here's a question I keep hearing are boomers hoarding their [Music] wealth BR I am so excited that we get to talk about this because at its root there is a really interesting thing going on in the world right now but depending on where you get your information depending on what media source that you lean into you might have two very different perspectives of what that issue is yeah what I like is is that this is an important topic look it really is a a situation where there is a great deal of wealth with the baby boomer generation and then there's also younger Generations that might be struggling financially is there some bridge that needs to occur there so very important topic but we did think it's important to highlight be careful that you're not manipulated because look at what happened on this very serious question and then what the Press did with it so there was a tweet that went out and in response to the Tweet which we'll show you in a second this article was released and listen to this headline

okay Boomer, you're hoarding your nest egg, but your kids need financial help now. When I will be honest when I read this headline, I had a visceral response. I was like, Yeah, Boomer, what are you doing? But then we read the article. We actually went through the body, and what the article said was very different than the title that was laid out. Well, you see, they acknowledge that this came from a viral expose asking whether to give your beneficiaries the money today or let them wait to inherit it, and has drawn more than 10 million views. Very important topic. Now, the rest of the story before we actually get into the subject matter and give the answers. Why don't you share with the actual tweet that started this conversation? This is the tweet that led to this article headline. It said, Hey, just wrapped a client meeting. It was a female 73 and healthy, has two adult kids aged 42 and 47, 13-year-old grandson. Plenty of money for her to have a comfortable retirement. The conversation was mostly

focused on Estate Planning and encouraging her to feel okay giving money to her adult kids. Now here's what I said to her: think about life 20 years from now. You're 93 years old, your kids are in their 60s, and your grandson is 33. Then they'll inherit your money. However, at that time, everyone is fairly settled into who they are and what they will become. Now compare that with a gift today. Your kids are at a place in their lives where a financial gift can have a trajectory-altering impact. Consider the Ripple effects of removing a bit of financial stress from the parents of a 13-year-old. I'll help ensure your needs are met for the rest of your life, but if you see an opportunity to help people who matter to you, seize it. I love that, Brian. I think that's incredibly well said. No, you can tell Adam, fellow financial planner, obviously doing good work out there, trying to help people have these hard life decisions. This is an important one. You know, we spend a lot of content

talking about how hard the messy middle is, and for those of you who don't know, the messy middle is when you're typically in your late 20s all the way up to your early 40s where you've got your short on time. You're short on money because let's face it, you've got a marriage, you've got kids, you got job responsibilities. There's a lot going on that makes life really hard. Meanwhile, if you're a parent and maybe you are coming into the later parts, you're no longer working, you're retired, and you're starting to analyze and look at your assets and go, Man, there is a lot here. Should I help my children and we my adult children make life a little bit easier? I love the way Adam had this conversation in the Tweet. Don't love the headline that it created in the discussion, but we want to kind of jump in and give our own thoughts on how you navigate this hard decision. Well, yeah, it's not uncommon. A lot of very astute sound financial decision-makers find

themselves in a place. And Brian, I'm gonna steal one of your lines here. There's a difference in being a miser and being a maximizer, and a lot of financial mutants lose track of that. Well, here's what we really, really love about this tweet. At the end of the day, we really want you to enjoy your money while you're still around. The idea is not for most folks to save up all this money and then when you leave this Earth. You Leave It to the generations behind you. There is some balance between enjoying the fruits of your labor while you are here but also making sure that you don't enjoy them so much that you run out prematurely. Yeah, I also like that this is a good indicator or an example of being a healthy financial support for your loved ones not the economic outpatient care that you remember in milliona next door when they talk about traits of successful people. One of the key traits is making sure your adult children aren't so needy to your financial life that they never

stand on their own two feet, and they actually become an obligation to you, and they actually hurt your financial life. So we like to jump in and talk about how do you do this right because in a lot of ways we want our children, we always love our children, we want them to be the best versions of themselves, but we also want to share our success. So how do we kind of bring these things together where everybody comes out on the other side in a healthy way. Yeah, we think that when you're thinking through this, like how do I help them, what are the right ways to think about this, there are really two questions that you ought to triage right at the very front. On the forefront of your thinking ought to be these two questions. Number one, can I help? We'll dive into like what that means, how do you assess can I help, and number two, what's the best way to help because frankly there are a number of different ways and your kids are different people at different stages in your life.

