My late FIL made some costly mistakes post-retirement. As a result, we were often asked to pay for various big ticket extras. Dh was quick to say yes until I learned that FIL still had money to pay his own way but was saving it so he could leave an inheritance for his kids. At that point, I suggested to Dh that he have a frank conversation with his father about how we were subsidizing the other siblings’ inheritance. Some of the other sibs were not happy when they learned that their dad decided to spend his own money, thus reducing what they would receive. In FIL’s last years, I did a lot of his personal shopping but the amount spent was only a few thousand and not tens of thousands as it would have been otherwise.
We absolutely do not expect our kids to support us. It’s more likely that one of our kids will need assistance due to health problems. We’ve taken steps to help our kids, but the rest will probably be spent on in-home care.
So far so good here. My dad seems set financially, and my ex-MIL is 85 and has not outlived her assets. They are the only remaining parents. My goal is to not be a burden on my kids, but I guess you never know.
My ex-SIL has Alzheimer’s at age 65 that is becoming quite advanced. She and BIL have always led a very healthy lifestyle (eating & exercise) – she could live to 90. BIL has her at home now, but that probably can’t last forever. Not sure of the details of their finances, but doubt long term care is affordable. Their kids may have to help. One nephew married wealth – maybe they will help. Even though they are exes, I am quite close with them, and it is difficult to watch.
If anyone will run out of money, it is my ex-H. He is terrible with money. Hoping my kids don’t end up having to support him. For that reason alone I hope his 3rd wife stays with him…
Outside of the cc bubble my guess is many of our parents are better set for retirement than current 40-50 year olds, since many of them have pensions and our generation does not. My parents’ house might be ok for aging, but their 3 acre yard and gardens are not. We won’t have to help them financially, but if my dad goes first, my mom will need a lot of help with the paperwork, contractors, etc.
H’s mom is 84 and failing, mentally and physically. She needs to be somewhere safer. H’s sister are also bad about buying things and trying to bill the siblings,
My wonderful DIL says she’s keeping me a room for when I’m old. Hopefully I don’t have to take her up on her offer.
This is a “hot topic” for me it now. I will likely have to support my mom, sooner rather than later. I am an only child. She is only 69, but has nothing but minimal social security and her health is not good. She’s a long term smoker (so has breathing issues) and addicted to pain killers, but she’s in denial of having any serious issues. Her memory is not good, but quite frankly we don’t know if it’s because of drugs, so it might get better, or not. Her Doc says she doesn’t exhibit the signs you normally see in Alzheimer’s patients (I can’t remember what exactly he said, but that was the concept). She lives in another state, with a couple of her siblings. That situation is volatile, and she will likely need to move soon. It will be very difficult if she comes to live with me, and quite frankly I’m not sure we could live together for long. I am willing to try it, but we work over full time, and I’m not sure she should be alone for hours on end. I also need to figure out how Medicaid will work if she needs to go into a nursing home.
I am very hopeful we won’t have to rely on our children for any financial support. We have saved a lot for retirement, and continue to save. We saved enough to pay all undergrad expenses for our kids, and are done with that. We plan to have our house paid off before we retire. I am still trying to find the “magic number” that’s enough to safely call it quits, but I worry that we won’t have enough.
Both sets of parents have passed. Both moms outlived their husbands by several years. They had different retirement life styles but both were frugal with healthy incomes. My mother was a well to do widow who lived in a CCRC, so never any financial worries. But my sister had to help her out with the daily life activities, handling her finances, shopping, doctor appointments, and so on. And her health declined in her 70’s (she passed at 80). Living in a CCRC doesn’t guarantee a cushy retirement or frees family from worry. When her health declined, my siblings had to come and work together to get and oversee the medical and in home care our mom needed.
My MIL lived on her own in a rural home. While one son lived a few hundred yards away, she was very independent and capable until she came down with cancer at 86. Her last year, she lived with a son - not for financial reasons, she too had a comfortable income - she needed the care. At first she tried in home nursing care and it didn’t work at all. The closest son and SIL found themselves at her home essentially full time to supervise and direct the in home caregiver. The family decided to have her move in with one son and SIL who were best able to provide care.
So, I hope our kids don’t have to provide for us financially but I also learned that money is just one aspect. We may find ourselves dependent on our kids for other reasons.
