hey everybody welcome back to another episode of Boomers wearing flannel okay Boomer what are you going to talk about today well today I want to talk to you about the money problems that appear to be rather extensive in people with ADHD so let's go ahead and tee up our PowerPoint and let's talk about this because this is a I mean it's a rather boring problem for many people but it's a serious problem if it gets out of hand which it often can do with people with unmanaged ADHD so let's take a look here's the results
of my Milwaukee follow-up study mean age of these children was 27 by the time we ended the study they rang from about 24 up to 32 years of age and when we saw them at their young adult outcome we talked to them about the problems they were having as adults with managing their money and you can see here uh how we broke down each category of money problems and into three groups we had have the kids who were still ADHD and diagnosable at ADHD 20 years later we also have a second group of kids who
continued to be symptomatic although some of them had outgrown their ADHD by then but they didn't meet our criteria for a diagnosis in adulthood that doesn't mean that they were typical some were some weren't and then we have our typical control group our community group here now take a look and you can see that those whose ADHD continue Ed into adulthood contined to have more of these money management problems at adulthood than those whose ADHD had lessened over time even if they remained somewhat symptomatic but even they were having more problems in nearly all of
these categories than were the community control people so you can see that they reported overall lots of trouble handling their money 70% of these kids by age 27 to 30 were were having trouble lot of big problems with impulse buying missing payments on their rent about 30% of them had that we have about 55% of them missing payments on their credit cards about 65% who were exceeding the limits on their credit cards routinely uh you can see here at least 60% of these kids by adulthood had no savings account and over 55% had a poor
credit rating so 88 D is linked up with problems with managing money as we showed in that study now let's take a look at some of the other outcome studies of ADHD kids into adulthood as well as studies of Clinic referred adults and what do we find that a significant minority of them report having periods of unemployment in young adulthood or even up to midlife it's about 22% versus 133% they're more likely to be living with their parents still or to have moved back home at least once in their young adult years look at those
numbers 33% still living with parents 41% had returned back home at least once they're more likely to get financial assistance from a parent about 1/4 of these kids in adulthood were getting help as you could see here they earned about 37% Less in income which extrapolated to the population of ADH is about $300 billion in Lost income per year that ADHD creates for people when their ADHD goes unmanaged so uh they're earning less than other people and that also contributes to them getting into financial trouble with credit cards debt and so on their starting salaries
were lower in the workplace probably because on average they didn't get quite as much education as the typical control groups in these studies did and they moved up more slowly in their progress in the workplace again because their ADHD at times is interfering with their productivity with working independently with getting along with employers and colleagues at work and so on and as a result they have much slower progress in gaining salary increases into and across adulthood research also shows about 66% of them had save little if any money twice as many had no savings at
all very similar to what we found in the Milwaukee study they have fewer credit cards because their credit ratings are not as good so they're not as eligible for these credit cards and they're more likely to have been rejected on their credit applications because of their past history of financial problems of course they're less likely to own a home than others by midlife by about age 30 to 35 roughly you can see here that about less than half of the typical percentage for control group adults 42% of controls owned a house by the time they
were in midlife it's only about 22% of those with ADHD and again as we found in our study much more likely to report lots of impulse buying and by the way this is driven not only by their poor inhibition but also by their poor emotion regulation uh they tended to owe more money to others and to financial institutions which is to say that they had more debt by midlife than others and many of them had reported having had their utilities turned off at least once because of non-payment of their monthly bills thus projections forward indicate
about 1.3 million roughly in less income across their working lifespan than one one sees in the control population that's a lot of money to be keeping on the sideline as a result of having untreated adult ADHD so what what can we do about it well first of all get yourself diagnosed and adequately treated for your ADHD after all it's the disinhibition it's the distractability the shiny things kind of symptoms and it's the poor emotion regulation that we found were predictive of these Financial B management problem so you know step one let's get this under control
including if necessary using medication to do so and maybe also entering into a cognitive behavioral therapy program for adult ADHD maybe relying on ADHD coaching as well but get assistance to manage these symptoms that drive these money problems use Auto deposit when you're being paid to go straight into your checking account maybe you even have a portion going into your savings account as well so you don't see see that money it doesn't get into your hot little hands to spend impulsively and then set up autopay features for your recurring Utilities Credit Card and other expenses
that you need to pay each month so that this is being done automatically as much as possible and other words don't handle cash don't handle large sums of money directly if you can avoid doing so create a budget or a spreadsheet in Excel to set up your monthly income to look at your monthly bill so that you can see the differences maybe you also include setting aside some regular money for a savings account but make yourself accountable to the spreadsheet for bookkeeping each month on your income and expenses if you're married perhaps your spouse or
partner can also help you do that or do that for you as well but more importantly make yourself accountable to others to a spouse a partner a parent a trusted friend for adhering to your budget and also to talk to when you're considering making major purchases so that you're bouncing these ideas off of a sounding board before you race off to get whatever that next thing is that you just have to have so talk to others make yourself accountable you can also limit yourself to just one or two credit cards and put a sticker on
the credit card with the word no written on it this is cause you to stop and think for a moment when you pull that credit card out and want to use it here's a word that's telling you hold on Maybe not maybe this isn't worth the money that you're about to spend just build in a pause before you use the card be sure to pay off your credit card balances monthly along with your utilities if you can't pay off that credit card balance you shouldn't have made the purchase to begin with you would be better
off saving up for the those larger purchases like that new uh widescreen TV you want to get or something rather than buying it on credit and then having it sit there on your credit card and earn interest rates not earn them but actually cost you interest rates that are running somewhere between 17 and 25% right now on these credit cards so man you don't want to be paying interest on these credit cards at all so pay off your monthly balances and if you can't don't buy it if you're married talk to your non-ad partner about
maybe handling the budgeting and the bill paying so that things are getting done on time and you don't miss important payment deadlines work with a credit union and a financial planner if you can find one to review your finances with you credit unions often do this for free they'll give you a couple of meetings review your financial situation give you some advice there are also other financial advisors out there uh including those on the internet as well so you can sign up for uh various podcast if you want to with regard to money management and
debt consolidation but again make yourself accountable to these Bank Financial officers if you are able to get a free credit counseling program near you then go on the internet Google managing your money and you will find a ton of websites with lots and lots of good Sound Advice take a look here I've just done that on my screen and here's what you get hold on just a second let me just shrink that down and I've Googled managing your money lots of stuff are coming up here on financial advice that's free you can also look at
Dave Ramsey's columns uh and other people who have uh recurring columns or podcasts on financial management but look here consumer.gov on managing your money lots of Banks and Credit Unions have helped with that there are books over at Amazon that you can get so there's a lot of advice out there as we find the biggest problem with ADHD isn't necessarily knowing what to do it's doing it getting it done it's a performance problem which is why you see me always recommending accountability to others and also managing your ADHD so you can do what you intend
to do so this isn't just about going out and getting the advice it's also about implementing that advice so and that's where your friends Partners uh your parents others may come in handy in helping you to be accountable for doing the things you know you need to do at managing your money well I hope you found this video useful please join me again later on for other videos that I'll be posting usually several a week uh subscribe to the channel if you like recommend this to others if you find the content useful and I'll see
you again at the next video thanks everybody and be well
