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You don’t stop being a parent when the kids are grown.
That may help explain why 44 percent of adults ages 18 to 34 surveyed by the Pew Charitable Trusts in late 2023 reported getting financial help from their parents in the past year.
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But helping your kids financially can be detrimental to you. The same survey found that more than a third of parents who gave their adult children financial help — and half of those with lower incomes — said doing so hurt their own financial situation.
If you’re one of them, you likely had the best of intentions. Maybe your child was out of work for a while or lives in an expensive city. Parents who struggled in their younger years may want to spare their children the same financial pain. Those who were better off might want to provide the comforts they enjoyed to offspring who otherwise “might not be able to afford a nice house in the suburbs and have access to a nice car,” says Anne Lester, former head of retirement solutions at J.P. Morgan and author of Your Best Financial Life: Save Smart Now for the Future You Want.
But giving an adult child a financial lifeline today might come back to haunt you when you’re ready to retire. Rob Burnette, CEO of Outlook Financial Center in Troy, Ohio, recalls a couple he worked with who said they would help their adult children temporarily, but the handouts continued longer than they anticipated.
“Now they have a mortgage in retirement that they didn't expect to have,” he says.
For parents (or grandparents) feeling the financial and emotional burden of footing the bill for adult children (or grandchildren), the road to change can be rocky, particularly if they are intent on preserving peace in the family. Here’s how to make the journey a little easier, for you and your kids.
Put retirement first
It’s a point financial advisers hammer home: Supporting adult children should not take precedence over saving for retirement. Yet a February 2024 Savings.com survey found that parents who provided financial help to adult kids gave them more than twice as much as they contributed to retirement savings — $1,384 a month in support versus $609 for retirement, on average.
To see how much your generosity could cost you, Meredith Stoddard, group team lead for awareness and engagement at Fidelity Investments, recommends doing a quick check on a retirement planning calculator. You might find that you’re in pretty good shape and can afford to help the kids — or you might discover that at the rate you’re saving, your nest egg will fall woefully short. Either way, it's best to know before you give.
Ask yourself: If you didn’t give that money to your kids, what would you use it for? Make sure it’s something you don’t (or won’t) need, Burnette says. It’s one thing to forgo a vacation one year, another to skip 401(k) contributions. See if you’re on track to have enough to cover not just your daily expenses in retirement but also future health care and, potentially, long-term care costs. If not, carefully consider how much you can support an adult child.
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