looks very different when your children are 18, versus when your children are 48. By the time your kids get in their into their 40s, there's likely a chance they've already become the people that they will be. So, you have to triage and assess what is the best way for me to help where they are in their current Journey. So, let's jump into these two major questions: can I help now? Look in the Tweet example that we just showed. Obviously, they've got a financial planner, they've stress-tested their retirement plan, they're very comfortable, going to have plenty of resources. So, the answer is a solid yes. However, I will tell you, I have dealt with the other side of this equation, where I can even remember a case where I had a windfall client. They had worked in education their whole life, but because where their family land was, a big windfall of money came their way, and it should have set them up forever. Yep, but I remember I had to do some tough love.

because the adult children cuz she she had multiple children were picking her apart. I mean to the point of buying bedroom furniture for their houses to the point of when they were trying to go on the next vacation they were they were asking their mother for all these things and and and when you think think about hey and I know what these adult children were thinking hey Mom just came into all this money she can she can she's set she can help me out but when you have three or four kids and every adult child is asking mom to do these different behaviors you can quickly see that yes Mom came into a windfall but it is breaking the system and I had to put a stop to it to kind of make sure that she didn't sink herself so Bo we talk about this all the time what is something you can do when you're figuring out can I help yeah one of the things you know we always use this analogy you know whenever you get on an airplane they always tell you hey make sure you put on

your oxygen mask before you help those around you before you even help your children. Well, your finances are no different. Before you can start helping others, before you can start being generous towards their financial struggles, you have to make sure that you are on a firm foundation. And unfortunately, when we look just at the numbers broadly, we know that right now, 14% of parents are moving back in with their kids. Now, obviously, some of this may be by choice and that's wonderful if you want it to be. We want a family unit, if you want to live together, if you want to move back in, that's a magnificent thing. What I'm worried though, is that a number of these 14% are not by choice. It's by necessity. It's by parents recognizing, Holy cow, I am no longer able to provide for my well-being. And rather than being able to continue to help my kids, I now have to depend on my kids to provide shelter or resources for me. That's not the place you want to be in. And if you can assess early on

whether or not you can help. Hopefully, you can avoid being in that dire situation later on. So let's get into the nuts and bolts here. When you ask yourself, can I help, don't go off just the emotional stuff. You've got to actually, let's put pin to paper, let's look at the financial order of operations. Where are you at in this process? Are you ahead of the curve? Are you behind the curve? Are you right where you're supposed to be? Every one of those answers to those questions about your personal finances are going to help you figure out, can I actually help, or is it to my detriment to actually make this decision? And if you are ahead, that's great, you should help, that's a wonderful thing. But if you are behind, you should be true to yourself and you should recognize, man, I might not be in the position to be able to provide the help that I want to be able to provide to my kids. But even if that's the case, even if I cannot be the financial resource that my kids need right now.

there are a number, a plethora of non-financial ways that you can help your kids, and that you can pour into their lives. well, this is something we talk about a lot how if you're talking about non-financial ways that you can help your adult children. and look, it doesn't have to just be adult children. if you a lot of our audience you're in your a lot of our audience is in their late 20s all the way up to the 40s, so your kids are probably still in the house. it's not too early to start this process. you've got to teach your children to be good with money, and one of the things we like to do is start, you know, thinking about how do you start those and model those behaviors well for your children. you do a great job, um, when you're teaching your children. I think about the, the, the three-part system that that's very age-appropriate, which is the give, save, spend. can you talk about what you do with your, your girls and your son.

