clear about that. Yeah.
Pete Wright: And every time when I want to go out and upgrade my phone and my computer, I want to be able to do that without any question. Those are the two things. I don't need extraordinary travel. I don't need—I just want to be able to have good gear and food on the table for me and my wife.
Nicole Stanley: Mm-hmm. And do you feel fired up about that?
Pete Wright: What does that mean?
Nicole Stanley: It means like, so as an ADHDer, right, because our executive functioning is—I don't want to say lower, I'm gonna say different, right?
Pete Wright: Mm-hmm.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah, I like that.
Pete Wright: Good. Yep, we like that.
Nicole Stanley: The emotional part of our brain is actually more active and guides us in our decision making. So when we make choices, we're often going to listen to the most emotional side of our brain. So if you're not connected emotionally with your financial goals, I would bet my bottom dollar that you're going to have a hard time achieving them. So if you're not connecting with that goal, I would say we need a different goal. And then I bet you we would see your success towards that goal take a different turn if you're connected with it.
Nikki Kinzer: Could you even put like a—I'm just thinking of retirement—"I want to retire by the time I'm sixty." Like even just putting a number to it, because would that help too? Or I mean if you're engaged in it, if that means something to you, or what are your thoughts on that?
Retirement vs. Financial Independence
Nicole Stanley: So one, I hate the word retirement.
Pete Wright: Yeah, no, that—just to be clear, I don't think I'm ever gonna retire. That would be miserable for me. That would be miserable. I'm gonna—things will change, but I don't—I love my life deeply, you know. I want to refocus and reframe, but I don't need to just stop doing what I'm doing. I'm not looking forward to any end date.
Nicole Stanley: So for me, I'll just give myself—I am not motivated by retirement because I never want to stop making an impact. I never—I like having something to do. I like that. However, retirement is just a sadder word for what it really is. And the word is actually financial independence.
Financial independence is a mathematical thing that happens, which is when the amount of money you have makes more money than you could make if you were working, which allows you to no longer be stuck in any job or any type of activity to make money because you no longer trade your time for money. That's what happens in retirement. Now most of us just say like, "Well, I have to wait till I'm sixty-five, therefore I'm gonna work a job I hate. I'm gonna hate my life. I'm gonna be away from my kids."
And what I like about this idea of "don't call it retirement, call it financial independence" is because then that means you have full autonomy over your life, what you do, which means you could lay on the beach. Most people don't want to do that. Most people say, "Well, if money didn't matter, oh, here's what I would do," right? And people change their tune because they say, "I would start this charity. I would start this movement. I would create content and not have to be worried if I was gonna be getting a paycheck from a sponsor because I could say whatever the heck I want." That's what financial independence does, right?
And so for me, that's extremely motivating because it allows me to think about, "Well, what more impact would I have? What..." things of that nature. And so when you often get people to see like their financial goals can allow them to reach their lifestyle goals faster, that's when we see real improvement, right? And that's different for everybody. That's not gonna be the same for me as you, Pete, or as you, Nikki. That's the beauty of financial goals—it's often been presented as a one-size-fits-all, but it couldn't be farther from the truth.
Nikki Kinzer: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Oh, that's a good point.
Pete Wright: I'm in a little bit of vapor lock because I low-key want to end this conversation and go start rewriting any financial goals that I've ever had. Like I honestly, honest to God, Nicole, I feel like—I am deeply in middle age, right?
Nicole Stanley: Sorry.
Pete Wright: Like I am there. And no one has ever said to me that bit about retirement vis-à-vis financial independence.
Nikki Kinzer: I know, I've never heard it either.
Pete Wright: No one has ever used those words and I am—I am at once—I feel enlightened and really pissed off, right?
Nikki Kinzer: Ever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because I've always attached it...
Nicole Stanley: I know, that's on purpose.
Nikki Kinzer: I mean, that's why I asked the question. I've always attached it with a number. Like you have to be this age, or this is the age.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer: And it's such an insightful—
Nicole Stanley: No.
Pete Wright: Yeah. Yeah, as soon as you say it, like it's like, oh—
Nikki Kinzer: Different view of it.
Pete Wright: Holy smacks. Everything has changed. The way I see the next ten years of my life has changed.
Nicole Stanley: I know. Yeah.
Pete Wright: Like inverted.