I am grateful that my mother, not confident of her own money management skills and worried that she could become a burden if she made mistakes, turned over control of her investments to me while she was in her 60’s. That way it was up to me (her only child) to make sure that her money lasted and I didn’t end up having to support her. This worked out well, and she lived comfortably and free of worry well into her 90’s, with just a small amount left over for her grandson’s college fund when she passed away. But do I expect the same system with our son? No. We are saving enough toward retirement not to have to burden him with worrying about whether or not our money will last and hoping to have enough left to help him out a little, rather than the reverse.
My parents are very well-off with extensive “what if” plans. We (children) even each have a binder with all the documents, passwords, copies of the most current will, all the estate planning stuff and even numbered directions. (My dad was an engineer, mom was a technical writer). We sit down once a year and review The Plan so there are no surprises. Investments are designated for the grand- and great- grandchildren. My mom already has labels on property with notes on who gets what. My parents are in their late 80’s.
OTOH, my ILs (in their mid-70’s) say they have a will, but they don’t think they know where they put it. “You can just sell the house and split the money” is what they say. They have no long-term care insurance, and we are pretty sure they have no estate planning. They just bought two vacation homes -cash— after spending the past 7 years trying to unload the one that was underwater. Real estate, FIL asserts, is a fail-safe investment. DH and his sibs have attempted to start a conversation about all this, but meet stony resistance and FIL actually gets up and walks away. FIL has had 3 heart attacks and 2 cancer bouts. MIL is increasingly confused and disoriented. We are worried, and helpless at this point.
We are already well into estate planning, house repairs, and anything else that will keep us from disrupting our childrens’ lives. We don’t have a lot of money, and little property, so that makes it easier.
I think there is a world of difference between “they just never made a lot, so we have to step in” and “they made plenty but they blew it.” Unfortunately the latter is what I’m dealing with.
I do not suspect that we will have to help my parents or MIL financially. My MIL is in her upper eighties, is healthy, still has all her marbles, and is living by herself at home. The reason she can do that is because she is willing to hire people to take care of her house, and do whatever she needs (even though she is tight with money). My father is not willing to hire people until things become desperate (like having to crawl out of his home because he had no railing), even though they have a decent amount of money. I think he would be happy for me to pay for all the improvements he needs, We could afford it, but my husband thinks it is crazy wrong for us to do so, when they have plenty of cash. He’s right, and I think my Dad just has to get used to it.
Our kids should never have to take care of us financially, or physically, as we should be set to pay for someone else to do so, if needed. They will probably be very happy with their inheritance, however, I’m hoping they don’t get it for another 50 years! The thing I worry about losing my common sense. I hope that when we need help, that we will pay for someone to work on the house (my husband does everything now), or improvements on it to get around, or moving to a senior friendly place when needed.
Right now we joke about putting in a zipline to the back yard, however we really should be thinking more about an elevator…
@greenbutton My father, also engineer, was similar. Had it all planned out and saved for. And then colon cancer at age 72, while he was still otherwise very healthy. One sibling had to go down to half-time work to help him and my step-mom. Just dealing with all the medical stuff took so much mental energy. He was wiped out most of the time and step-mom was overwhelmed by it all. We needed someone from the family at the hospital daily to track his treatment and keep track of the information from the multitude of doctors. If you’ve ever had a family with a serious illness and had to navigate the medical system, you know what I mean about this. Nobody plans for that to happen, but really it is not that uncommon. Numerous friends have navigated this in late-40s and 50s. Then there is Alzheimer’s. What a wretched disease. A friend’s mom (widow) really torched her financial situation in the early stages of this when she portrayed to the outside (family & friends) that she was fine and ‘no, I do NOT need help!’ But was making terrible financial decisions that she was hiding (or very likely just forgot about). She was in denial and also the disease caused her to make poor decisions.
I think we do a disservice to our young adult children if we are not honest about the responsibilities that most adults have as their parents (including in-laws) age. I look around me and I see many of my peers helping take care of elderly parents for some period of time. Maybe that is not direct money support, but working less in order to help care-give or manage parents’ finances is a real financial cost.
My husband was born and raised in a country where multiple generations living under one roof is the norm.
My MIL lived with my SIL, but all the siblings contributed $ for living expenses, and we all took turns taking her to appointments, etc.
My parents have passed, but I have an older brother who is unmarried, unpartnered, and without children. I help him with doctor’s appointments and keeping the financials organized on his rental unit. I’m not really sure what we’ll step up to do when he cannot live on his own. He is fiercely independent, but on the other hand, needs some help.
I’m not sure what I expect from my own children. Kindness and patience would be nice. I sometimes worry about being the caretaker for my husband, in the future. Yikes.
