Supporting Adult Children

Posted by: Sophie H. | Dec 19,2007


As this is the retirement blog, most of my points are devoted towards helping people plan their retirement, or how to organize finances post-retirement.  Makes enough sense.  What do you do if you’re a fine financial planner and your children are in dire financial straits?  The opposite case usually gets the most attention: children who have to care for their parents, down to balancing the checkbook.  Often the opposite occurs – retirees who need to help out their children.

This can be difficult both financially and emotionally.  Nobody likes to see their children in financial trouble.  Most parents want to help out, if possible.  If you’ve got above-adequate retirement savings built up, you’ll want to chip in.  However, don’t do this if it’s just going to prolong the bad habits, as opposed to right the ship that will stay on course.  Check out this post by Married with Children that outlines how you should talk to kids about money.  The same issues could apply to much older adult children if they’ve never become effective at money management.  

If you’ve got less-than-adequate retirement savings, having to support an additional person can make retirement planning that much harder.  No parent wants to turn their back on their kids.  But sometimes this can do more harm than good.  

This commentator at Bloomberg has an interesting proposal: buy your problem child a meeting with a financial advisor.  A bad attitude towards money is something like a bad marriage – sometimes all it takes is a good sitting-down with a counselor to point out problems.  Some of these problems are blatantly obvious but need pointing out anyway – and many children won’t listen to their advice of their parents and need to hear the (bad) news from an impartial advisor.

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