Nicole Stanley: Yes. That's the difference. And it's on purpose, right? Because the financial industry doesn't want the average American to understand this about how investing works, how they can take part in it. Because all they want us to do is say, "Oh, that's boring. I don't understand any of that. I don't need to understand. Oh, I'll think about that later," right? If they can get us in that state, we stop participating and they make a ton of profit, right?
And that's what financial education did in my life—it said, "Holy crap, I have autonomy, right? This is education. This is freely available. It's never been more available. It's never been easier to become financially independent. And you don't have to be somebody who is a crazy high earner to do it." That's powerful information. And when I think about all the people in the world who are just operating—they're just operating because nobody's ever told them, "Hey, did you know that if you learn about money, you could become financially independent in the next ten years or fifteen years or whenever you decide to do it or how fast?" Right? Or if you get really clear, your money can help you get there because that's not profitable for anybody.
And that's why I never shut up about it because I think that's pretty awesome. I think the fact that anybody can become financially independent—even somebody like me, who when I got married as a young kid, we were—my husband was making $23,000 a year. We were not millionaires. We did not get an inheritance. We just said we understand how the game works and we're gonna start early with our measly $200 that we're investing—got laughed at a financial advisor's office. And we said, "Well, no, we get how this goes. We are going to retire in our thirties." Like we're going to do this. And my ADHD mind said, "Well, I'm not stopping."
Learning About Money and Education
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah, it is interesting because—I'm just thinking, before you got on the call, Pete and I were talking—both of our kids are at the university right now, and we just got our nice big bill that says "tuition's due." And my husband is very financially savvy. And so as soon as our kids were born, we started 529 plans. And I gotta tell you, I don't regret that at all because we're able to pull from that when these tuition bills are coming up. And so I do think that—I think knowledge is power because if you don't know about those kinds of things, because all we did was we put aside $50 every month, is all we did. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough that when by the time they went to college or were getting ready, we had a substantial amount of savings. And there's always things like "what if they don't go to college? What do you do with all of that?" and everything, but that wasn't the case for us.
So I'm curious—how do you tell our listeners to learn more about money? How do you educate—where do you go for that kind of education? Because some people might not even know what I'm talking about right now, right? Like they don't know what a 529 is. What are your thoughts about that?
Nicole Stanley: That's a really good question. And I love that you have the example of starting something early. So the first thing is if you're listening to us talk and you're hearing like, "Well crap, I should have done this twenty years ago." Yeah, me too, right? My biggest financial mistake is that I didn't buy a house when I was in middle school during 2008, right?
Nikki Kinzer: Right, yeah.
Nicole Stanley: Obviously, the best time was a hundred years ago, right? My husband and I, our favorite game is when we go to California and we look at all the houses and we think about like "what if we lived in 1914?" And we could buy all this, right? Obviously, the best time was a long time ago. The second best time is today, which means I don't care how old you are. I have seen fifty-, sixty-year-olds, seventy-year-olds change their trajectory in just a few years of focus. So don't count yourself out no matter what age, no matter where your starting point is. That's just a starting point. It's not an ending point.
The second thing is I want you to know that everything that you think about money right here, right now, today, is not necessarily true. That might sound crazy, but hear me out, okay? At Cambridge, they did extensive studying on the psychology of money and what they found is that the average person decides and fixes their money mindset by age seven.
Pete Wright: Oh god.
Nikki Kinzer: Age seven.
Pete Wright: I was such an idiot at seven. I mean I was a kid—I wouldn't judge myself.
Nicole Stanley: Right.
Nikki Kinzer: But so that tells us how you grew up really matters and how your parents handled money or whatever you saw matters.
Nicole Stanley: Correct.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Nicole Stanley: Yeah. Exactly. And that's what the point is—that means that most of us are subconsciously walking around with our parents' mindset about money or what we observed our parents' mindset.
Nikki Kinzer: Wow.
Nicole Stanley: Or other influential adults. And so what that means is if you can digest that for a second, which means I'm trusting my seven-year-old self to make the biggest financial decisions in my life. That allows you to not say, "Well, I'm stupid and I have to learn about something because I don't know it," right? It just allows you to say like, "Huh, I'm older and I'm wiser now. So I'm gonna see if I still believe all of this," meaning I'm gonna allow myself to question my money beliefs. So I'm gonna allow myself to question—you know, maybe it's my knee-jerk reaction when I see a nice house, I say the phrase "must be nice," right? Because that's what my parents said. Or maybe it's my knee-jerk reaction that when I think about my friends who were successful growing up, how my parents used to say, "You know, money really changes people," right? What are all these subconscious things that you say or think about money all the time and just give yourself the permission to say, "Huh? I'm older, maybe I can update some of these," because that allows you to actually go into education with an open mind. Because often when we read a book about finances, what we're looking to do is see if it confirms what we think. And if it doesn't confirm what we think, we say, "Oh, well, this is wrong," right? But if we say, "I'm actually somebody who wants to learn beyond a seven-year-old," all of a sudden you've opened yourself up to a world of education. That is a playing field that not many people are at.