my kids are obviously young, so I can't talk to them about Roth IRAs and Roth conversion strategies, and safe withdrawal rates, but I can talk to them about give, safe spend every time money comes into their possession. I want them to understand, okay, there's a right thing to do with these dollars, and there's a wrong thing. First, we give, and then we save, and then we spend what's left over. That's a very age-appropriate thing for my kids, but then as your kids age, you want the educational content that you're providing them to also change. So as they get into their teenage and young adult years, there are different topics you'll walk through them, yeah, and that's one of the things you've heard me share many times, but I think it's very well worth repeating. When your children get to working age, I'm talking about 15, 16 years of age, help them get their first job, and then once they start having money coming in, talk to them about what are appropriate behaviors where you need

to be saving a portion of your income for the future, and better yet, why don't you take the role of what a lot of employers do? Why don't you prime the pump by actually doing dollar for dollar matches? I did this with my own daughter, and I've created a beast. I mean, every time she now comes into windfalls from work or other things, she will immediately come to me and say, Hey Dad, is that deal where you do dollar for dollar matching still working? If so, I want to give you some money to put in the investment account. While she's still in college, I'm like, Oh yeah, let's do this, and I load her up because I really do think that behavior of understanding giving a little bit of today for that Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow is so valuable. I also really like to make your kids go to work. You know, I think about Bo, you worked in Food Service, you waited on tables. I worked in fast food and did the drive-thru. It is amazing how

much of my adult life and the skills I developed working in fast food still have tremendous dividends when I'm dealing with clients when I'm dealing with co-workers. So make sure that you are letting your children have some chances to learn how to work and build and understand the power of letting your money work, but also a good work ethic. And then even as your kid age and as they get into adulthood, there's even age-appropriate ways that you can do adult education. When your kids begin to have kids of their own, are you encouraging them to make sure they have estate documents in place? Do they have life insurance in place? Are they saving appropriately? As you age and you prioritize your financial life, hopefully so too will your kids begin to prioritize their financial life. And even though you want to be able to provide that education, you want to be able to speak to that, you want to be able to lean into that for your kids, you want to give them room to fail. You don't want to do everything for them, you want to step

back and let them learn lessons on their own, but you can be that sounding board there to say, Hey, I noticed that you did this. I noticed that you made this choice. Did you think about it this way, or had you approached it this way, might that have been valuable? If they can learn those lessons early on, if they can fail small early in their life, hopefully that'll prevent them from failing big later on in their life. Well, this accountability creates self-reliance, but it also creates them to kind of stand on their own two legs, have skin in the game, create some scarcity in their life, and I think this will serve them well. Because now we're getting to the other side of this. Assuming that your answer was, Can I help? and the answer is yes, what are actually the best ways to help so that you don't create a crutch system where they're relying on you to just live their life? Yeah, if the first thing you have to ask is, how financially stable are they? Are they in a tight spot

because they're in the messy middle, and frankly, everybody in the messy middle finds themselves in some form of a tight spot. Or are they in a tight spot because of decisions that they are making that are not the sound decisions, they are the less than sound decisions you need to assess, and you need to be honest with yourself. Are they struggling now because life is just hard? Interest rates are up, housing prices have increased, children are more expensive, groceries are there and FL. Is that why things are tight, or are things tight just because they haven't made the tough decisions early on, and they have allowed their lives to be subsidized for you, and you need to have a real, real assessment of which of those is true, and which of those accurately defines where your kids really are? And I have a good example. We did a Q&A show, and I remember the question came in, Is hey, it was two things that kind of came to mind was my children, my adult children got their first job. They're still on my health.

insurance. Well, that might make sense from a financial standpoint because look, if you're already on a family plan, you have, they have younger siblings. It doesn't change your premium, but it might create some savings opportunities for them. I completely get that because with the laws now allow adult children to stay on your health insurance until age 26, might be a financial opportunity. Same thing, think about your mobile plans or car insurance and things like that. There might be financial opportunities, but that is going to be a little different than self-reliance. But with all that shared, I want you as the parent, and I don't want you to get too nosy, but you should pay attention to what are these opportunities creating in dividends from your children and have these conversations in some way, in a very tactful way, because you have to be careful because they are now spreading their wings, they're going into independence of adulthood. But you should find out is this savings that you're creating maybe through the health insurance or the mobile plan or the car.

