Life with Aspergers

In my first post on this subject, I introduced eight steps to financial independence and began working through them, explaining what they were and how some autistic people may experience difficulty with them. That first post covers: Developing the right mindset, Budgeting and tracking expenses, Saving, and Debt management. In my second post , I covered the next two topics: Generating Income and Making Your Money Work for You (i.e., Investments). In this final post, I will cover Building Good Credit and How to Review and Adjust Your Plans for the Future . But first, I want to clarify a point raised by one of my readers . Why Do I think Autistic People are "Bad with Money"? It's a good question, especially since I'm writing a series aimed at helping people do better in this area. The answer is simple: I don't. I have met many autistic people who are absolute wizards with financials , particularly if they have finance as a special interest. Unfortunately, not every...

In my last post , I covered the first four of eight steps to financial independence while looking at the key issues that specifically affect autistic people. This time, I want to cover the next two crucial steps; Generating Income and Making Good Investments .  Step 5 Generating Income The foundation of financial independence is generating income, and for most, this means securing a job. While jobs are generally accessible to young people, gaining a foothold in the workforce can be challenging, often requiring prior experience or qualifications. Don't be discouraged if your first job isn't glamorous – sometimes, it's just about getting a foot in the door. My own first job involved making dog food! The key is to commit fully to your current role while always striving for something better. Autism and Job-Seeking Autistic individuals often face unique hurdles in the job market, particularly during the initial recruitment phase. Many of these issues center around the interview ...

One of the key goals of adulthood is to seek financial independence from our parents. It's all very well to be living off "the bank of mom and dad", but parents will not be there forever and financial independence is a major stepping stone to being able to do your own thing without the controlling influence of others.  In this three-part series, I want to look at eight steps towards financial independence and the way in which our autistic traits can make this difficult. I want to suggest some ways that autistic individuals can mitigate some of these problems. The chart below covers the eight steps. Step 1 Developing the right mindset There are three critical parts to developing a good "financial literacy" mindset.  Educate Yourself  on personal finance terms; budgeting, saving, investing, debt and credit.  Avoid the biggest money pitfalls  - Bad investments, bad debt and scams. Develop a healthy money mindset -  Financial Independence is a journey...

As I prepare to close the door on 2024, which was another blog-lite year for me (I only did three). I wanted to talk about where I am at and about why Autism is still highly topical in 2024.  Image Generated by Google Gemini Where I am I'm still married to the same person (just passed 27 years), still working and still living in the same place (24 and 28 years respectively). My kids have grown up and are now trending towards their mid-twenties. I've tried to talk about them less to give them more space to grow up into individuals who can go through life without having people look them up online and learn everything about them.  For all our "advances" and "woke-ism", the world is a much more dangerous and intolerant place than it was in 2007 when I started this blog. Words like "Asperger's" are now considered triggers and instead of providing protection, social media companies have created platforms that encourage and support bullying, spam and ...

Living with Autism Undiagnosed by Ruth Horowitz is quite an unusual book in that it's not exactly an "autism book".  By that, I mean that the vast majority of the events in the book occur well before Ruth received a diagnosis and that thus far, I don't get the impression that Ruth as done a complete review of her life in the frame of autism. This is something that many of us on the spectrum do but it also takes many years and a lot of insight. This is quite a good thing though because the book is very much a biographical retelling of the events of Ruth's life without a lot of explanations. We are left to interpret those events and actions and there are many clues to how these relate to autism spread throughout. This makes the reader think and pulls them into the story.  Ruth's story is a very interesting one for several reasons. It's rare to hear the voices and stories of older autistic women and usually these stories are either triumphs against adversity ...

In my last post I talked about the dangers of social media. Today I want to talk briefly about a recent event and how it needed to be dealt with. Names are changed to protect people.  The aim of this post is to educate parents and fellow autistics about how this problem started, why it became such a big deal and how to deal with it if and when it does happen to you. Even if you don't read this whole post, at least skip to the end where I give some recommendations for ensuring that this doesn't happen to you. How the Problem Started I received a call about an autistic boy who had an issue on social media. Essentially the crux of the problem was other family members who followed his channel on YouTube were being confronted with videos containing bad language and nudity. This included younger children, so clearly it was a issue.  For the sake of clarity, I'm going to call this autistic young adult "Robbie". Robbie is in his early twenties, he is fairly self-sufficie...