We have our hopes to be in the same city/state with DD2/SIL/5 grandchildren soon to live (maybe some time in 2027). Anticipating things sequentially happening - it seems SIL’s job is in the queue/going through the hiring steps with anticipated September start date (government jobs with his agency are a bit prolonged). Then will see if this job settles in nicely. Then making sure they want us to live in their city. As soon as SIL gets the job I will work in earnest on getting our home decluttered/packed up so it can get ready to be on the market. Once sold, we can see what the properties are like in the new city. We will see if SIL’s parents have made the move to Assisted Living in their city (they are still dragging their feet, but their MDs say they need to make the move…..also moving from a distant state). Our move is independent of their move - neither has to ‘move first’.
Looking to have more available liquid assets ‘loosened up’ this year for those transitional/moving costs and various disruptions. I will have to be making lists and handling it all like a job with ‘job done’ when we are in our new home in new city and all running well on the home front. Having lived in current community for 43 years and in the home we built 34 years ago, it will be big transitions for us.
My wife and I got virtually no help from parents. We both had college loans. Times were tight for a long time. Our honeymoon was a driving one. I didn’t get anything from my parents until my Dad died. Mom started to gift a little after that. She has since passed away and we had a small inheritance. My wife still has her Dad alive.
We got the kids through undergrad with no loans. Kid #2 has one more year left and will earn a Masters with plans on a Doctoral program. Kid#1 is launched fully. We did gift the kids a small amount from the inheritance.
Our plans do not include bailing out our kids. If they needed money from us because of bad financial actions I will probably kill them first. If our plan works over the next 9 years we should have money to leave the kids upon our death. I will still have a life insurance policy that will help them as well.
We have been taking the kids on nice Xmas vacations the last few years and covering the expenses. I do plan on passing some money down earlier if things look good for us. I know they probably could use the money in their late 30s and early 40s more. We could have used some help then. It is all dependent on how things are going at those times.
Basically my kids would each get one bail out in life.
Everyone adjusts as time goes on. Many on this thread do a lot of financial planning, especially if they are involved with ‘caring for parents’ while also having their own children growing up into adulthood.
When we turned 65 in 2021, our DDs were 25 and 27 - we were married 15 years before DD1 was born - we have been married for 47 years and got married when we both were out of college a year, at age 22. Times for us were also tight for our early marital years - we shared a vehicle to get into our own purchased home, then moved to other cities/other purchased homes with opportunity by choice 1st time and decision forced the 2nd time (DH’s manufacturing plant shutting down so having to relocate). We have stayed in our current community for a long time, purchased a 3rd home and built our 4th and current home.
One has situations that are thrust upon them which changes decisions - I had aggressive cancer at age 53 (when DDs were in 8th and 10th grades), and this changed working trajectory for me, and it also used up financial resources (max copays and deductibles for family for 4 years over a 5-year period). But I survived in as good of health as possible, DDs had everything educationally and experientially w/o being impacted by my health/circumstances. I had a ‘sunset career’ using my continually active RN license (having enough time and earnings in social security to draw my own earnings separate from DH).
Some people thrive on travel in retirement and budget for it. DH traveled the globe for work and has no desire for sight-seeing travel. I have a group trip in November in the US (travel w/o DH) - just reviewing information now on it - attended two OLLI/Road Scholar meetings in Jan about it - have a reading list too, “The Best of New Mexico: Santa Fe, Taos and Albuquerque”. Have my flight to arrange and almost everything else is ‘all inclusive’ with the group. I had a fun travel experience with our local OLLI group to Pittsburgh May 2025, and obtaining an excellent book about Pittsburgh (which included a lot of history and pictures) allowed me to absorb well the whole experience. I attend the lectures of some members of our local OLLI group that do a lot of travel - hearing their experiences and seeing their photos is ‘enough’ for me.
DH is going on a fishing trip with his brother (leaving Friday), which will include hiking and also 3 brothers being together - he is driving/they are driving, and it will not be expensive but ‘family enriching’ - hope the weather cooperates. Summer in WI and MN can be quite glorious.
Until situations ‘unfold’ one can prepare and plan. Untoward things happen and one adjusts their plans.
Good article. (Our kids usually resist accepting money. But they are on board with a bit of “travel with your parents”, letting us pay majority of expenses.)
Too bad it is a Wall Street Journal article. If NYT, maybe my father would read it. No impact on me, as he’s chose to leave all to his wife and his grandchildren (which is fine by me). It just might be nice for him to consider gifting some to his grandchildren while alive - some of them have children of their own, could probably put bonus money to good use for family purposes.
