Aspies, how are you doing financially? (Adults)

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I am 40 years old and i've never lived entirely independent of my family. I have held many jobs in the past, but they were all menial/unskilled positions which didn't pay enough for me to be 100% financially independant. I lived in my own apt. for 10 years, but family and friends always helped with rent, car expenses, etc....


It is very painful to admit all this and the shame I feel can't be put into words. But in spite of my reasonably good IQ scores, (anywhere from high average-very superior) I feel I have severe learning/memory deficits the IQ/memory tests just haven't picked up on. Coupled with chronic and profound depression, poor motor skills, anxiety, panic attacks, executive functioning problems and other socio-emotional issues often associated with AS/NVLD.

Whatever is ultimately wrong with my brain....it has robbed me of every hope, dream, goal and aspiration i've ever had.

I didn't answer the poll, but I'm somewhere between "not as much as I'd like" and "getting help from family". A few years ago I lived on my own just fine, but I moved closer to my parents and found that the cost of living was much much higher here, which left me the choice of staying with my folks or getting roommates, and I'd really rather not have roommates. Besides, we all get along, and I am their only child. So, now I'm getting help from family, technically, though I work full-time, benefits, etc...

But, I am quite underemployed and I have yet to find a way out of it. As to the OP's question - how to help her son be gainfully employed as an adult - looking back I have a few ideas on why I've had a hard time. The biggest thing for me was that I understood very well what to do to be "successful" from grade school through college, but I had no understanding of what it would take to transition from college to work. And worse, I didn't realize that I didn't know this until I tried to find work I was qualified to do.

My parents never talked about how to find a job and the only thing they emphasized on how to be qualified was to go to college. In high school, all that was ever mentioned, and rarely, was generalities - but I could have really used specifics. Oh, and by the time I got to college, I thought I knew what was up (hah!) and if my parents did have advice in that area, it was probably too late.

Such as, it is perfectly fine to major in philosophy if you get internships and have connections to find you jobs (which I didn't do and don't have), but otherwise it's better to pick something specific and marketable, BS not BA. And if something doesn't grab you right away, just pick something you like and can stand to do, otherwise you'll end up in retail (erg).

My two cents. Hope it helps.

Before I had children I supported myself, albeit at minimum wage. Now I am a single parent and my mental/emotional resources only stretch so far. IF I had known that I had AS at the time I would not have divorced. I had no idea. I thought that I would just be able to get it together and do it all, and I can't.

I have a part time job and some child support. I have been living in subsidized housing for 3 years and receive food stamps. I wish I had family to lean on but they are unstable. For example, my mom offers for us to live with her and I make the preparations only to find that someone else has already moved in with a 1 year lease..

Your point of view pretty well solidifies when your stomach is empty.

Maintained a career in a single industry for over 30 years, but spent probably 30-40% of that time unemployed - I was 'successful in the sense of being recognized by my peers as exceptionally talented, but barely made enough money to survive, and was regularly fired from each job after about a year and a half for being a nonconformist.

Worked many odd jobs in between, but could never keep one for more than a couple months.

Have a new career now, but have to drive to another state to work even part time, due to discrimination against my Autism which the state I live in has endorsed and upheld.

Mainly subsist on SSDI since shortly after diagnosis at 49.

Please don't be so hard on yourself Horus.

My oldest sister who is 53 years old and a NT (masters in nursing) has NEVER lived by herself on her own until this year.

The other two sisters who are 51 yrs old (zero college/beauty school/divorced) and 52 yrs old (masters in psychology/married) are both NTs too and have only lived alone for very short periods of time but always with financial help from family. And they don't have any learning disabilities and/or AS/HFA or anything else to make living in this World more difficult.

Taupey

money has always been a struggle in my family, for both my parents as well as myself. if it weren't for my [late] mother's exceptional thrift we likely would have been a homeless family and probably fragmented.
as for myself, [with one exception] money talked and it nearly always said "good bye, sucker! i'm outa here!" ironically, las vegas was the only time in which money said to me, "well hello, daddy! let's play!" other than that, i must be extremely frugal, watching where every dollar goes. my oldest brother and sister have learnt how to make money come to them, but not me.

