My son has profound autism. He’s 21 years old. He can’t read, can’t manage money, and lives in a world that was not built for him.
Every piece of financial planning I do comes back to one question: how do I make sure he’s okay when I’m not here anymore?
That question doesn’t show up in normal financial planning advice. The standard playbooks — save for retirement, build an emergency fund, invest in index funds — they assume your kids will grow up and take care of themselves. Mine won’t. The rules are different for us. The stakes are different. And almost nobody is writing about it honestly.
This is the part of my site that’s most personal and most important. If you’re a parent or caregiver of someone with special needs, trying to figure out the financial side of a situation that no one prepared you for — you’re in the right place.
Start Here
- Financial Planning for My Special Needs Son: What Nobody Tells You — The full picture. SSI, Medicaid, ABLE accounts, special needs trusts, guardianship, and the fears that drive all of it.
- ABLE Accounts: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before I Opened One — I put $1,000/month into my son’s ABLE account. Here’s what the brochure doesn’t tell you.
Guides
- Special Needs Trusts vs. ABLE Accounts (coming soon) — You need both. Here’s why and how they work together.
- Saving for a Special Needs Child Without Losing Benefits (coming soon) — The $2,000 asset limit, how other people’s money can wreck your child’s SSI, and how to protect against it.
- The Real Cost of Raising a Special Needs Child (coming soon) — The numbers nobody publishes.
- Guardianship: What It Costs and What It Takes (coming soon) — The legal, financial, and emotional reality of the process.
- Credit and Banking with a Special Needs Dependent (coming soon) — How having a dependent who can’t manage money changes your financial life.
Why This Matters
Most finance sites ignore special needs planning entirely. The ones that don’t treat it like a footnote — a paragraph in an estate planning article, a bullet point in a list of tax-advantaged accounts. That’s not enough. Not for parents who are trying to protect their child from a financial system that could destroy their benefits with a single well-meaning check.
I’m not a financial advisor. I’m not a lawyer. I’m a dad who’s been doing this for 21 years and is still figuring it out. What I share here is what I’ve actually done, what I’ve actually learned, and what still keeps me up at night. I’ll always tell you to verify with a professional — especially an attorney who specializes in special needs law — but I’ll also tell you the things they don’t always mention.
Like the fact that financial planning for a special needs child isn’t really about money. It’s about trying to build a life for someone and then trying to make sure that life doesn’t fall apart when you’re no longer around to hold it together.
— Thomas