Financial management?
 

I am of course broke - on SSDI which doesn't come anywhere close to covering my expenses.

Of course my finances are a mess - I have no idea what bills are due when, and where the $$ will come from for my next MD co-pay. And I can't find anything, so when I need a copy of something, it isn't going to happen.

Does anyone have any ideas about dealing with the financial mess?

What do you do?

you are not alone. ssdi is a far cry from our previous salaries. I had to forego credit payments for years and took a credit hit. I payed them off later on at a fraction and have started to get good credit back. your recovery comes first. pay what you need to survive. if you have trouble focusing get someone to help you sort things out.

The difficulty in dealing with financial matters is something that doesn't get much attention. I find that this is one of the costly aspects of this type of injury. I just got another bill from the public library for overdue books and magazines for my kids. Late in filing income tax papers. Forget to claim health benefits. Lose bills and receipts. I had difficulty following what was going on with the long-term disability payments and have no way of checking to see if they were right or not.

I have thought about trying to get an assistant but I think it would take too much effort. I tried to console myself with the thought that at the end of my life than that this will not matter anymore.

I hope it works out for you.

yeah I tell myself at my worst tmies that I will be dead one day and this wont matter. what a cruddy thing to have to say to comfort yourself lol.
I worked so hard for my savings and it breaks my heart that its gone but at least all the overtime boosted my ssdi. miss my 350z and thousand dollar at a time atlantic city visits :(

You are definitely not alone, I can't tell you how many times bills have not been paid, I forgot I had library books and magazines out and right now have a....$155 fine, I almost dropped dead, luckily the very nice man there took pity and dropped it to $20 which is amazing.

I agree with Mark, pay what you need to survive.

I also cannot find anything, to give you an example, tomorrow I see a neurologist, have had the appt for 4 months yet this evening I am going to have to sort through a mound of paper work to find out the address of where I need to be tomorrow at 8 and fill the paperwork out.

I have been saying for months that I am going to file all my paperwork, this is the only way I know of that will help when looking for things, mind you then I'll forget to go to the file so....

Now every single night I know to put due bills right by the coffee maker where I will see them doesn't always work but it helps and I juggle the money, ask for extensions, never had a problem with that.

My credit is kaput but that doesn't bother me anymore.

yeah..my credit used to rock, then it took a hit. that hurt a lot for a while but now I'm just in survival mode as a bunch of us are. before head injury I wanted to take over the world, now I just want to wake up feeling normal.sitke I know you can relate.

sciencetoy,

I can't teach you how to be disciplined but I can teach you a few tricks. I can not deal with loose papers. I deal with this by putting papers in a three ring binder. Get a three whole punch and some three ring binders. Used binders work if you need to be cost conscious.

You can also use shoe boxes as loose filing systems. I use them for receipts. One box for unpaid bills that have not been entered into Quicken and another once they have been entered and scheduled for payment.

I also use Quicken to track my finances. I use bill scheduling and other features to plan ahead. My SSDI payment is scheduled for the 14th and the last week of the month, I sit down and adjust the date to the second Wednesday.

If you can't do these on your own, you may be able to get some help from your city or county social services department to help you set up system that work.

The key is to set up systems that, if you follow the system, everything usually falls into place.

I took an 80% cut in pay when I had to go on SSDI. It is difficult but we can survive.

My best to you.

mark 80% is brutal. I am sorry but I am glad you adapted. I missed the 2 credit card payments last month because I don't want to admit to myself that there might be some cognitive decline pic. That is silly I know.I will have to ask the girlfriend for help

I had to turn all the household accounts over to my husband. So funny as my day job was in finance. I used to oversee an empire, now I can't pay the hydro bill. (If I don't forget outright, I invert the numbers.)

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. lol If nothing else, the TBI has sure given me a crash course in humility. I've learned not to ashamed to ask for needed help.

I've also learned that good people like to be needed. The friends who have stuck with me have said that they feel they have an intimacy with me that they didn't have before my TBI.

hockey I didn't know about the finance thing. That is impressive. I think a woman stat tend to stick around longer with an injury like this. My guy friends couldn't handle it and it disappeared. Its good that you relinquish some responsibility. I have to do that too

I have trouble paying bills too... inverting numbers, or if there happens to be some other numbers on my screen (I pay using online banking) I'll forget the number I'm supposed to pay and "pick up" the number in front of me and be SURE that's the correct number. *sigh*

So what I did that's helped a LOT is get all my bills emailed to me. Then I copy, paste the amount due to my online banking and then pay it. No more need to remember the number from screen to screen or worry that I picked up a different number along the way some how.

