When Desi Wyatt left a stable corporate job to become a financial planner in 2006, he was not planning for one life event: his 2-year-old daughter was diagnosed with autism.
“I just left this very comfortable, very stable world to go be a financial advisor, which is anything but . . . I had to pass my FINRA Series 7 exam and I had one chance to pass it,” said Wyatt, who’s now lead of workplace strategy and business controls at Citi Personal Wealth Management. “So you talk about having a major distraction in your life, called a family life-changing situation, and you have one chance to pass this exam, to follow your dream. It was stressful.”
Yet, it was through that experience and sharing it with others that Wyatt realized something was missing from the traditional advisor training materials: how to work with clients and their families who are neurodivergent.
“I saw an opportunity in my situation to help others that look like me, and so I began to actually seek out organizations in my local community that work with families with special needs,” he said. “And I worked with my firm to curate or create content that would allow me to really get that message out into the community.”
There are numerous studies that point to how mental health is connected with financial decisions. A report released earlier this year by TIAA Institute and High Lantern Group said that “among those facing mental health challenges: 93% felt they spent more than usual, 92% found it harder to make financial decisions, and 56% took out a loan they otherwise would not have.”
And this is not a small group of people who belong to a certain wealth class or demographic. Nearly 60 million Americans, or about 23% of adults, reported experiencing a mental illness in the past year, according to Mental Health America.
“There’s definitely an intersection between wealth and neurodivergence. They’re not mutually exclusive,” said Melissa Weisz, wealth advisor and associate partner at Corient, who’s designated as a chartered special needs consultant.
Technology to advise neurodivergent families
Part of the growth in a client base of families with special needs stems from a greater recognition of mental health and recognized diagnosis. But more recently, the advancement in technologies have made it easier for advisors to work with neurodivergent households.
For example, something as simple as a video meeting may bring more comfort to someone who has depression or anxiety about going out, Weisz said. And applications either built within an advisor’s CRM or externally that set automated meeting reminders to help clients with ADHD have been particularly helpful.
“You could have a client who has ADHD who’s a very successful corporate executive . . . They may have restricted stock units or they may have other sort of deadline-oriented open enrollment periods that you want to make sure you’re calendaring for them,” she said.
Weisz said in her own household, family members who have ADHD and autism use a customizable digital wall calendar, called a DAKBoard, to help keep everyone organized together.
“Technology really can be such a powerful way to visualize what we have coming, to keep ourselves organized and also to communicate because so much of either family interactions or working with an advisor is communication,” she said. “So making sure that you’ve got the right pathways for communication, and follow ups and reminders — technology can be really useful in that capacity.”
This need has also transformed AI companies that work with advisors such as Trustworthy, a platform in which consumers can important documents like financials, IDs, assets, taxes and wills onto a single platform and share it with their families, financial advisors and other hired professionals.
READ MORE: Tech spotlight: How Trustworthy gets people to store life’s data
The platform uses AI to extract information from the documents to set up customized alerts or reminders, which is how Trustworhy’s founder and CEO Nathaniel Robinson said the firm discovered people with attention deficit disorders were often using the reminders feature.
“We didn’t really understand the mental wellness or mental health aspect of Trustworthy until we heard it from some of our Trustworthy certified experts,” Robinson said.
The company has a certification program in which they specifically recruit professionals who work for organizations in mental health as well as fiduciaries and financial coaches.
“Some of these folks were the ones telling us, ‘Do you know that this is so great for attention deficit people who need places to put things and need to be able to see them on a recurring basis and need reminders?” he said. “We didn’t come at this from, ‘Hey, let’s build something for advisors.’ We came at it from, ‘Let’s build something for families, but incorporate their ecosystems into that.'”
Tips from advisors on working with neurodivergent families
Advisors agreed that it’s critical for their industry to ask more questions pertaining to the mental health of their clients and family, but such awkward questions are par for the course since advisors often help clients in planning out their asset distributions when deceased.
Chuck Cavanaugh, head of financial planning at Citi Personal Wealth Management, said there are ways to better frame questions around mental health.
“If you ask, ‘Tell me about your children?’ you’ve opened the door up now for them to tell you their concerns and their children . . . and then if they do mention anything about a neurodivergent child, a special needs child, ‘Can you tell me about your your child’s specific needs and what kind of support they currently get?'” he said.
“The second follow-up question to that would be, ‘What are your hopes, and what are your goals and dreams for your child in the future?’ And that really gives you a sense as to what their caregiver approach is going to be, what their concerns are about wealth,” he said.
Several advisors said it’s also important to understand the types of financial behaviors that often correlate to specific mental health conditions.
For example, people with depression or high anxiety tend to have a low risk tolerance for spending. Whereas people with ADHD tend to impulse buy.
Weisz added that it’s also important for advisors to meet clients where they are most comfortable because some prefer texting or email if they get anxiety about a phone call; while others might need an in-person meeting if they get easily distracted during virtual meetings.
“It’s not about getting people out of their comfort zones. It’s about doing it in a way that’s going to maximize their time, their attention,” she said.
Wyatt also said advisors should do more research, particularly on how to manage clients who might be adult dependents due to a special need or whether they’re receiving government support that would change how the financial plan is structured.
“It’s important to understand what protections are out there and particularly when it comes to financial, because a lot of times . . . the government will provide certain supports for them, but a lot of families find that it may not be enough,” he said. “So understanding what that infrastructure looks like and then how we, through our own personal planning, can supplement that. That provides a lot of peace of mind for families.”
