Saundra Brodkin 0:00
Welcome to fantabulously ADHD, the podcast. I'm your host Saundra Brodkin, and I teach you how to embrace all of your ADHD to create a thriving life without getting stuck in analysis paralysis, overwhelm, and emotional hangovers. Living a full and beautiful life with ADHD is possible. Listen on to learn how. Hello, welcome to the fantabulously ADHD podcast today I have a special guest with us, Rose Marie, and she she goes by the name mortgageless mentor. So I'm gonna pass it over to Rosie so she can introduce herself to us and tell us a bit about her background. Rosie! Hi. How are you?
Rosemarie 0:52
It's incredible Being here, thank you, I'm doing great. Very excited to be here. So the mortgageless mentor came about when I was really focusing on paying off my mortgage. So I called myself Rosie, the mortgageless to get myself in the groove to get all excited about paying my mortgage off. And then I paid it off. So I needed kind of a new a new goal, a new, a new view. And in talking to another coach, she suggested that I help others get to where I am. So that was Rosie, the mortgageless mentor is born. I help others get mortgageless, get debt free. And, you know, create that beautiful lifestyle that they deserve.
Saundra Brodkin 1:38
I love it. Because mortgages are only one piece of the the picture of debt that many people are in. And it's one piece and it's a big piece. And people I've often heard and I'm curious about your take on this. I've heard people say things like, oh, I can just take another mortgage out on my house and it'll be fine.
Rosemarie 2:03
It's used as a line of credit. So many people have just rolled in random purchases, things that there's no way they would amortize over 25 years. In the real world. You wouldn't even think of it but they don't think twice about open up the mortgage rolling the debt.
Saundra Brodkin 2:19
And I guess I'm really even more curious about how this really affects people over time, when they when they do things like that, like, say, I I'm just gonna throw another mortgage on and I'll be fine. What have you seen?
Rosemarie 2:40
So not only is it affecting the person, it's affecting their marriage, you have competition spending. Well, you bought this, I'm gonna buy this, well, we'll just roll it into the mortgage, I want a new vehicle, all of that relationship discussion changes, and there's no consequence, there's no desire to save for anything, we'll just roll it into the mortgage, that will then affect your children, because to them, that's how you shop. Well, we want a house, we'll roll it into the mortgage, we have a credit card, just use your credit card.
Saundra Brodkin 3:13
Oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. My, my philosophy has always been that I have to pay my credit card off every month. And if I, if I see that I won't be able to pay it off, then I can't buy the thing. But that's just not enough. It's not enough to be able to pay off your credit card every month when you also have things like a mortgage,
Rosemarie 3:38
you need to re-analyze your spending. So it's not enough just to float. You want to be able to build the buffers, you want to be able to ensure that should something happen. You can access the money and go be it some catastrophe or some incredible opportunity. A few years ago, I went to Ireland for a month. If I didn't have money in the bank, I wouldn't have been able to afford that it would have mortgaged my future.
Saundra Brodkin 4:04
So this all sounds obviously amazing because who doesn't want to live mortgage free and have that extra buffer? How do people with ADHD who have impulsive spending habits get there?
Rosemarie 4:20
One of...
Saundra Brodkin 4:22
a hard question
Rosemarie 4:24
assuming that I have ADHD but I also have concussions so they kind of mimic each other. And I am on the list next year to be able to find out if I truly have ADHD. One of the one of our major obstacle is also one of our major words falling out of my head right great are superhero powers if you will, and I know that's not a term that you find. But
Saundra Brodkin 4:54
oh no, I am I am work on that. Okay, I love I love that word. I I think it's really important that people understand that being a superhero in general also means that there are challenges a lot of challenges. So your superpowers can also be that, like, there's always the opposite in your life, you've got your superpowers, and you have your challenges. But noticing that is what's really important. ADHD is not just in and of itself a superpower, there are pieces of it that are superpowers, and there are pieces of it that you need to work with. So sorry, I totally took over there, I just wanted to
Rosemarie 5:32
explain it a lot better than I could. So that that piece about our impulse control and spending, I see can also be used to hyper focus on this debt that annoys you. So my mortgage got to a point where it annoyed my student loan years ago. Legend has it I broke it into hives when I saw my first my first bill and the amount of interest they wanted to take from me and my money forgetting, of course, that all those years they've been floating my boat. Student loans have been paid my way. But that's that ability to focus in on that enemy of the interest and pay it down. So we can get very, very focused on sweeping money onto the debt on really paying it down and getting so excited about seeing the money drop. Just as excited as we can about buying something new. So we can just twist the way that we think into I'm going to focus on paying this off, and I'm gonna get my my happy hit from paying off a debt as opposed to going shopping.
