Dorien Bangma

172 | CHAPTER 7 Discussion The goal of the present exploratory study was to investigate FDM in adults with and without ADHD, using a recently published comprehensive test battery (Bangma et al., 2017). The results show that the personal financial situation of adults with ADHD was less optimal than the financial situation of healthy controls. Furthermore, adults with ADHD showed significantly decreased performances compared to healthy controls in five out of seven tasks measuring FDM and on measures of vigilance, interference and numeracy. However, mediation analyses indicated that differences in cognitive functioning cannot fully explain the differences with regard to FDM between adults with ADHD and healthy controls. Personal financial situation. The gross annual income of adults with ADHD was lower than that of healthy individuals, resulting in significant less money to spend each month for adults with ADHD compared to healthy controls. Previous research showed that income levels of relatively young adults with and without ADHD (i.e., younger than 24 years of age) are more or less similar (Altszuler et al., 2016; Barkley et al., 2006), but that adults with ADHD of 24 years and older have a lower gross annual income than healthy controls (Barkley et al., 2008; Biederman & Faraone, 2006). Fischer & Barkley (2006) found even higher income levels in adults with ADHD who were on average 21 years old compared to age-matched controls. However, they argue that this is probably due to the fact that healthy individuals are more often students at this age than young adults with ADHD. Furthermore, Altszuler et al. (2016) reported that, although income levels of adults with ADHD and healthy controls sometimes appear to be similar, young adults with ADHD receive more often social security from welfare systems or are financially dependent on parents or relatives than healthy controls. In the present study, it was found that one out of four adults with ADHD received social security, however, compared to 7.8% of healthy controls receiving social security this was not significantly more often than in healthy controls. With regard to having debts, almost half of the adults with ADHD reported to have debts other than mortgages or study loans, which is significantly more frequent than in the healthy control group (i.e., 15.7%). Previous studies reported inconsistent findings with regard to debts of adults with ADHD (Altszuler et al., 2016; Barkley et al., 2006, 2008; Fischer & Barkley, 2006), which might be a result of the relatively young age of participants included in previous studies. Furthermore, despite the finding that adults with ADHD did not differ from healthy controls with regard to saving for retirement and actively saving money when they have a savings account, the present results indicate that financial future planning of adults with ADHD is not as optimal as the planning of healthy controls, i.e., significantly fewer adults with ADHD had a savings account or bought a house compared to healthy controls, which can both be understood as investments for the future. Financial decision-making. Consistent with the findings described above, lower performances on various standardized objective tests of FDM were found in adults with ADHD compared to healthy controls, which are substantiated by mainly large effect sizes. With regard to two relatively fundamental aspects of FDM (i.e., financial competence and capacity) poorer performances were found in adults with ADHD compared to healthy controls. This shows that