@liska21, all good points. Both my parents are cancer survivors and my mother’s family was involved in a protracted probate process with no good outcomes, and I think all that influenced their planning. Also, we had an aunt with early onset Alzheimer’s and omg, there’s just nothing worse. When she died, we were so relieved it was over but it had totally ruined her spouse financially, even with my parents’ help. My mother also had to make the decision to turn off her mom’s life support, which we all very much supported, but it was obviously traumatic and I know she hopes to spare me that.
I’ve tried to talk to my sibs about caregiving plans for our parents, but they are all men, and blithely sure that whenever something happens, we’ll just figure it out then. As fate always has it, the least reliable child lives closest; the most able (that’s me!) is the farthest away. I roll my eyes, and wish we could have that conversation now, before we are faced with imminent medical emergencies.
The talk of siblings is rough, too. I have a sibling who is not really capable of managing their finances, due to just plain bad choices. My sister has an in law who is also helpless and hopeless. My sister in law has a sibling who is also incapable of acting like a grown up.
None of these people have a development delay or anything like that, they are just people who make bad choices and/or are overwhelmed by life.
I really struggle with the concept of what PizzaGirl talks about, you have plenty & you blow it & others are supposed to fix that.
I would be ok with it, in a sense, if the person would say, “here, here it all is, you take over” but that is so often not the case, it’s “fix this now with your money & then let me live my life to squander until I need you again”
I don’t know what it right & wrong and what is enabling versus compassion, but I know it’s rough. And in all three cases, what is being done financially by the siblings is being done to prevent the helpless person from living with a sibling.
It is very much like the person who has lost it mentally, but not lost it enough that anyone can prevent them from making more bad choices, like FIL with dramatic short term memory loss, but he’s still legally able to do whatever he wants.
No. Both sets of parents are financially well-off and all have LTC policies as do we. We also agree that children are not financially responsible for parents’ welfare and parents are not financially responsible for adult childrens’ welfare.
Absolutely not. We’ve been quite upfront with kiddo that he has zero responsibility for our welfare now or ever. That is all on us. Should the world implode or our wits leave us, we may end up wards of the state, but we would never expect (or ask) help from our son. He has his own life to live and (hopefully) family to provide for.
We suspended 401K contributions for four years to send our son to boarding school. We’re past that now, and because he chose a service academy for college, the 529 funds come back to us penalty-free, minus tax on gains. We will be giving some of those funds to our son to strengthen his budding investment portfolio, but he knows that we plan to spend our wealth in retirement and not preserve capital for him.
We all fend for ourselves with no expectation of help from family members.
"Absolutely not. We’ve been quite upfront with kiddo that he has zero responsibility for our welfare now or ever. That is all on us. Should the world implode or our wits leave us, we may end up wards of the state, but we would never expect (or ask) help from our son. He has his own life to live and (hopefully) family to provide for.
We all fend for ourselves with no expectation of help from family members"
This makes me sad. This sounds like a very distant family. I do not expect to have to help my parents too much, nor do I expect to need much help from my kids. However, we are always here for our family if they need us, and I expect my children to be so too, because we love each other. Not to take care of us, but to make sure that we are taken care of, with our own money.
It takes effort and intervention to end up as a ward of the state. If you lose your wits without anyone to advocate for you, is how you end up becoming a homeless elderly person, sleeping under a bridge with all your belongings in a shopping cart. I can’t imagine letting my loved ones get in that situation, nor can I envision a situation where they care so little about us.
We care a LOT about each other and have a very tight extended family. We only have one child, and he is the love of our life. BUT, we don’t place financial strings on anyone, no expectations.
“We care a LOT about each other and have a very tight extended family. We only have one child, and he is the love of our life. BUT, we don’t place financial strings on anyone, no expectations”
I understand the financial strings, but the way that you phrased it, it sounded like your son had zero responsibility to make sure you were taken care of, even if you lost your mind. Making sure no harm comes to someone is far different than having to pay to take care of them. I have seen what happens when someone has no kids or close friends just to watch over them (but not pay for them) after they have gotten dementia, and it’s heartbreaking. You need someone who truly cares about your welfare as you get older, just to keep an eye on you, to make sure.
Hmmm. We really don’t think he has any responsibility to make sure we’re taken care of. What he decides to do if the time comes when we can no longer drum this into him is his business but, no, he doesn’t have any “responsibility” to care for us.
But we also told him when he was hell-bent on film school that we were totally behind him following his passion but he also needed to be OK with the potential for living in a box under the freeway.