insurance. If this savings is turning into saving an investment for the future, or is it just being consumed. And I would start internalizing some of that because you are paying attention to as an adult to see have my par have my adult children started showing dividends to good behaviors, good adult management of their personal finances. So because if they can be good with a little, they can probably be great with a lot. So as you give them more and more opportunity, but you do need to be paying attention to those dividends. All right, so let's talk about ways that we can help finan, assuming that they are in the situation where it makes sense. We love the idea of helping with one-time expenses, not supplementing lifestyle. We love the idea of, okay, maybe I want to help with education, or I want to help with experiences. I want to be generous there. What I don't want to do is say, hey, you know what, go buy the new car, and I'll cover the car payment. Or you know what, I'll help with the more, go buy the

more expensive house. I'll help with a mortgage that is different than you recognizing your kids saying, Hey, you know what? We're not going to be able to go on a family vacation this year. We're going to make sure that we buckle down. We're going to make sure we tighten the belt. We want to be saving for the future. And you say, Hey, you know what? Why don't we all go on a family vacation and I will foot the bill? That's a wonderful way to be generous and create a huge opportunity that does not subsidize lifestyle, but it does create memories that can ultimately blossom over time. Well, and also, sometimes there might be opportunities for you to help fund things. Maybe you're not paying for it outright, sure, but um, and I'll give two examples. I think about like my daughter's first car. I did a matching contribution, meaning that I will give you whatever you save up for your first car. I'll match it up to this limit because you hear about these horror stories where you have an

entrepreneur kid that all of a sudden is buying a Lamborghini because they're cutting so many yards of grass that that's not what situation I ran into, but it is one of those things where it was, it worked. She saved up enough so we could buy a very reasonable used car. She paid for half of it. Maybe that, if you age that up, maybe that first house down payment if you know your children. I know people in my life that parents have seen the good work of their adult children, and they said, Hey, you know why don't we offer a $10,000 match on your contribution towards your house down payment? It can be life-changing. And if you see the fruits of good behavior from your children, there's nothing wrong with you helping with those big one-off life decisions. But one of the things you also ought to do is consider the need of your kids and what's actually important to them. Don't decide, Hey, you know I'm going to help my kid and so I'm going to tell.

my kid, hey, I'm going to help you with a down payment on your first house, and I found a house that I think you should buy. It's a great deal, and here it is. And here's your down payment. Well, maybe your child isn't going to stay in that location for 5 to seven years, or maybe they want to have a f. Maybe there are other things, other areas where they need help. You should have a conversation with them. Open communication is going to be the key. Just because something might have been helpful to you when you were in their situation does not necessarily mean that it will be helpful to them. And the last thing you want to do is offer some form of generosity or offer some form of gift that falls flat, that wasn't actually something that helped them where they needed it. So make sure you have an open line of communication to lean into the areas that are actually truly going to be helpful. Well, and I don't want you to prime the pump so much where you create these opportunities and

this is what you're alluding to. B where they never actually develop the skill set to be able to even maintain it. It's, it's kind of like, you know, if you and you love this bow, 'cause you think about weightlifting, oh yeah, let's go. I mean, everybody thinks about everybody thinks about the key muscles, but if you do like steroids or other things that might give you big gains very quickly, the problem that nobody ever thinks about is all the tendons, all the things that are around it that are holding the structure of these muscles. So you as a parent with your, your horsepower, your extra muscle power, you might be able to give your kids some outsized performance or extra muscle, but if they never develop the tendons or the skills to support it all, it falls apart. So if you get, if you help your parent, your kids buy a house that's way outside of what they should be buying, meaning that they, they should be buying a starter home, but you gave them two steps ahead and put them in a solid