The Five Financial Problems
Pete Wright: There's a movie coming out very soon, and I'm looking for the name feverishly because I think it's one of those that I find really funny. The whole premise is here's somebody who says "Oh, my life is terrible. I'm really trying and I just wish I had more money." And so a guardian angel comes down and says, "Okay, you have all the money," and you expect it to be that money doesn't solve every problem. But it turns out money does solve all the problems, and he doesn't want to go back. The lesson he learned is ironically kind of what you're talking about.
Nicole Stanley: Yeah, yeah.
Pete Wright: That there are ways to think about money that will solve very immediate problems. And that's one of the things that I think we latch on to because it's a dramatic narrative that says, you know, "money changes people." That's part of my programming. And all that programming is really saying is what? I don't want more money? Really what I want is to be able to replace my floors when they're damaged, or to do the siding on my house, or something like that. That would be helpful if I had the money to do that, to be real practical about it. But my internal dialogue about money is as negative as often my ADHD internal dialogue is about my shame when I talk to myself, right? I'm not a very nice guy. And that part of that is lodged in my relationship with money. Gross.
Nicole Stanley: Yes. Well, it's true though. I mean, I think that people like to pretend that money doesn't affect them for whatever reason. And I think that we all know that the good things in life are free, right? The people you love and all of that. But the way that we choose to have a relationship with money—this comes from an amazing book called "Happy Money" by Ken Honda. He talks about how money is something that controls our experience of life. And here's what I mean by that: there's a difference between happy money and unhappy money. And he talks about the person who makes money in anger, right? They hate their job and they hate the bills they pay and they hate how expensive everything is at the grocery store, right? And they hate when they pay their taxes. Everything—it's just like "I make money in anger and I spend it in anger." What that means is your relationship with money is your life, right? It's unhappiness. But when you choose to say, "I'm gonna learn how to have a better relationship with money," it actually changes your experience of a lot in life because we spend our lives working, we spend it spending money on things, and we either have a deeply committed, unhappy relationship with money or one that's a little more neutral or a little more positive, and you see the compounding effects of that in other areas.
Pete Wright: Wow. Wow.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah, that's interesting.
Pete Wright: Okay, so just speaking practically—we already started talking about how, you know, you want to live in the now first when you're talking to folks, right? Get a sense of where they're spending. When you look at folks you're coaching with ADHD, where are the sort of red flag areas and how do you sort of move them forward? If you're looking at people listening—this conversation is novel. What's day one Monday morning?
Nicole Stanley: So once you've already discovered the thing that lights your butt on fire and you feel it and you feel it in your stomach and you feel it in your throat—this is exciting. Gotta find that, right? Because then you won't do anything. Now you're gonna use your money as a tool to get there. I want you to first start with just analyzing the past—analyze the last year and say, "What are the things I learned about myself?" No shame, no blame. Then you're going to look for one of five things.
So I am of the mindset—and I've seen this to be true, and a lot of people would take me down on this, but I don't care. Come at me. I believe that every financial problem is fixable. Every financial problem is fixable. So when you encounter your money for the first time, you are going to see—surprise—you are not where you want to be. You wouldn't be working on your money if you were exactly where you wanted to be. So instead of looking for that to mean something about you, I want you to put on your detective hat and say, "I'm looking to find the problems. I'm looking to find out what they are because if I find the problems, then I can find the solutions."
