Helping Your Kids Without Sinking Your Own Retirement

By: Jack Strulowitz

It’s no secret that managing expenses is a real challenge for a lot of families in our community. Even relatively high earners often find themselves scraping by month after month, without much to show for it. I hear some version of the same question constantly, usually asked half-joking and half-serious: “How does everyone afford to live here?” My honest answer, more often than not, is parental support.

I understand exactly why that’s the answer, because my role gives me a fairly intimate view into how a lot of households in our community are actually doing financially. By some estimates, a family here needs an income around the 97th percentile for New York State just to keep pace with the cost of living, once yeshiva tuition and camp are factored in alongside everything else (IPUMS CPS). Given numbers like that, it’s completely understandable that adult children turn to their parents, and just as understandable that parents want to help. What I’m seeing more and more, though, is that support being extended at the direct cost of the parents’ own comfortable retirement.

This isn’t unique to our community either. Research from Merrill Lynch and Age Wave found that roughly four out of five parents provide some form of ongoing financial support to their adult children nationally and parents spend about twice as much each year supporting grown kids as they contribute to their own retirement accounts. The pressures in our community may run higher than the national average, but the pattern underneath it holds true across the country.

Here’s the part that matters most—and the part that almost nobody checks. Every retiree has a real, calculable number for how much they can send out the door each month to anyone and still keep their own retirement funded for thirty years. Most people have never seen that number. Decisions about helping the kids get made based on the bank balance’s “vibe” this month, rather than on what a full projection actually says is sustainable.

This is where a financial plan earns its keep, and I mean a real plan built around your actual retirement income, not with expensive annuity products designed to look like an answer. I’ve had clients come in bracing for bad news about how much they can afford to help their children and walk out relieved to learn they have more room than they thought. Once retirement income is actually structured properly, it often has more room in it than people assume walking in. That’s a genuinely good conversation to have, and it happens more often than people expect.

Other times the plan tells a harder story. The sustainable number comes back lower than what’s already flowing out the door, and that’s a difficult conversation, but it’s the one worth having. I’ve sat with clients who were a few years from running their own retirement dry, because ongoing support to a child had quietly become a fixed cost long before anyone sat down and measured it. Nobody wants to be the parent who has to say something needs to change. The alternative is finding that out much later, with far fewer options left on the table.

Having that conversation with your children isn’t a rejection of them, even though it can feel that way in the moment. A parent who actually knows their own number can help with more confidence and less resentment, because the help comes from clarity instead of quiet worry. What tends to damage families over the long run usually isn’t a conversation about limits. It’s years of silence beforehand, followed by a crisis that forces the same conversation later, under much worse conditions for everyone involved.

Knowing your true capacity works in both directions, and it’s just as often good news as it is a wake-up call. Either way, you stop guessing and start deciding on purpose. You shouldn’t have to choose between generosity toward your children and honesty with yourself about what thirty years of retirement actually requires. A plan puts a real figure on both sides of that equation, and once the figure exists, the conversation with your kids, whichever direction it goes, gets a lot easier to have. n

Jack Strulowitz is a Financial Advisor at Bernath & Rosenberg in Cedarhurst, NY, where he helps high–net worth individuals and families manage their investments and build comprehensive strategies for retirement, tax, and estate planning. For questions or to schedule a consultation, please contact [email protected] or 847-962-3352.

The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.

Securities and advisory services offered through LPL Financial, a Registered Investment Advisor. Member FINRA/SIPC.