Retirees Provide Family Financial Support

The feature article this week on SCJ’s Senior Finance page deals with a piece of research from Ameriprise Financial about Baby Boomers supporting their aging parents. The research addressed issues of support for the GEN X and Y groups as well.  The piece caught our attention because we have heard from so many friends and family about their experiences supporting their elderly parents and/or their adult children and/or their adult grandchildren.  It seems as though the economic issues are hitting every generation, and Baby Boomers are getting caught in the middle.

A recent discussion in which we were involved highlighted experiences senior couples had providing financial assistance to their adult children. Several couples were helping their adult children with mortgage payments.  Some had paid off college student loans for their kids.  Still others purchased vehicles for their adult children and grandchildren.  The discussion was both comforting with realizing the common experiences we were having, and startling that we were all going through essentially the same family issues.

Support for Elderly Parents

The discussion then moved on to what was happening with our elderly parents.  Now we are all retired.  We are not Baby Boomers.  The Ameriprise Financial research looked at Baby Boomers.  But we retirees quickly realized we are dealing with the same issues the Baby Boomers are addressing.  We are also assisting our elderly parents with medical issues of aging, financial support, and daily needs of shopping and errands and housekeeping. In short, we retirees are doing the same thing the Baby Boomers are doing.  We just weren’t the subjects of the Ameriprise research.

Without revealing personal financial information, the group involved in the discussion realized we all are using our retirement resources to assist our elderly parents as well as our GEN X and Y children. We all became aware of the need our loved ones have for financial and daily-care support, and we all reaffirmed our choice to be available to our family members for their needs, so long as we are able.

Finally, we talked about the need to maintain our financial resources so that we are able to take care of ourselves, and then provide care for our parents and our adult children/grandchildren.   Those resources need to go a long way to cover the needs of four generations. We hope we have planned well financially.  We really hope so.