A little bit of empathy and compassion would go a long way’: emotional and psychosocial experiences of money management and cognitive decline in later life

The ability to manage money is essential for independent functioning, but this is highly sensitive to cognitive decline. The issue is of growing importance to societies with ageing populations required to make increasingly complex financial decisions in later life. Moreover, managing money does not just involve a set of skills to be deployed rationally, but is influenced by a range of emotional and psychosocial factors that have shaped people’s interactions with money across their life course. There is relatively little knowledge about how older adults, families, and care professionals working with older people navigate and experience potential challenges of declining mental capacity to manage money. This paper draws on a UK-based qualitative study involving interviews with 13 older people and/or family members and 28 social sector professionals about their experiences of supporting older people with cognitive decline to manage money, triangulated with public information resources from major national organisations across the health, care, consumer and charity sectors. The analysis focuses on the emotive and personal nature of cognitive decline and money management. Declining mental capacity to manage money can strike at the core of people’s sense of who they are, leading to strong tensions and difficulties in discussing support. Support to manage money is often framed in discussions as ‘there if we need it’; this can be reassuring for people, but may be challenged if there are subsequent disagreements and changes in perspectives about the detail and timing of support. These nuances are not well reflected in public information resources, which largely emphasise administrative procedure. Financial organisations may lack empathy that declining mental capacity to manage money is extremely challenging. The paper highlights a greater need for recognition of the emotional and psychosocial complexities presented by declining mental capacity to manage money in later life.