The Money Fog

I came across a clip of an interview with female comedian Shappi Khorsandi who was talking about her struggle with money and the particular additional challenges that she faces due to ADHD. She described an inability to understand and manage her finances and whenever someone has attempted to help with explanations, it feels as though she is back in a maths lesson, where understanding and explanation rarely meet. Her ADHD meant then and now that her mind is spinning with distraction which removes the chance of any understanding.

This has resulted in Shappi facing financial problems and the preferred solution is to avoid thinking about it. This results in unopened letters and emails which leads to County Court Judgements and significant difficulties with any financial institution thereafter.

I don’t have ADHD, but I understand that it is a spectrum (like many things) and of course I also struggle to understand a lot of things … I acknowledge that this isn’t the same thing, but I simply wish to state that I understand at least some of the feelings around not understanding.

Unfortunately, the time in which we live means that understanding money is really very important in terms of basic living in both the present and the future. In truth, many of us struggle with numbers and financial concepts. Certainly, there will be people who struggle more than others, but it would seem to me that the financial sector has often deliberately made life more complex and full of jargon than it needs to be.

Shappi made the point that for a long time she didn’t know how to articulate the problem and the help that she needed. She struggles with the administration of her finances and understanding what she sees on a statement. I would argue that this is not exclusively a problem for people with ADHD, but for many people; and indeed as we age, our ability to cope with evolving technology and concepts becomes ever more challenging.

So my question in the thread and here to you, is on one level rather simple, but of course not a simple answer. What can we do to make managing your finances easier? How can we make things more straightforward? Given that we don’t wish to overreach our responsibility and remove any sense of your own agency from the dynamic – we cannot simply ‘do it all for you’, but I am certain that we can improve on what has gone before.

The FCA are aware of the problem, in many respects it is evident in their approach. At one level, they do not believe that most people can calculate 1% of a number, so advisers have to clearly state fees in cash terms not simply percentages. At its heart, the latest initiative Consumer Duty (which builds on the prior initiative of Treating Customers Fairly) is about this, but it’s still all about numbers and not really about helping people to build resources for their financial independence.

I would suggest, politely, that a lack of understanding combined with inertia are the real reasons why people don’t move their savings accounts to better rates of interest or invest cash that they are really very unlikely to need for five years or more. This is not helped by the reality that ‘advice’ comes with lengthy documentation and the litigious world in which we live means that those of us dispensing advice are caught between simplicity and detail for fear of claims in the future about “not understanding”.

Money is complex, partly because it can involve a lot of maths and formulae, but also because the jargon and terminology used make most of us shut down! There is also the very real problem that we are human, most of us are not really interested in money, but in what it can do for us. Having the self-awareness to appreciate that you don’t need to be an expert but need one; but not completing delegating decisions is a journey that you are on. I know it works, but I certainly recognise the size of the emotional step that you have taken, which is easier for some than others.

In this process, trust is obviously an enormous factor and it’s my belief that trust, whilst I can earn it by keeping promises, is at its core instinctual.