‘Having ADHD has cost us tens of thousands of pounds’
When Kirsti Nicole Hadley lost an original Banksy artwork, it epitomised decades of issues managing her money. “Admittedly, I did only pay £20 for it back in the early noughties,” she says. “But that same print recently sold for around the £20,000 mark.”
She is one of many people who struggle with finances due to having ADHD.
A survey by Monzo and YouGov last year found that 60pc of people with the condition said it directly impacted this area of their lives, costing them an average of £1,600 per year – in what is sometimes referred to as the “ADHD tax”.
Hadley, now 50, was first diagnosed with ADHD in 2021, when she also discovered she had autistic traits and dyscalculia, a difficulty understanding numbers.
Previously she was at a loss trying to understand a string of expensive events. There was the time she worked in a cafe and kept forgetting to charge customers. “Needless to say the job didn’t last long,” she adds.
In another role, as manager of a photo-processing shop, she wrote the safe combination password on the wall above it “because I couldn’t remember it and knew that if I wrote it in a notepad, I’d just lose it”. Eventually the store was broken into. “I may as well have gift-wrapped the safe”, Hadley says of the aftermath.
Bryony Lewis, 39, a mother-of-two from Portsmouth, was also diagnosed with ADHD in midlife. “Before that, I didn’t really have any idea why I struggled with managing my finances and impulse control when it came to shopping.
“If I’d had a rubbish week, I’d want to be shopping to get that new thing – happiness, I guess – and that was particularly bad in my late teens and early 20s when I was at university.”
Hadley and Lewis are not unusual in their delayed diagnoses. In childhood, the ratio of boys to girls diagnosed with ADHD is approximately 3:1, but it grows nearer to 1:1 in adulthood. This has been attributed to the fact that ADHD manifests differently in girls, who are more likely to display behaviours such as being distracted, disorganised and forgetful, compared to boys whose ADHD manifests more as hyperactivity, impulsivity and aggression.
Additionally, researchers suggest that social stigma – girls being judged more for sloppy behaviours – means they expend far more effort than their male equivalents in hiding ADHD symptoms.
Lewis started to rack up debt. After she turned 18, spurred by banks “throwing” low-interest credit cards at her, she “was buying all sorts of computer games and films”, which eventually stacked up. “Clothing was another quite bad thing for me, particularly at uni. I was constantly trying to reinvent myself.”
While splashing out Lewis says she didn’t check her bank balance as she “didn’t want to see or think about it”. Before she knew it, she had a debt of just under £20,000.
Around the age of 26, Lewis met her now-husband who was “very good with money” and her “complete opposite”. Initially she didn’t tell him about her growing debt, but the crunch came when they wanted to move in together. She knew her finances might be a barrier to finding somewhere and came clean. He helped her devise strategies to reduce the debt and she eventually paid it off. “My brain just couldn’t do that,” she adds.
It’s not unusual for people with the condition to turn to loved ones for support. According to a study published in 2020, “adults with ADHD are more financially dependent on family members, face more financial difficulties paying bills, open fewer savings accounts, use credit cards more compulsively, and are more likely to use very high interest rate borrowing”.
Troublingly, the research also found that “high default rates, poor credit, and increasing financial distress are associated with higher suicide rates in adults with ADHD”.
Dr Helen Read, a consultant psychiatrist who specialises in ADHD, as well as having it, says money management is a “huge issue” in the ADHD community. “Firstly, executive functioning difficulties mean that many people with ADHD really struggle to remember logins, passwords, PIN numbers and otherwise for their banking systems.
“Losing email account passwords, especially if using a system with security requirements to change passwords regularly, is often another layer of impossibility when trying to manage finances.
“In addition to the issues with executive functioning, people with ADHD, especially if not on treatment, often use things like online or in-person shopping for a quick dopamine hit.”
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in feelings of reward, and some researchers have hypothesised that low levels of it in the brain can contribute to ADHD – leading to the need for quick “highs”.
Read says people with ADHD often buy “takeaways, equipment or items to fuel the latest short-term hobby and January gym memberships which never get cancelled”. This can reflect “the desperate passion for a cure or fixes which the untreated ADHD-er will often resort to, reflexively”.
Maddy Alexander-Grout, a money coach who has ADHD, says people with the condition are especially susceptible to being scammed. “We jump at good deals. For example, I saw a deal that was too good to be true last year for an air fryer, and rather than normal people thinking this is too good to be true, I just went ahead and bought it. Then I spent hours trying to get the money back from the bank.”
In May last year, Alexander-Grout set up an app called Mad About Money to help support people with neurodivergent conditions manage their finances. “I have struggled with banks in the past, charging me late fees for non-payment of bills, saying it was my fault I got scammed and I have signed up for loans and overdrafts without fully understanding contracts.
“Banks need to get better at understanding there is an ADHD tax, and giving more opportunities for people who are neurodivergent to pay if they miss something before it goes on their credit file.
“It’s not an excuse, but if banks spot patterns where their customers are struggling they should be doing more to support those customers, as they are vulnerable.”
Despite their financial challenges, Lewis and Hadley are both self-employed – a website developer and founder of an inclusion consultancy (Generation Alphabet), respectively.
Freelancing comes with having to keep on track of your own salary, manage invoices, and other administrative tasks, so it’s hardly the type of career you might imagine for people who have regular money struggles.
However, it is not uncommon in those with ADHD: a study in the journal Small Business Economics showed that people with ADHD were 60pc to 80pc more likely to have entrepreneurial intentions. Those with the condition are almost twice as likely to start a business.
Hadley says people with ADHD “often find it too boring to work for traditional firms, and have difficulty conforming to corporate expectations”. She is now thriving as an entrepreneur.
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To manage their finances, Hadley recommends that those with ADHD “keep track of tasks they tend to avoid, or take a disproportionate amount to complete, and outsource these wherever possible.” Lewis uses an accountant and NatWest’s Mettle, an account for the self-employed, which has free accounting software.
Banks have slowly been stepping up to help the ADHD community. Monzo, for instance, has a page dedicated to ADHD, which includes recommendations as to how to manage your finances. One tip is to turn off borrowing offers to avoid the temptation to spend money you don’t have.
Lewis has a range of techniques to cope. One is putting a reminder in her diary for any free trials she needs to cancel in the future, and she now tends to leave any shopping purchases online in her basket for a week to make sure she really wants them.
“Shopping in person and using cash is probably better, because you can feel you’re giving the money to someone else,” she adds.
A lack of object permanence – the ability to understand that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight – is common in people with ADHD, so it can be safer to use physical money than a card (you can literally see the money being spent, rather than ignoring what’s happening on your bank account).
Hadley is also a campaigner with charity SEND Reform England, which wants more government funding allocated to children with special education needs.
She thinks businesses need to do more to help those with ADHD, but was left feeling optimistic after a visit to Parliament. She spoke to over 50 MPs from three major parties, and said the experience “felt like a light at the end of the tunnel”, and had the sense they really cared.
With the annual cost of the “ADHD tax” estimated to be as high as £1.74bn, a little political awareness goes a long way.
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