October 3, 2022
Hello and welcome to this week's edition of the Autism Grown Up newsletter! |
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For those who are new to AGU, welcome! We are an online non-profit & neurodiverse startup dedicated to getting everyone on the same page in supporting autistic people as they grow up and navigate adulthood. You can find us on our website, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and join us in our Facebook community! |
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This week, we are wrapping up our Lifespan Toolbox Summer Series. Look below for this week's Toolkit! In case you missed it, you can catch last week's series post as well as our other monthly series by clicking here. Feel free to pass these along to parents & families, your child's teacher, the autistic individual in your life, and other people in your support system or team. |
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October is the month of months! We're sharing info on each of the following months and where you can learn more: National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM) International AAC Awareness Month Sensory Processing Awareness Month |
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Vote for the next newsletter series topic! For the rest of October, we'll cover the winner of the this poll. |
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In this post, we'll define what exactly financial planning is, cover the basics, and how they may relate to your needs as an autism family. |
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Financial planning is one of those intimidating topics - and can often lead to more questions than answers! In this toolkit, we cover the basics around financial planning, outline some resources out there that you can pick and choose based on your needs, interests, and goals. In this toolkit, we cover/include: - What Does Financial Planning Look Like?
- Financial Planning Self-Assessment
- Guardianship + Supported Decision-Making
- Public Benefits
- Housing
- ABLE Accounts
- Special Needs Trusts
- Letter of Intent
- Working with a Financial Planner
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Hello and welcome back to our corner of the newsletter where we are finally rounding out our mega series of 12 toolkits with Financial Planning for Families. With one series we almost doubled our library and found so many wonderful resources to share along the way! We want to thank NCCDD again for working with us to achieve this goal and we’re already looking forward to the next one! One of our long term goals in building up our paid resource library is to have the resources to continuously contribute to an extensive free toolkit library for autistic adults, families, caregivers, teachers, and professionals. While we are still working toward that goal as a sustainable practice, we are also able to create new toolkits when we receive enough donations to pay for the associated labor. If you’re interested in donating to a toolkit, want to sponsor a toolkit, or if you have an idea about what you’d like to see us cover next drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com. With the sentimental stuff and our shameless plug out of the way, let’s take a look at who can make use of this latest toolkit and how. Self-Advocates If you tuned in last week you may have seen our announcement about our Personal Finance Toolkit, and it would be fair to say that last week’s toolkit is a little more directly aimed at autistic self-advocates. That is not to say, however, that there is no benefit to be had from this toolkit. Financial planning can be a collaborative process if you want it to be, and talking about financial planning is a great way of making sure your priorities are understood even if it is in the context of a family, caregiver, or trustee decision. If you happen to receive benefits but have been thinking about how to save for your own long term care, this guide also goes over some saving options that can help keep your benefits intact. Parents and Caregivers While this toolkit is aimed at families, we know many family based financial decisions are likely to stem from a parent or caregiver. This toolkit takes a look at some “traditional” financial advice and compared it to the realities of navigating the additional costs and systemic barriers associated with special needs finance planning. For parents and caregivers of adults with considerable support needs, we discuss Letters of Intent and how financial planning can stem from what is described within the letter. And of course you can check out our sections related to saving for necessary or quality of life expenses without jeopardizing benefit payments (or our earlier toolkit on Managing an ABLE Account while you’re at it!). Professionals As always, we hope this will be another tool you can share with families and self-advocates who express an interest in finance or securing their future. If you are interested in going more in depth into this topic, our toolkit offers an helpful baseline and many of our linked sources get into even more detail.
WIth that, and with me getting sentimental at the beginning this time, all that’s left is to talk about what’s coming up next week! Since there isn’t a new toolkit and we want to give people a chance to vote for next months topic, we have decided to make the remainder of this week’s newsletter posts a bit of a grab bag and will be doing brief writeups on some topics we find interesting. They are still a work in progress, so if you are extremely excited to hear about a particular topic from us we’d love to hear from you! Drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com and we will see you next week! |
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I hope you all have a great week and we'll see you in your inbox next Monday! Dr. Tara Regan, Executive Director |
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