“That’s what gives me joy,” she said. “The daily grind puts a lot of pressure on people. If you can alleviate a little of it, I think that’s great.” That is so true - if one is in the ‘sandwich’ time with young children (time/energy/money), in demanding career times, and all the demands that life situations have - including those one does not have input/control on nor the ability to gain the skills to do anything about some of these demanding situations except to learn how to cope as well as one can while avoiding becoming an alcoholic, drug addict or ruining current relationships. I do remember those more stressful times; some of it is the uncertainties for children/grandchildren in formative years having good life direction. Having a few more financial resources does lift off some of the stress with giving some options - like not having to work a lot of extra hours and instead spending more time with family time/contact.
”Vicky Graybill, 76, remembers asking her parents for a loan to help buy Christmas presents for her children during a rough financial patch in the 1990s. They turned her down.” Unless the parents were in worse financial shape (and w/o real explanation in the article) - that is telling on things - did she think she had a better relationship with her parents, did the parents have some things in their past that ‘damaged’ them in some way, and all kind of other reasons that certainly would affect me keeping these parents/grandparents at arm’s length to not further pass on damage. I think the grandparents could have provided some money as a gift, not a loan, unless they were totally financially strapped.
”David Hertzberg, a 66-year-old retired federal employee, said no to his son when he asked for money to pay off credit-card debt in his 20s.” Yes, the son needs to get himself out of this situation - in his 20s he can work a second job and drastically cut his lifestyle to pay off his debt.
We all have to figure things out - time/energy/money - and make adjustments in the retirement phase of life.
I think it’s hard for our generation to understand that our parents went through the depression, as children, but it was a time of great instability. We won’t know that, we’ve grown up in an environment of great growth. So to expect my generation to do things the same way or to understand how our parents did, the world has changed.
In the same way I feel that my children approach things in a different manner also. They’ve had so much, traveled and experiences we didn’t. Our children’s parents weren’t as worried about frugality.
I see my mil who thinks that all of her stuff has purpose and should be kept because someone might have a need. In a different way than I do. And my kids? They have little use for others stuff because they have so much.
How I will distribute my wealth will probably be very different than how my parents did. I’ve said it before. We’ve changed from a parent based family structure to a child based one.
We make fun of my mom all the time for using the Depression as an excuse for her inability to throw things away. Her father was a dentist to the wealthy industrialists who he and my grandmother had gone to college with (my grandmother had been a scholarship student but her friends were the daughters of industry ( think the Chicago Jewish equivalent of the Vanderbilts). It was normally only the wealthiest of the wealthy that sent girls to college. My grandfather had met her friends and their boyfriends and they became his patients. My mother was raised in very much upper middle class circumstances during the Depression with a live in maid and a cook.
My mil was the daughter of German immigrant farmers. Her mom died when she was 10. She had another sister who passed away from polio. Her dad married a woman who didn’t want to be a stepmother. They moved to another state without her when she was 18 and her sister 17.
Her life experience was different. She thought they were lucky because they were farmers and grew their own food.
That’s so sad. The reason my grandmother went to college was because her mother had passed away and her father married a woman who didn’t have children and didn’t marry until she was in her 40s. She had to work and she told my grandmother that she should try to get a scholarship and go to college because what if she never married and needed a good job. Her stepmother was so excited to get to be a mom to a little girl and she loved my grandmother. She told her all the time how smart she was. And that’s how my grandmother ended up going to college at the University of Chicago (which admitted women since 1892…my grandmother in 1921) and meeting my grandfather on her first day of school.
Reminds me of my Swedish grandfather, who relocated with family to Queens NY when he was a baby. When a teen, he spent a summer in Minnesota with some extended family who had settled there. He claims to have really liked farm life (and a girl he met there ). For many years I had assumed they needed more hands on the farm. But recently I’ve realized that his parents may have welcomed a chance to have him well fed elsewhere. Win/Win.
I took over the finances for my parents – the investments and then the bills – and am now doing the same for my MIL. In the latter case, it took a while for her to trust me enough to do so. I have made clear that I do not want any payment for helping. This is in part so she will trust me but also because I don’t want to set a precedent. (There is another job and I don’t want to create an incentive for an underemployed and opportunistic son-in-law to pad his income by offering to take on the a task for pay.) It did take a while for her to show me her will, though I had talked through various aspects of it with her. She still has not given me a copy. I needed a durable power of attorney to take over her finances.
My father never talked about it, but it is clear that growing up poor in the Depression affected many of his life decisions. But, I think he had the same attitude as his parents (who were immigrants), my mother and her parents that what each generation should do is make sure that the next generation gets the best education and best opportunities they could provide. ShawWife and I had/have the same attitude.
We had a very useful meeting with one member of the estate planning team of one of our financial advisors. Very sophisticated. He suggested a number of things I did not know about or had not thought about.
). For many years I had assumed they needed more hands on the farm. But recently I’ve realized that his parents may have welcomed a chance to have him well fed elsewhere. Win/Win.