Any bill that I can get automatically deducted from my bank account, like my mortgage, house insurance, life insurance, etc, I get it automatically withdrawn and that works well... the rest get emailed to me... no more paper bills to deal with.

Its simplified my life in many ways, less papers laying around to be filed, less chance to lose them, less chance of inverting them when paying, no need to write a cheque (which takes me forever to do and I avoid like the plague!).

Might not work for everyone, but for a while it looked like I was going to have to let my husband take over, but with a few adjustments, I'm managing. Occasionally if there's something weird or complicated, I will ask him to double check before I'm done, where I never would've done that before.

Starr

Starr,

I was beginning to wonder if I was the only one who inverts or transposes numbers! I also do it at times with words. Thankfully, my husband is savvy and handles all our financing. I also ask him to double check any of my entries into our accounts ledgers, and I do it in pencil so it is easily corrected.(sigh). M-i-m

M-i-m,
I invert numbers, transpose them, add zeroes, subtract zeroes... butcher numbers in all sorts of ways! The consequences are terrifying.

For some stuff, I've had to go back to very basic reasoning about math. Counting how many places from the decimal, the "tens column", the "hundreds column" etc. :rolleyes: to make sure I have it right.

For 2.5 years, I've avoided paying anyone with cash because I have a hard time knowing how much to give them and if I do figure that out, then have a hard time making sure I get the right change.

I practice at home, where time is unlimited and there's no pressure to go quickly and I struggle and often get it wrong. Out in the real world where there is some expectation of how long a transaction will take just adds to the stress and makes it much harder, so I stick to my debit or credit card and just hope I remember my PIN!!

I also invert my words too, mostly when spoken... in general I do better when I type. I prefer to interact with the world via email anymore. Luckily my husband generally understands what I'm saying when I screw up my words, but other people don't... they really get hung up on that and always want to correct me. That just tends to screw up whatever comes next. :(

Starr

Organizing paper stuff was the worst for me. It's our working memory that doesn't

"work" anymore, which is the ability to hold multiple pieces of information in our brain and manipulate them. It's the same for the kids with autism I worked with interestingly enough.

My girlfriends came over and organized a huge stack of paperwork for me
and I pay my bills online the second that the reminder comes in my email.

What I used to be: run my own business (small, but still there is a finance side involved), handle our family finances. Hubby used to not know how much we pay for the electricity, gas, etc.

Now: I totally depend on my husband financially. I have no income. I can't pay bills - I simply forget or mess up or both. If he divorces me, I'm screwed.

This situation took A LOT of getting used to. The hardest part was letting go of control, I guess. Well, it is what it is and I still hope that I get my normal self back someday. I hope we all will. Maybe, Japanese will come up with something to help us.:hug:

Another one here adding and subtracting zeroes over and over again, totally get messed up, or I'll think it all looks completely fine then go back to check and it's like a child's been in there, all wrong.

Still get so nervous at the check out with my bank card, "Is it Debit or Credit?" um.....pause...." debit" ...then I always have a quick glance at the pin # in my bag before I put that in.

I just cannot get myself to sort all this paperwork out, I am usually such an organised and neat person, come to my house and open some cupboards, papers fall out of them so I just push them back in...:wink:

Paying by cash confuses me too.

I have a HUGE wall calendar, among a ton of other reminders floating around, and circle dates with a thick pen, still don't see it though at times.

Mark, I hear you...I just want to wake up normal, the bad credit upset me for a while then I let it go, had to I suppose, we are all in basic survival mode here.

By some miracle I do put all receipts in to a shoe box, my pride and joy.

My neuro-psychologist told me that this is a very common problem for the brain boo boo crowd. Heck, I even sent all the medical documentation the neuro-psychologist requested to the wrong place - because I inverted the numbers in the address. (I guess that was the first hint that I wasn't going to do well on the tests. lol)

The sad thing was, that I checked and checked that address and was sure the envelope matched the business card. Yeah, making mistakes is annoying - not being able to see those mistakes, no matter how hard I try, is disastrous.

In my case, while I'm far from back to normal, I am doing somewhat better with this. I think the Attention Processing Training (APT) really helped with this and some of my language issues.

Before cognitive therapy, if I was speaking, and something entered my visual field, I just inserted it into the sentence. For example, "I think Dad would like fly for his birthday." Only the blank stares of others alerted me that I'd misspoke.

Since cognitive therapy, I do this less and SOMETIMES I'm aware I've said something, unintentionally, the moment it leaves my mouth.

Hockey's last comment refers to paraphasia, I think. My speech lang pathologist has been explaining that to me. When the words that come out of your mouth are wrong but somehow related to the real word. I said my son is twelve-o'oclock instead of twelve years old!

People with dementia do this too. Sigh.