So the five main financial problems that can exist for someone, and this becomes clear during that first discovery, is it's either a spending problem—meaning you drastically spend more than your income allows. There's another type of problem, which is you either have a fixed expense problem. Now this is different than a spending problem. Everybody thinks that they have a spending problem when sometimes they have a fixed expense problem. This is like when I look at somebody's money and they'll be like, "Oh, I just need to stop going out to eat." And I'm like, "Girlfriend, your mortgage is sixty percent of your income. That's why you feel trapped," right? "That's why you feel like you can't breathe is because you've got a fixed expense problem," which are often harder to change, but that still glares at us on paper—like healthcare, childcare, debt payments. These are huge areas that are fixed expenses and actually don't have to deal with the impulse of spending. And so it's important that you have a distinction between the two of—everybody thinks if I'm in the negative or if I have credit card debt, it's because I'm a terrible overspender. I have met so many people in tens of thousands of credit card debt who did not know they had a fixed expense problem and just spent time slapping their wrists for going to McDonald's or going to Chipotle, right?
Pete Wright: Yeah. Which if they didn't have a fixed expense problem, going out to Chipotle is gonna be zero impact.
Nicole Stanley: Wrong problem.
Nikki Kinzer: Wrong problem.
Pete Wright: On overall life, yeah.
Nicole Stanley: Exactly. Right? So that's the second problem. The third one is one—it's not my favorite to diagnose, but I actually think is very important for people to hear because nobody typically hears this honestly. And this is when you have a true income problem. This is when people who are—I've had this in my life when we were making like $45,000, $50,000. I was a stay-at-home mom in Phoenix, Arizona. And I just was like, "How can I make the most out of my paper towels?" And I used to wipe a diaper with one wipe. Yes. And I was like, "I'm amazing because I can do this," right? I had an income problem.
Nikki Kinzer: Which means you were not making enough money.
Nicole Stanley: Correct. And this often comes up for people when I get into their numbers and they'll be like, "Okay, I guess I just gotta be more scrimpy." And it's like, "Well, actually, no."
Pete Wright: Right. You're as scrimpy as you can be.
Nicole Stanley: Yes, like I'm looking at your rent. I can take away all this spending. The numbers don't add up. You live in New York City. $2,000 just doesn't cut it. Like that is a true problem. And some people who have a spending problem or who have a fixed expense problem or have other problems think they have an income problem when they don't, right? So you'll notice there's a pattern here that if we can discover what they truly are, we can fix the true problems versus busy work, which is when we work on other stuff.
And then the fourth problem is when we have a true money management problem. Many ADHDers have this, which means there might be plenty of money to achieve your goals, but you don't have a system that allows you to capture that extra money, right? So this is when high earners—a lot of high earners—they'll be like, "Man, I'm just living paycheck to paycheck and I make $250,000 a year." And it's like this is clearly a money management problem. There's plenty of money to achieve your goals. We just need a system that works for your life.
And then the fifth one is another one that most people have is a financial strategy problem. And this is when people have extra money, or maybe you get a windfall, you get a big tax return, right? You get a bonus at work. And when people say like, "I'm just gonna go buy crypto with it," or "I am gonna keep it all in savings. And I've got like $300,000 in my savings account at Bank of America that pays me 0.00%," right? That's a financial strategy problem, which is there's money to be moved towards your goals, but you either don't have the education or the resources to make better decisions with it. And so each one of those contributes to people not getting to where they want to be financially. And most of the time people are just working on the wrong problem.
Money management just means that you have a way to know every month that you're on track or not towards moving forward, right?
Nikki Kinzer: Oh, so it doesn't have anything to do with whether you're overspending. You're just looking to track it.
Nicole Stanley: Overspending doesn't exist. You can spend whatever you'd like on anything as long as you make certain trade-offs. It's really about the decision process. And that's what money management does—it allows you to have a lens to make those decisions, right? So maybe you want to spend—I have a lot of single clients and someone might say "that's way too much money to spend on eating out." But I'm thinking to myself, or they say, "I live alone, I'm trying to meet people. It's really hard to cook for one. This is my social life," right? That's a great way for them to spend their money. And they might say, "Well, I actually don't spend a lot on groceries or I don't spend a lot on my rent. I live in a smaller place," right? Overspending is really just about if you said "I want to spend X on this because that's what feels right to me," and you grossly overspend that. That would make you feel bad. That would be overspending.
Pete Wright: But see, we don't use overspending that way. We use overspending as a means to describe what we think we should be spending based on goals that were set in our heads when we were seven. Or what we saw our parents do.
Nicole Stanley: Or what we saw our parents do. Yes.
Pete Wright: Right. Right.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah.
Nicole Stanley: Yes.
Pete Wright: Oh my goodness. Okay.
Nikki Kinzer: Wow, this is so enlightening.
Pete Wright: I've got a lot to do.
