I’ve never been able to. I’ve tried:
Keeping receipts, text file on laptop, trying to keep track… too absent minded. Forget one receipt, it’s all off.
Bank app on phone? Phone stolen last year, wary.
Weekly visit to atm to check balance? Forget pin, can’t remember, locked out of account.
Paying for everything with cash might work, but unsafe neighborhood. And I forget where cash is, random $20 bills found in bizarre locations months later.
At my wit’s end. Any adhd people experience similar?
If you have an iPhone, check out MoneyStats. It helps with all this stuff and allows forecasting any arbitrary timeframe. I would never be able to keep up without something like that, the stress has and would kill me
Doesn’t your bank have a website or app where you can check your balance?
I’m not sure if I’m in a really different situation from you, or if I’m totally misunderstanding this, but what are you actually trying to do? Are you trying to do the math of how much you spend to find out if you have any money left??
Why not just look at how much money you have?
Depends on how active you want to manage your cash, but I’ve found YNAB to be godsend. It’s designed for limiting money use as well, not just balancing, but I’d recommend giving it a look.
Edit: it’s helped me massively with impulse spending as well.
My wife has ADHD, and we’ve had to work for almost ten years to find something that worked well for us.
We currently use Mint, which automatically imports all of your transactions from your bank and credit cards. We have a simple budgeting system–things are either “fixed” or “general” (where fixed expenses are the same each month, everything else is general). Mint is getting merged with another service soon, but it should have similar features.
If those methods aren’t working for you, you could try an envelope method. When you get paid, you split your money between different envelopes (either physical or digital) and then you don’t need to worry about tracking your spending. Need groceries? Check the grocery envelope. It’s easier to see what you have to work with, if that’s helpful for you (my wife had some success with this, but we couldn’t practically do it with cash and the digital option felt too abstract for her).
Best of luck!
I download the CSV of transactions from my bank. If I make amazon/walmart purchases I make a note in my phone of the date and what it was. If I forget to make a note I just try an remember what I got.