Saundra Brodkin 6:44
So I think that that is possible. I also want to play devil's advocate here. Because I mean, I know from my own self, and obviously, we've talked about this in our coaching calls as a group, we find loopholes. And it's like, oh, I can get my happy hit from paying down my mortgage or paying off my debt. Oh, but it'll be so much more fun to do this other thing or to buy the higher end model of the new car that I'm looking at instead of the base model. Do you see what I do you see what I'm getting at.
Rosemarie 7:25
And when. So when I try to get to the nut of what you really want. So if you have an idea of what you want your life to truly look like something that is more important to you than that daily coffee, and that new thing. You can keep that in mind. When in order to get there, you kind of evaluate your purchases against it. Now that's really hard when you're having impulse control. So I use kind of manipulatives, if you will, my cousin who was looking at buying a house a number of years ago, she wanted to buy a house in Paris. So I found a little bobble it was the Eiffel Tower, that I asked her to attach to her phone case, because she did a lot of purchasing here. And I found, I found a watch. And it wasn't an expensive watch was really pretty watch I happened to find it at a hospital gift shop. And it had an Eiffel Tower on it. So I said I want you to put on the watch. So when you're taking out your credit card, you see your watch, when you're trying to pay on your phone, you have an Eiffel Tower slapping you in the back of the hand. So it is very, very evident that what you want is that house. So in having a really huge, incredible focus, you can sometimes kick that demon of just protecting for nothing. And there's nothing wrong with resetting.
Saundra Brodkin 8:55
Oh, absolutely. I love that story about the Eiffel Tower and the house in Paris. It really reminds me of what I was like when my husband and I were saving for the house that we currently are in. I have never been so mindful of my spending in my entire life than I was for the two years before we moved into this house because I knew that this was our future. And this is what I always wanted. I wanted a home with a yard and a garage to park our cars and our very cold frosty minus 30 degrees Celsius winter. I wanted a place where my kids could play and grow up and have their own bedrooms. And so that was kind of, and the manipulative for me was that I drove, It was being built for a couple of years before we moved in. I was able to drive by it and I would make myself drive by it because I wanted to see the progress and that would that would remind me and it's exactly what you've described, and I never thought of it as a sort of manipulative, but it is. And I think that's, that's huge. That's actually really helpful for me to know. When I'm talking to people I may talk, impulse spending comes up a lot with clients. And I will absolutely attribute to you more Rosie, the mortgageless mentor talks about manipulatives. I think that's so great.
Rosemarie 10:27
No, it is Paris, Ontario, just in case you were getting a little bit excited.
Saundra Brodkin 10:33
I actually did think it was Paris, France.
Rosemarie 10:37
Our, she now has little Eiffel Towers all over her house in Paris, Ontario,
Saundra Brodkin 10:42
which is amazing. I always want to go to I've like, I wanted to go to Paris for so long. I hope I hope I can get there one day, but it's really I love hearing about your experience from the perspective of someone who is an expert in finance.
Rosemarie 10:57
Well, when I grew up, we were, we were poor, we were kind of poverty line, and my father got sick. So we were kind of okay, and then my dad got sick and we weren't okay anymore. But my parents were very much cash people. They did not have credit cards, they did not have debt. They just kind of like sort of paycheck to paycheck. And my mother did a lot of bartering. As a music teacher and a language teacher, she was able to barter for horseback riding lessons. Years later, when my father was remarrying. He, he said to me, he said, Well, I cannot ask Ruth to marry me because I'm in debt. How much do you owe, he owed about 40, or $50, at the corner store for gas. And he could not ask a woman to marry again, with such debt on the shoulders. I told him that I would clear the debt and he just had go buy the ring and the ice cream. For him it was huge. It was massive to be able to be carrying debt, it just wasn't right to bring a woman into that terrible situation.