Nicole Stanley: I love that for you.
Pete Wright: Well, you know, awesome.
Nicole Stanley: I love it. I'll give you books to read that are actually good too if you want.
Pete Wright: We'll take them, we'll put them in the show notes.
Nicole Stanley: Yeah. So yeah.
Financial Professionals: Coaching vs. Advising vs. Planning
Pete Wright: As we wrap up, I mean you are a financial coach. Can you talk about financial coaching versus financial counseling or financial advising versus financial planning versus an accountant?
Nicole Stanley: Yes. Yes.
Pete Wright: What do we need and when?
Nikki Kinzer: Right, yeah, that's a great question, Pete.
Nicole Stanley: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Pete Wright: Well, thanks.
Nicole Stanley: So—
Nikki Kinzer: I'm curious about this too.
Nicole Stanley: No, it's good that you asked that because financial coaching is relatively new in the marketplace. And the reason is because the financial industry for a long time has just been an advisor, which is somebody who sells you investments. They make a percentage, they hold a percentage, and that's it, right? So it actually doesn't take much to become a financial advisor and this is not to drag them. I think it's great. Some people will never get started unless they go to an advisor. But an advisor can't help you with like, "I'm in a ton of debt and I don't know how to get out. Why am I continuing to go in debt? Why is my net worth going down? Why is my credit card balance going up every year? Why are all these other people able to take their kids to Disney and I can't?" Right? A financial advisor cannot help you there because he has no profit motive there, right? He just has a profit motive in "if I manage the money, then I get a percentage of it."
And that also means that many financial advisors will say, "Oh, well if you don't have at least $250,000, $500,000 or a million in assets already, I only work with clients that have that because that's my specialty." So there's already a problem for middle-class Americans that they can't necessarily find advisors that will work with them. Then the ones that do work with them usually charge a higher percentage because they're like, "Oh, these people take all this time and I never get as much from them." And that's really the underhood of how financial advising works, right?
And then on the other side, there's tax, which tax is amazing. I have a great CPA. Everyone who has businesses and needs one—CPAs are great. I'm not a tax professional.
A financial coach is somebody who you hire when you say, "You know, I've been playing this game. I'm a soccer player. I've been playing this game. I'm not good at it. I'm not scoring goals right now, or I'm okay with it. I've started—I'm on the junior league, but I want to be in the Olympics for soccer. I want to be the best version of myself that I can be in this game." That's when you would hire a financial coach, which is somebody who's more like, "Okay, they're gonna get in the weeds of your cash flow. They're gonna get in the weeds of your mindset," because you're paying them hourly or programmatically, which I believe is actually the only just way to do financial advice is hourly. And there are some advisors now who are starting to get on that train, which we are championing as financial coaches because transparency.
So that's when you hire a financial coach—when you say, "You know, I want to get better at this game." And you want to hire someone who jives with you, who gets your problems, you've seen them transform people just like you, right? That you connect with. And that's their purpose—to outline, "Okay, based on what I've learned about you," which is what I do in that first session, "I can see very quickly this person struggles with this mindset, they've got this going on, they've got these other things. How can we get them from point A to point B in a way that's going to excite them the most?" Because that's the other part of it—there are a lot of financial coaches who will be like, "Well mathematically, you should just save an extra $500 because look, it's right here. Can't you see it?" But I'm a financial coach and I believe that I've built a successful financial coaching company because I've learned that math is the least important part of it. The most important part of somebody's financial success comes down to how excited they are about the plan. Because I know as a financial professional, there's a million ways for us to do this. Let's say somebody needs to solve the income problem. There's a million ways for us to solve this problem. I might solve it one way in my life, but my job as the coach is to help the client discover the way that lights them up the most. And if I can motivate them and hold them accountable to that, there's their success.
Book Recommendations and Closing
Pete Wright: Well, and that's the thing. I mean, you know, boy, I like to think I have a pretty good plan. Month to month, I use YNAB extensively. I love it. I hyperfocus on it.
Nicole Stanley: Oh, good, good, good.
Pete Wright: It's my favorite thing in the world. It's like a fetish object for me. And yet I am not—I really struggle with the vast fog between this month, next month, and financial independence, right? That's where I struggle.
Nicole Stanley: Yeah.
Pete Wright: And I think this is just—just hearing about the role of enthusiasm plays is huge for me. That is a real lesson learned for me out of this conversation.
