<p>We had always hoped that when the youngest graduated fr. college, he would be on his own. Now with graduation looming in May, we’ve found that he can participate (will have completed coursework) in the May grad. but has to do a fulltime unpaid internship this summer in order to receive his diploma…ugh.
So looks like we’ll still be supporting him for at least the next eight months and prob. more.</p>
<p>Yea, D has no clear plan beyond trying to complete all her courses & graduate in May. None of us knows what comes after that but she will try to figure out her options this term. We really need her to focus on finishing her courses and figuring out her next steps. We are keeping our fingers crossed that she will figure it out – she always has up until now and are hoping she will continue to do so as she moves forward. We expect that we may have to be paying room & board for some time while she figures out her next steps & hunts for a job.</p>
<p>Any suggestions by others how long they help their kids with room & board while said kid hunts for a job? Thanks! Some of her peers have had folks say they have to move back home & can live there rent free while they get a job & save up for next steps while others are given help with room & board while they job hunt.</p>
<p>It all depends on what kind of jobs she wants and where the jobs are located. If the parents are living in an area where there are no available jobs in her field, it doesn’t make sense for her to move back home.
Lots of companies like to see a local or nearby address where they can set up interviews within a day or two.
If my kid was aggressively job hunting, I don’t see any reason to set a deadline.</p>
<p>Yea, we figure we’ll play it by ear. We told her that rent & food is cheaper for us than rent, food and tuition. 
There are a TON more opportunities where she is, near her U, than in or near our home. We figure she’ll be able to share living quarters with others & live fairly inexpensively while she job hunts or figures out her next steps. She knows she always has a bed in our home as well. ;)</p>
<p>DS is working at a fairly low-paying job while he applies to grad school. Today he and I went to BJs (like a Costco in the Northeast) and I bought him razor blades (boy, are those things expensive), trail mix, raisins, almonds, dress socks, and dental floss. The essentials.</p>
<p>My adult kid makes good money and I’m sure she will be able to support herself with a shared housing situation with friends when she graduates. I will still pay for health insurance, cell phone and car insurance.</p>
<p>I mean no offense by this, but if she makes such good money why doesn’t she pay her own phone and car insurance? I’m always amazed when I see things like that. When I turned 16 and started driving I was told to buy my own car and had to pay my own insurance. Can’t do it? You’re not driving. We started working at age 14 to have money saved up. Same thing with a cell phone. Health insurance, parents covered us till we graduated college but then we were thrown off. I found a job with health insurance insurance right away but my sister did not. She had to get her own individual plan for 6 months or so. Now they have changed the laws to allow people her age to continue on the parents plan but she’s getting her insurance through her job.</p>
<p>^Good enough to pay rent but not enough for everything else. She also needs to put some of her earned money into her business. Health insurance is free until she is 26. We will pay for car insurance until she turns 25, too expensive on her own. For cell phone, it makes a lot of sense for us to pay $10 instead of D1 to pay $70-100.</p>
<p>My D is 21 and graduating this Summer. We hope she will find employment, although she will need to go to grad school to become the person she wants to be. She does not want to move back home, and we want her to fly, but she knows she is welcome to come back home if needed. We are it. There are no sugar grandmas,inlaws or siblings to help out. They are long gone. We have supported her wholeheartedly as much as possible. We footed most of the bill for college and we will be feeling that effect long after she graduates. She also will have her government school loans to pay. Grad school will be on her own dime. We do intend to help her out if possible, but there is no expectation on either part. She is trying to manage on her own, budgetting her money, living in an off campus apartment with 2 roomates. Its all a learning process. She cooks at home because it is cheaper. At times I want to help her out more, but I do restrain myself. We pay for medical, dental, clothing, books supplies, cell phone, metrocard and some other extras. She has no car. Its all a matter of what is comfortable and doable for your family.
Our parents helped us out financially during college and throughtout our marriage when we needed help, now we are paying it forward to or daughter.</p>
<p>My son graduated last year from NYU May '11 and has been working full time ever since. He shares an apt in Brooklyn with 2 friends. He has access to health insurance from his job, but being a skeptic I told him I’d keep him on my plan (in case the job was short lived) but he did take their dental/vision plan which costs way less than I was paying for him. I also have him on the cell phone plan (but HE bought the Iphone). I got him a new computer (MAC) for a graduation gift. I am paying his loans with his tax return $$.</p>
<p>The $150(?)/month it costs me to keep him on my health insurance and cell plan are a PITTANCE of what his education cost me.</p>
<p>He’s been to San Francisco on business and is going to Barcelona later this month (all on the company dime of course!)</p>
<p>Could I being doing less or more for him? sure, but we’re BOTH happy with the current arrangement.</p>
<p>It costs us nothing to keep both kids on our medical insurance until they turn 26–our plan makes no distinction between just H&W and H&W + kids. D doesn’t have a car so she doesn’t have any auto insurance. We have both S & D on our cell plan, which is on a month to month contract currently while S figures out what we want next.</p>
<p>This is super long, but I thought it might interest people to hear one person’s path from supported-by-parents to self-supporting.</p>
<p>I graduated from a New England high school in 1992 and began at an in-state private college in 1992. My college is about 25 minutes drive from my parents’ house (and can be reached by public transit if you don’t have a time limit :)) and didn’t offer me any scholarships. </p>
<p>My parents and grandmother paid for college; my choice of college was somewhat affected by the fact that this was the college my grandmother was willing to help pay for, but not strongly enough that my parents would’ve made me go there if it had been too big, too small, too far away, didn’t offer my chosen fields of study, etc. For the first two years, I had no loans or work study, and my parents gave me a monthly allowance for personal costs as well as paying for books, etc. For the third and fourth year, when my brother went to school and I qualified for Sub Stafford and work-study, I had small loans and a very part-time on-campus job which I supplemented with income from summer jobs (my parents would help out if I truly needed something essential, but mostly I was on my own for personal expenses). First summer: lived at home, worked part-time. Second summer: worked at sleepaway camp. Third summer: lived at home, worked part-time. </p>
<p>As a double major in music and theater production, there was an expectation from both of my academic departments that I was working in both fields during the summers, but I wasn’t good enough to get into paid companies so I did a lot of volunteer community theater/choir productions. </p>
<p>My parents didn’t charge me rent during the summers or while I was in grad school, and charged me a tiny rent while I was working full-time. They paid for my health insurance and for any medical stuff that insurance wouldn’t cover. I was expected to help out around the house much more than had been expected before I went to college. This was pre-cellphone era, and I never learned to drive so the car thing wasn’t an issue. My parents made one year’s worth of payments on my student loans after I graduated, so that I could get the benefits of 12 on-time payments, and after that I was on my own (and frequently forgot to pay the bills and incurred penalties–this was also before the era of e-notifications and online bill pay).</p>
<p>After college, I was immediately hired by a very high-end sheet music bookstore. (If you were a musician anywhere on the East Coast before about 1998, you knew this place.) They didn’t pay a living wage by Boston standards, and my career path was music/theater education so grad school was in my future.</p>
<p>1st year out of college: Lived at home, paid my parents a small rent, saved money for grad school.
