I Already Own This: ADHD, Forgotten Purchases, and the Museum of Duplicate Things
I have, at last count, four pairs of reading glasses. Not because I have four places I like to read, I don't, I mostly read in bed, but because I lose the glasses, cannot find the glasses, need to see something, buy new glasses, and then find three previous pairs immediately afterward, in the same drawer I checked twice.
I also have two nearly identical navy blue rain jackets (one was "missing"), a warehouse-sized quantity of scotch tape because I can never find it when I need it, and, memorably, three copies of the same book, a book, I should note, about how to be more organized.
If you have ADHD, this particular flavor of financial drain is both deeply familiar and rarely discussed. Everyone talks about impulsive buying and forgetting to pay bills. Fewer people talk about the very specific economic phenomenon of buying the same thing multiple times because your working memory works like a browser with too many tabs, half of which have frozen.
What's Actually Going On
Working memory, the ability to hold and use information in the short term, is one of the executive functions most significantly affected by ADHD. It's why you walk into a room and forget why you're there, why you lose the thought mid-sentence, and why, when you're at the hardware store looking for a specific size screw, you cannot for the life of you remember whether you already have it at home.
And so you buy it. And then you get home and you have seven of them.
This isn't carelessness. It isn't lack of interest in your finances. It is a neurological gap in the brain's capacity to track and retrieve information in the moment, a gap that, in a consumer economy designed to make purchasing as frictionless as possible, turns out to be very expensive.
There's also the spatial dimension: losing things. The ADHD relationship with objects is a complicated one. Items get put down in places that made sense at the time, and then are truly, genuinely gone. The sunglasses are not where sunglasses go. They are somewhere else, somewhere that felt logical at the time and now yields nothing, no matter how many times you look. And when you need them in the next fifteen minutes, you do not have fifteen minutes to mount a forensic investigation. You go to Walgreens.
This cycle, losing, replacing, finding the original, accumulating multiples, has a real cost. Not just financially, but in the low-grade, chronic stress of never being sure what you have, where it is, or whether you should buy another one of something right now or risk going without.
What Actually Helps
1. Designated Homes for High-Loss Items
Keys, glasses, chargers, wallet. These are worth taking seriously as categories, not just objects. A hook by the door is not a personality. It's infrastructure. The goal is to make the right place so easy and automatic that it bypasses the decision-making entirely.
2. The Two-Minute Inventory Check
Before buying something, do a quick mental and visual scan, not a full search. Do I already own this? Where would it be? If you genuinely can't tell, take a photo of where you last saw the thing you're replacing. Some people find a visual record easier to access than a verbal one.
3. One Shopping List, Always
Keep a shopping list in one place on your phone, and check it before shopping, not after. The key word is one place. If your system requires you to remember which of several apps you used last time, it will not survive contact with a real grocery run.
4. The Periodic Possession Audit
Take an informal inventory of what you actually own in the categories you tend to over-buy: chargers, scissors, tape, reading glasses, batteries, rain jackets. This isn't an act of shame, it's a legitimate organizational strategy. Many of my clients are surprised to discover they're quite well-stocked once they actually look.
And more broadly, the chaos of duplicate ownership is not evidence that you can't be trusted with things. It is evidence that your brain needs different systems than the ones most people use by default, systems with more visual cues, more automation, less reliance on memory. Building those systems is exactly the kind of work ADHD coaching is designed for.
The reading glasses, I have decided, are now in every room. This is either a solution or a surrender. I'm calling it a solution.
If ADHD is costing you more than it should, in stress, in dollars, in the particular exhaustion of managing a brain that doesn't come with an instruction manual, let's talk.
Book a free discovery call and we'll figure out what's actually going on, and what could help.
Susan Pagor is an ICF-certified ADHD coach working with executives, creatives, and adults who are tired of trying harder and ready to try differently. Learn more at susanpagorcoaching.com.