I'm doing very well even though I'm below the poverty line.

other, i work part time but my husband earns OK so we're fine.

i sure would like for you to patiently explain to me how you could be doing well financially yet be below the poverty line? enquiring minds want to know

I lived pretty comfortably the past few years working in a lab at an engineering firm…. But the traveling and 70 to 90 hour work weeks during the summer killed me and my life, so I quite 7 months ago…. I was in pretty bad shape mentally. I could play it off at work a little bit but at home I was a mess. I was so freaking depressed. I had plenty of savings, and I had some nice stuff but it didn’t make me happy, so I got rid of a lot of my things and I may get on disability for a short period so I can actually get my head on..

Very moved by this post. I can definitely relate. I have been independent off and on but right now I am not. I lived with my grandmother three times. She and I got along well, she was a very no-b.s. type of person. I am on family land right now. It is awful and has been about the worst environment I could be in. Work is almost impossible for me. Jobs are not hard buy coworkers are horrible. They just wont let you be different. I definitely have lost all of my dreams too. It's chilling to me to think I am only a couple decades from retirement age and am horribly poor with no savings. I am really good at living frugally but it's terrifying to think what if I end up on cat food. I identify with the shame as well. I have NT siblings who make really good money, they make me sick when they judge me...I can't manipulate on a daily or hourly basis like they do otherwise I would make great money too. I see little difference between what they do sometimes and straight up prostitution. I tell them so if they rag on me too much.

You see, it's all perspective and subjective.

I make enough money to buy things I enjoy (interest related) with a little saving up and to eat well. Hence, I'm doing very well.

Work in R&D engineering and an doing quite well for my age, however I do sense that I will have problems moving forward due to a lack of management, presentation and general social skills.

You need to be able to put yourself in a position closest to your obsessive interests, were your technical performance is sufficient to succeed.
Allot of the professions are good for this (lawyer, engineer, doctor etc)

In a technical career near your interest there are few NT people who will be able to keep up, or understand how or what you are doing. This is important because, as other people have mentioned, my employer would certainly prefer to have a NT employee if they could find one that can preform the function that I do.

I don't know if you have seen this thread but it is worth a look:
Best jobs for people with aspergers

I have a number of traits, both good and bad, that keep me employed.

One bad trait is I have a great fear of losing my job and becoming homeless. Maybe this comes from seeing my mother's struggles with finances during the inflation of the 1970's. It causes me a great deal of anxiety and sometimes I stay in a job longer than I should. I have usually avoided taking risks that would be to my benefit because I feared I would fail at a new job.

On the good side is that my particular interests can be made marketable (computer graphics, photography etc) and I had a good teacher who helped me understand the importance and value of self promotion.

I have been employed pretty much constantly since I was in my mid-teens. I have rarely had trouble getting a job and I have always become a valued employee. The one time I was fired was because I just stopped showing up and even that boss asked me to return. I am doing reasonably well. Some might think I am doing extraordinarily well and I think a lot of that comes from how my parents raised me.

I think you can help your son by pushing him to try things outside of what he is comfortable with. My family valued education, work and competence and these were the things they pushed me to explore. Maybe if instead they had valued socialization, I might be good at that and had a hard time being successful in work.

I'm not a parent and I can only guess at what might be helpful. I suspect encouraging, even demanding that your son get a job when he is 16 or so, even if he really doesn't want to, will be helpful in teaching him to deal with work. Obviously if it is overwhelming, it could put him off the idea of work entirely, so the job should be within his abilities, but it should challenge him somewhat to push himself a bit further than he would go if left to his own devices. Make sure he does chores around the house when he is younger and don't let him off the hook just because he doesn't like them.

Stressing personal responsibility might help, especially when he is younger. Letting him know that he is responsible for his own life and future welfare is important in instilling in him the understanding that he needs to become self sufficient.

Encourage his interests even if you don't particularly understand why he is interested in them. Careers can blossom in the strangest fields. If he is encouraged in his interests, he won't grow up feeling ashamed about pursuing them. If he feels good about his interests, he is likely to find a way to make it a career.

Don't demand that he pursue a career just because that field tends to make a lot of money. Don't try to stop him even if you think his interests will lead to a career that will not make money. If he is interested and dedicated to a field, he'll probably do alright. He may not make huge amounts of money, but money is useless if you don't have a life.