Saundra Brodkin 11:59
Yeah, I mean, 40, or $50, now doesn't get you very far. So a lot of people with ADHD have trouble either staying in a job for long periods of time, or we jump around where we it's hard to find work, which makes a lot of sense for why we have such a high probability of being entrepreneurs, because we need to create our own thing that's going to work for us. But in general, what if someone is in tons of debt? And they're struggling to find work? How would you be able to help that person? Or what would you say to them,
Rosemarie 12:37
you, but first, I have a, an ecourse, called the debt annihilation boot camp. And the first step of the E course, is to face your debt. So to line it all up, and actually look at it put what the interest rate is, or the emotional rate, if it's debt from your mother or your sister. And the minimum payments to stay away from the predators that you would hear it is you would face that, and then you would take them down one at a time, all the while looking at the run rate for your life. So how much does it cost to pay your rent or your mortgage to pay for the food to make sure the kids have a good lunch to take to school? What is your basic run rate? And what does it cost to keep you from going into bankruptcy? Okay. After that a job search is a full time job. So after everybody goes off to work, if you have a family that you're sending off out the door, then you sit down and you you look for it. And I have advised some people if they cannot find that job that they were after, to go and look for a job that is fine and acceptable. But that gives you a discount and things that you purchase regularly.
Saundra Brodkin 13:56
Yeah, I think that that's super valuable point is to whoops, is to find a job where you could if you can't find something is to find a job where you could get discounts on regularly purchased items. That's super important. I love it. There are online services that help you with budgeting and which I've looked at for myself, and I think it's fantastic. What do you do differently that is sort of gives that personalized approach for people
Rosemarie 14:34
that don't go much into the budget. I was writing a chapter in the book that I'm drafting and it was called budgets are bullshit. When when you're in that lack, you will resist you will you will dig in your heels you will kick and scream and you will go spend on the first thing you see. So if you feel that you're being constrained In your ability to defend you are worse. Okay, so going back to the run rate, I've found that if we're looking at what it's going to cost to float your, your minimum life, and to float the life that you are currently living. So if you're not unemployed, and you're not seeking work at the moment, and you actually you're in the job that you have, or you're the business that you love, and you know how much money is coming in, you need to know how much money is coming out. Yeah, then we work on the importance. So let's, let's prioritize the most important pieces so that you can say, I'm not going to spend on this, you're going to be very intentional, I won't spend on this because I'm saving for that. I'm not going out for drinks with the girls, because I'm saving for a family vacation, or I'm saving to buy my house. Now I have done budget, I remember the first budget that I did was with my sister, it was well over 20 years ago. And we broke her budget down to the point where she needed to find I think it was $1.50 in the couch cushions or something like that, because people still carried cash at the time. We needed we needed money from the laundry or the couch to float her by. And we set up that budget. And I think she is my example of why budgets just don't work because it felt so constraining as a first time mom with a little baby. So we had to find different ways we had to kind of work with, where can we get this items? thrift stores weren't as prolific back then. Now you can you can find a thirft store pretty much anywhere we live in Ottawa, so we have a lot of men around here. Be okay with secondhand items? To be okay with receiving things from friends and family who their kids are grown out of it. They pass it along. I think I went off topic or off track, though from
Saundra Brodkin 16:56
No, actually because it's my question was really about budgeting. And that does play into budgeting. Because I think and we did this with our kids, we accepted any kind of hand me downs. And we still do, I embrace them, because I'm like, Oh, we don't have to spend on new shoes, we don't have to spend on new clothes, we don't have to, we can put that money towards something else that is going to benefit our future
Rosemarie 17:25
more. Yes, my favorite words will probably always be one of my aunts or a cousin coming up to me and saying Rosie, I have a bag of clothes in the car for you.
Saundra Brodkin 17:35
Yes, when I hear those words, I get so happy and excited. And in before having kids. And before having that responsibility. I was very much the I like to buy new things. Because it's fun, and it's exciting to go and choose it. But as you have more responsibility, and income is not just for you and the rent. It's now for a house and for your children and for savings and retirement and all these other things. And your kids education funds, if you have those. It changes things that changed things a lot for me. But I do know that people will always struggle with this stuff. So the tips that you gave today, and the the guidance was, is really amazing. I got I got a lot from it today. So I'm assuming that people listening are gonna have gotten a lot from this too.