middle raising four kids and now they can't afford the insurance. They can't afford the landscapers or whatever else is going on in that neighborhood. You might have created a problem, so make sure you're not letting them get bigger than the structure of what their financial life can support. Dynamite analogy. Would not guess you're going to pull steroids out on this. I like that. That was not in the show content me. That was good. All right, so let's talk about the other side of the equation. Let's talk about maybe, and I don't want to say more delicate because neither of these is more delicate than the other, but this is a hard one. What if you're the child? What if you are someone who is in the messy middle or you are at a stage where life is hard and you are struggling right now, and you do happen to know that your parents are in a financial situation where they are on sound financial footing, and you've come to this realization. Okay, I know that life will be okay one day 'cause Mom and Dad

have done great, but man, you know it's G to when if if they live, they're going to live a ripe long life, and I'm going to inherit all this money 30 years from now. Man, I don't know if it would really help me. It would be life-changing. It'd be trajectory-altering if maybe I had some of that help now as opposed to later. How do you do that? Well, because that one can be real dicey. Be careful. Yep, this is the first thing we'll get into some actual tips here, but I do want to tell you to be careful because I think it's a part of the human condition. We're all somewhat selfish. Oh yeah, so you might be in a situation where you think that hey, this is a no-brainer for Mom and Dad to help me. I'll just bring up my concerns, my wishes, and you know and they should, they should help me. Just make sure that you, you just be careful 'cause this money is very. It's a

taboo subject, and it's hard. And you know, once it comes out of your mouth, you don't get to get it back. So that's why this is definitely a measure twice, cut once before you even go down this path. And I would challenge you to really make sure your heart, make sure your mindset, and your perspective on this situation is actually going to be heard the way you think it's going to be heard, because this could be very, very challenging. So let's talk about some what to do and what not to do. Here's the first what to do: clearly communicate that there is a struggle present. Explain to your parents, Hey, here's what's going on. I really, I really, the school system we're in is not wonderful, and there's a great school, but we just can't quite get the tuition together, but we really want that to be the education. Clearly communicate that there is a need, and that that need is actually a need and not a want, and that there's a goal behind why you're trying.

to achieve that thing, if you can clearly paint the picture for them, it will seem less like it's this emotional, visceral thing where you're just trying to get into their back pocket. And I think if they actually see it as something that you need and not something that you want, the parents are going to clue into that. They're going to recognize that it is a legitimate concern. Well, and the second thing we put was provide a solution. Now, what we mean by that, this is not meaning your parents are the solution with their money check. It means that you, as part of this, 'cause think about any good presentation, if you're going to have a hat in hand moment to where you're the adult child coming to your parents humbly asking for their help, you don't want to seem like you're asking just for what it potentially is a straight up handout. You need to show them that this is a win-win scenario, meaning that you are part of the solution. And I'll give you, I'll give you an example on this in.

the book millionaire Mission. I shared that as soon as I got into my adult life, I think a lot of people fall into this. Is that all my adult decisions added up much more than I could have ever realized. When you start paying your first apartment, even with roommates, you start paying your first apartment. You get your first car payment to get you to your job that's actually going to be your wealth-building engine. And then you got your lifestyle choices that you have to figure out. How often am I going out to eat with my friends? How often am I taking my girlfriend out to eat? How often, you know, all these things groceries and how we're splitting up adult life kicked my butt and I ran up some credit card debt and I'm not, I'm not proud that this happened to the point that I just couldn't make the math work and I had to call my father and I said look um I can't I'm $300 short which you know was it was very humbling but I shared with him that I would never

make this mistake again. I was already trimming certain things. I was going to start, you know, taking my lunch to work and all. I shared the solution, and then I tell you internally, it tore me up inside to know what a disappointment I was to my parents to have this perceived success. I graduated, got my first big job, and then here I was coming right back to them asking for money because I couldn't do it on my own. I made sure internally that I said, Look, you're never ever ever going to put yourself in this situation again, and I created a solution for myself. So there's nothing wrong. I did the right thing instead of paying the high in credit card debt, but I—you got to make sure that you're providing a solution so this doesn't look like you're just asking for a handout and you're going to just keep repeating this cycle over and over in an unhealthy way. The other thing you have to do is mentally prepare yourself when you go and ask someone a yes or no question.