Emphasize that doing work you enjoy is the real goal of a career. Making enough money to be comfortable is important, but if you are only working for money and you'll do any job to get it, you may end up in a lot of awful jobs. No job is perfect and sometimes you have to take a lousy job to get to a better one, but if your job is intolerable you'll never do it well enough to make an adequate amount of money. If you make a lot of money, but your life is miserable, have you really gotten anything of value?

Demand that he develop some social skills. If he is an Aspie, he'll probably never be very social, but insist that he make some effort early in life and keep pushing him just a little further than he might naturally be comfortable. I suspect the lack of social skills is a large part of the reason why a lot of Aspies have trouble in work. Many jobs a acquired through social contacts. With the exception of one, all the jobs I have had have come through friends or my direct attempts to engage with people on a personal level. Obviously you don't want to push him to a point where it becomes overwhelming, but it is better for him to learn these skills early in life rather than when he is 47.

Give him time and room to grow. He may not learn skills at the same time as other kids his age. He may need to live at home longer than most. But the safety of home can help him have the courage to get out into the world. You need to strike a balance between pushing him to challenge himself and allowing him to hide from the overwhelming world from time to time.

Be a good example for him. Much of what I have learned in life did not come from anyone telling me things. Instead, I learned from watching what people do and the results they get. If you have a good work ethic yourself, he will see the work you do and have an idea of how he might go about doing the same thing.

All of these suggestions are things that need to be done, not once or twice, but all throughout his life. It's sort of like a diet - if you go on a diet for a month and lose some weight, once you are off it, you likely will gain it all back. But if you make the diet a thing you do all your life, it stands a chance of working.

I hope some of this helps.

Lars

And this is why I become frustrated when people tell me I should try to be happy in spite of the fact that all my dreams, hopes, ambitions, etc....have gone down the tubes. Such an endeavor seems about as difficult and unreasonable for me as reaching the summit of K2 would be.

I'm sorry... IMO, life just isn't worth living if you can't (for whatever reason) fulfill at least a significant amount of your dreams and aspirations. When I look at the billions of poor (in terms of economic poverty and otherwise) people in this world who are essentially just surviving, I am awed and mystified by the ones who seem happy in spite of the hand they've been dealt. In fact....life hardly seems worth living for many affluent people in the western world. I look at people like my mother. She's had a successful career, but beyond that, what has she really done in her life? She's never traveled much, she doesn't have too many hobbies or interests (outside of dancing and cooking) and the majority of her non-working life has been spent watching TV, sleeping, shopping, etc...People say happiness comes entirely from within. If so... like most things in the general human experience, that really hasn't worked out for me.

I had high expectations when I was younger and they have all come to naught. I really don't know what i'm SUPPOSED to be happy about. Because "things could be worse"? Well....things could be worse for the denizens of Dante's first circle of hell too and I can't imagine any reasonable person would expect such mythical souls to be happy.

I think the Rolling Stones put it very well in their song "Ruby Tuesday".


"Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind....in life unkind".

My family is extraordinarily competitive and hard working and those traits have definitely rubbed off on to me…I have worked from the age of 14 “de teaseling corn“, and I worked nearly full time at a hotel at 16 years old while going to school. At the engineering firm I worked for I was the youngest employee by at least 5 years…It’s difficult keeping young people my age because of the responsibility and high stakes nature of the job I had. So I actually stood out from many people my age, and the company that I worked for did not keep incompetent idiots during the off season . So I definitely think the familial aspect of the hard working nature of my family has paid off a bit.

One thing I have noticed is that when I worked at crapy jobs I get very little respect from employees and management people who have sub par intelligence. Stupid people don’t look at results.
Stupid people look at eccentricities and differences and judge worth by that alone. No matter how intelligent and competent you are, stupid people just cant look past the differences, and its ret*d how bad they will treat an individual of difference. And it’s quite stressful for people who are different because of the lack of respect.

The nice thing about the engineering firm I worked for was that most of the employees where somewhat intelligent and or very intelligent and competence and results mattered most. The big boss at this company was highly respected individual in the industry and he was well known to be a no bull shitter and if he respected you , you typically got respect from your clients and others… And that was nice.