Rosemarie 18:32
Now, you did mention the education funds, I had a conversation with a couple a few years back. And the mother was very, very interested in these education funds. She didn't know about them, we in Canada have their Registered Education Savings Plan, I don't know the rest of your audience's world. But for us, it is a maximum of $2,500 per child. And that will give you $500 If you're lower income, then you get that 500 sooner. Well, their husband walked in the room and said I don't like it don't like locking money down that long. Because this would be over a 17 year period where you're saving up the money to send your children to university or college or to start. I think it also works for trade and starting businesses. Now after a bit of digging, we found out that he had absolutely no problem in spending that amount of money on wine for dinner. So that the entire savings that could have been going to his children's advocate education, was going into a wineglass at dinner because he insisted on a beautiful bottle of wine, sometimes two or three every dinner on a Tuesday. And I don't see how like we couldn't I couldn't equate it in my brain. So what I suggested in the end was that they they look into a brew-by-you where they could make their own wine for $2 A bottle so that he could continue his wine loving experience and she could put the money towards the Education Fund and and hopefully both would be happy. Now, I haven't spoken to the news. And I don't know, whatever happened in the end. But I hear a lot of a lot of excuses in that, that side of the shop where it's, well, I don't want to lock my money down or interest rates are so low, let's just leave the credit card rolling or leave the debts rolling. In Canada, we've just had a few hikes in our interest rate, and people are moving severely from that attitude. Very much. So instead of buying a toy, paying everything else down first.
Saundra Brodkin 20:34
Yeah. And that's, that's something that I mean, again, it's something that is so hard to do, unless it's been drilled into you, either by yourself or by a parent or a spouse or a partner or something. It's like, I know, it's been drilled into me my entire life, it was drilled into me, and I was afraid to get a credit card for the longest time. And then I had no choice. But to get one when I was in my 20s. I went that long without one, all my friends had a credit card, I had a debit. And all my paychecks when it's my account, and I use my debit. And I had a very strict limit on it, I was super careful. And it helped a lot. It helped a lot in getting us started having that amount of savings. When we when my husband and I got married, and we started looking for a home and it all you know the stuff that comes with life. I always think about the people that didn't have it drilled into them. Like my parents drilled that into me. So many people didn't have that.
Rosemarie 21:40
Yeah, and we do we do look to our parents, and unfortunately, we grab the the traits that our parents would prefer, we didn't
Saundra Brodkin 21:48
Yeah. Yeah, we grab, we grab all the traits, even if we don't realize that it's subconscious. Thank you for everything today. I want to know where and obviously I'm gonna include all this in the show notes. But just for people who are listening, where can people find you to explore more if they want to join your debt annhilation bootcamp or if they'd like to work with you? Where? Where can they find you?
Rosemarie 22:18
Well, I have a website, it's still very new mortgagelessmentor.ca. I also have the mortgagelessmentor.com in case somebody messes that up, they will be redirected. And the debt and I was thinking, the debt annihilation bootcamp is right there on the website. I'm also on Facebook and Instagram, as Rosiethemortgagelessmentor.
Saundra Brodkin 22:45
Yes, I saw that I had no idea you had an Instagram account, and I just followed you right before this call. I've known you for a while. A little while,
Rosemarie 22:54
but I'm not as skilled yet, as I would like to be at posting and interacting on on Instagram. I did recently answer somebody who had put a comment two years ago.
Saundra Brodkin 23:08
Well, you know what, not all businesses market through Instagram, so it doesn't even matter. Anyways, let's wrap this up. Thank you so much, Rosie, for joining me today and talking all about debt and finance and the budgeting bullshit. I love it. I love it. Thank you so so much.
Rosemarie 23:32
And thank you for helping me realize how my spending and ADHD have been because I had to think about it a lot before. I had never thought about it under the ADHD lens. So thank you for that.
Saundra Brodkin 23:43
Yeah, it's totally different. All right. Thank you everyone for listening. If you enjoyed that, and you're looking for more, make sure you check out my additional resources at Saundrabrodkin.com/freestuff. You'll find a fully done for you and customizable daily planner that you can use as is or completely make it your own without all of the hard executive function steps. It's been known to take people from spending endless amounts of time and money on planners to finally finding something that works for them. And hey, you can print it at home so ADHD tax averted. It's also linked for you in the show notes