Nicole Stanley: Can I give you a book that I think you'll love?
Pete Wright: Please.
Nicole Stanley: So if you're a YNAB nerd, chances are you do not have a money management problem, right?
Pete Wright: Right. Yes. Okay.
Nicole Stanley: You might just feel like you need a little more strategy. Right? Yeah, so if that's it, one of the best books you can read is it's called "The Simple Path to Wealth" by J.L. Collins, and he outlines the everyday person, how they achieve financial independence. It's a great story. He's, I don't know what gen—I think he's Gen X. But he gives—
Pete Wright: Hey.
Nikki Kinzer: Hey, that's us.
Nicole Stanley: Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. It's like he's somebody who you would connect with. He's seen a lot of the same things and he outlines it from a personal perspective that I found for somebody who likes YNAB, you're gonna love that. The other book is "Your Money or Your Life," which is a classic personal finance book.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Nicole Stanley: But chances are I think you'll be more inspired by J.L. Collins' book.
Pete Wright: The "Your Money or Your Life," that's been around a long time, and I imagine—do we like all of the messages in there?
Nicole Stanley: Yeah.
Pete Wright: Oh, okay.
Nikki Kinzer: I love your honesty.
Pete Wright: Well, like I remember the book that was huge when I was a kid was "Rich Dad Poor Dad," which has been widely lampooned for messages that are antithetical to actual mental health and fiscal responsibility.
Nicole Stanley: But there's still some good nuggets in there. So I'm a big believer that you can find the truth. There's always gonna be seeds of truth in anything that people resonate with. And so what I don't like about the book "Your Money or Your Life" for someone with ADHD—if you're listening to this, if you're someone like Pete who gets really hyperfocused on budgeting and enjoys that, I think you might like that book. Because they are really, really granular. But if you're somebody like, I don't know how you are, Nikki, but there are a lot of people who are like, "Just tell me what to do, like just make it fun," I might suggest a book like "I Will Teach You to Be Rich" by Ramit Sethi. He's got a hilarious—I think he's also Gen X.
Nikki Kinzer: I like him.
Nicole Stanley: Yes, he's so funny, right? So notice you can both get to the desired outcome.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah.
Nicole Stanley: The difference is how you know yourself and the resources you use to get there, which a lot of people don't know. They have the freedom to do with financial advice.
Nikki Kinzer: I think it's the same concept when you're looking at ADHD books, right? There's gonna be some ADHD books that you're gonna resonate with and some you're gonna say, "Nope, this doesn't work for me." But there might be another chapter in that same book that you absolutely love. So it's kind of taking the pieces from what you're learning and what you said—or how we introduced you at the very beginning—is you're doing it your way. And I think that's the key—it all has to be customized for you because none of us have the same financial history, beliefs, plans. We don't make the same money—everything is so different. So I love that, you know, being able to really customize what works best for you and what your style is.
Pete Wright: Incredible.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah, that's so great.
Pete Wright: All right. Nicole, wow, what's it like to have two new best friends just like that today?
Nikki Kinzer: Thank you so much.
Nicole Stanley: I just feel it and I love it.
Nikki Kinzer: Right.
Nicole Stanley: I'm so excited you had me on.
Pete Wright: Yeah.
Nicole Stanley: Maybe we'll do this again and we can talk about other things.
Pete Wright: Oh yeah.
Nikki Kinzer: Oh, we will.
Pete Wright: Oh yeah. Yeah, no, I can feel it.
Nicole Stanley: Because it's so fun.
Nikki Kinzer: Yeah, we'll do it again.
Pete Wright: I can totally feel it.
Nicole Stanley: I know.
Pete Wright: This has been fantastic. I'm gonna put the link to Arise in the show notes. People need to go learn more about what you and what you do. And for everybody listening, yes, the book links to the books will be in the show notes as well to all the books that we've just talked about. And if you are—you know, if you're listening now, what you missed is joining us as a Patreon subscriber because we're going to go into our members-only chat with the people who are listening to the live stream. And we would love more of you to be part of that next time because we've got questions coming in. For now, we appreciate you downloading and listening to this show. Thank you for all your time and attention. Don't forget, if you have something to contribute to the conversation, we're heading over to the Show Talk channel in our Discord server. You can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the deluxe level or better. Patreon.com/theADHDpodcast. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer and new best friend Nicole Stanley, I'm Pete Wright. We'll see you back here next week, Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.