2nd year out of college: Got an apartment a few towns over with two friends, used up all the money I’d saved the first year (my job still didn’t pay a living wage). Most parents would’ve thrown a fit. Mine shrugged and said “well, you’ll have to take loans for grad school instead”. Moved back home at the end of the year.</p>
<p>3rd year out of college: Lived at home, paid my parents a small rent, saved money for grad school. Near the end of that year, my parents issued the ultimatum: If I didn’t start grad school the following year, they would stop paying for my health insurance and my rent at home would be raised to something like what I’d have to pay to share an apartment.</p>
<p>4th year out of college: Two semesters of grad school (savings paid for one semester, took Stafford loans for the rest). Determined very conclusively that this was not the career path for me.</p>
<p>January 2001-present: Full-time job, that pays me enough to support myself and save some, at a college I won’t identify but which I love a whole lot and which pays below-average salary but offers terrific health/dental insurance . Absurdly cheap apartment, shared with terrible roommates, and poor money management skills until 2005. Salary raise in 2004, slightly more expensive apartment (but still well below 1/3 of my salary) shared with awesome roommates since 2005, and a comfortable savings cushion but not enough for the down payment on a condo. No car, no pets, no spouse or kids, no travel (although all of that is voluntary, rather than extreme cost-cutting measures!) No regrets. </p>
<p>For the past four years, my mom has been offering to at least look into lending me the money for the down payment and helping me with the mortgage for a few years. I’ve declined, because she’s made it clear that in return she’d expect to have complete knowledge of, and some control over, my finances from then on. Her logic is that any money I spend on anything that’s not the mortgage, is money she’ll be obliged to give/lend me in order to ensure I meet my mortgage payments–so money I spend on anything not-mortgage is money out of her pocket, and she’s entitled to know where it’s going instead.</p>
<p>You can maybe see why I’ve turned her down. I love living with roommates and travel in social circles where that’s not at all unusual, even for persons of my advanced age (38). Any condo I could afford would be in neighborhoods so far away from my socialization hubs (yes, I’m still in community theater and choir! 5 companies and counting!) that none of my friends would ever visit me, because I also travel in social circles where people will do absolutely anything to avoid owning cars and in our city the subway/bus stops running at midnight. Renting means I can live pretty much wherever I want.</p>
<p>Wow. This <em>did</em> get long. Hope some of it’s useful to someone. Summary: Supporting your adult kids or cutting them completely loose aren’t the only options. There’s a lot of options in between. :)</p>
<p>D1 graduated in June '10. Started her job August '10. Company pays for her insurance and cell phone. D1 and future H bought a house in May '11 with no help from either side of parents. We signed car over to her that was “given” to her for HS graduation when she married in August '11. She and her H now pay the insurance so she is off of the “gravy train” as H jokes! If she would have needed help we would have given it to her but she has always been a saver and had things under control.</p>
<p>I still keep son on our cell phone plan but he mostly uses his cell from work. I keep him on it though. It makes me feel more connected, I think. We spend on getting vacation rentals that we can all gather at and enjoy ourselves. Otherwise, he hasn’t cost much since graduating. He may do an expensive graduate programs though so we may find ourselves subsidizing him down the road. Also, he finished undergrad in three years which was a savings. So all in all he’s not been too expensive for us. </p>
<p>You just have to realize there’s no real end zone in parenting. Crisis can strike and if so then you’re the parent and it will mean helping to support them thru.</p>
<p>I am shoveling $1100.00 a month for kids- they are out of the house though and learning much- amazing how they focus on life and the necessities of life whereby they start setting goals, etc…All I care about now, when people ask me about retirement is: “I hope I can live long enough to enjoy what they call disposable income” :)</p>
<p>S1 is doing pretty well. Working hard and paying his own way. However, he can’t really decide what he wants to do, and despite many years loyalty and hard work to the same business, he is not appreciated. Although he has repeatedly expressed his desire to advance, and many less qualified people have been promoted over him. We pay his car insurance and license, although he pays everything else car related, and pay out-of-pocket medical expenses (he pays the insurance premium since it isn’t provided by his job).</p>