This is an introduction to our 7-part Bipolar Finance series.
When Bipolar affects your spending, you have a much more hightened relationship with the normal ups and downs of personal finance. When you are in a manic phase, you overspend far more, and when you are depressed you are wracked with the guilt of your overspending during the manic phase.
You have to work harder at learning how to manage personal finance, since the cost of not doing so (the money spent) is many times that of a non-bipolar person. We are taught the lessons of personal finance to us by the universe at much louder volume.
Unfortunately, when you have bipolar, it’s not a simple case of telling yourself not to spend. If you don’t let yourself have some breathing space to spend so that you can ride the manic high a little, it tends to backfire on you and you end up spending even more.
The Bipolar Finance series is a 7-part series that introduces mechanisms you can set up in your life to co-exist with bipolar in a way that has less damaging effects on your life. It also does not stifle the bipolar so much that it backfires at you in other ways.
There are no complicated steps in this series. You do not need a degree in finance to do them. The trick with controlling your finance is changing the way you see money and your spending behaviour. Each step in the Bipolar Finance series will ask you to look deep within yourself and make real changes.
The Bipolar Finance series is for people with bipolar that are just about coping with it at the moment, but want their financial situation to get better. It’s for people that want to stop Bipolar having such a ruining effect on their finances. The series won’t be covering how to deal with large debts (since that is a large topic), but here are some very good resources about Bipolar and dealing with debt: Moneysavingexpert.com’s guide to debt and mental health, bipolar-lives.com’s guide to debt and credit repair, and Bipolar UK’s debt crisis guide.
Bipolar Finance series:
Intro: Introducing the Bipolar Finance series
Step 1: Get motivated!
Step 2: Know your spending pattern
Extra: How to draw your mood history chart
Step 3: Become a squirrel
Step 4: Lock away your savings
Step 5: Go cash only
Step 6: Serve eviction notice on your cards
Step 7: Spending the Bipolar savings without guit
I am not a financial advisor nor a medical doctor (as I always say, I’m a doctor of computers). The steps in this series are things that have personally worked for me. What I would really like for you to do is read about each step, and see if they may help you in controlling your spending. However, if you don’t think it’ll help you, please do not carry the steps out.
(Image: patpitchaya / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)
About Dr. Akiyo Kano