need to be prepared. That if the answer is not what you were anticipating, you need to make sure are my parents actually willing to do this. You can lay out your struggle, and you can lay out the solution. You can lay all this out, but at the end of the day, it's their money, and they get to choose if they help or not. And if their answer is no, you need to be okay with that. You need to recognize that it's their choice to make. You cannot storm in there and begin demanding, Mom and Dad, I need this help, you got to do this, you got to do this. That's going to create friction in a relationship that you do not want. And they may say, Hey, we'd love to help, but we can't. You have to respect that, and you have to be comfortable with their no being a no, or else it's going to lead to a very negative and bad place. And let me save some relationships here. You don't know their full picture either, is 'cause I think about, and this is a childhood.

story. But I remember I wanted a go-kart so bad when I was a kid, and I knew my dad made $40,000 a year. And I had done the math, and I was like, why is my dad not buying me a go-kart? He can afford 20 or 30 go-karts, you know. But what I was doing, what I call go-kart math, rightly named because what I wasn't realizing was, hey, as an adult, you have mortgages, you got kids' education, you've got, you know, all the after-school things, you've got all the groceries, you've got all the expenses that nobody tells you as a kid that you have. You know, if your parents tell you no, I want you, because for the sake of the relationship, just know there must be more going on than you realize, 'cause maybe if you have siblings, there's already stuff going on there, or maybe they're not in as good a financial situation if you might have been led to believe. You've seen that both, you know, thought some things were be

funded certain way, and you find out hey parents just didn't have the money. So, don't make false assumptions. Um, and be careful because you don't want to ruin the more powerful overall relationship. So that's what to do. Let's talk about what not to do. These are Big. Make sure you don't create this as a transactional thing. Hey Mom and Dad, I need this, so you should give me this. And it's a transaction. This, if they choose to help you, and if this is something that's a part of your financial plan, it needs to be driven by the relationship and not the transaction. If you let the transaction drive and it just feels transactional, nobody wins in that scenario. It's not good for you, it's not good for your parents, it's not what the original tweet of this uh show was getting at. That is a very, very different thing. So be careful not to let it turn into purely transactional, yeah. And I hope for my audience that maybe is on the side of this where you are the adult.

you've done well. Well, you've saved well. You've planned well, and you know you're ahead of the curve. I hope you will kind of look at your life and say, Hey, how can I use this as a blessing now? Because what is great, and I love this, was from the original tweet, is that if you can make memories with your children now, if you can help them out with maybe some of those educational goals or some of those other struggles that they're having at this moment, versus just waiting for 20, 25 years in the future where they're old, you're old, and those assets never got to actually connect and let you actually see the fruit of all your hard work, all your discipline, and all your labor. Let's figure out how we do this in a healthy way, and that's what a good financial planner can do. I love that it was a financial planner that shared this tweet. I love that we're fee-only financial planners that we get to share this content with you guys because this is the hard stuff that I do think makes

financial planners help us in a lot of ways. They are the moderators between some of these hard life decisions, on how do you navigate the emotional stuff, the relationship stuff, but also get the math and all the analytics stuff that a lot of people just take for granted. How do you get the perfect balance on that? A lot of times, it means taking the relationship to the next level. One of the things you have to remember is that money is nothing more than a tool that allows us to achieve our goals. Well, one of the things that you have to do, whether you are the parent, whether you are the person near Financial Independence, or you are the child who is in the messy middle and is struggling, you need to Define your goals. What are the long-term goals, what are the intermediate goals, what are the short-term goals, and how can I use my money, how can I use my resources, how can I make decisions that are moving me towards those goals, and how can I prevent myself from making decisions that are moving me away from those goals.

if you can answer those questions, and you can figure that out, you have a much higher likelihood of living a more abundant life. Guys, go check out all the free stuff we're loading you up with. Go to moneygo.com and even money.com resources. You're going to see all kinds of tools, all kinds of free downloads. They're all out there waiting for you to live your best life 'cause realize there's so much that goes into wealth building beyond just the money, and we want to help you balance both the mindset, the math. It's all they're waiting for you. We're going to keep creating this type of content. I'm your host Brian Preston, Mr. Bohansen, Money Guy team out.

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