But many grandparents have a hard time listening to this advice, she said, because they can see that their children and grandchildren are even more financially insecure than they are. “Financial managers advise the elderly to hold on to the money they’ve saved, to use it to care for themselves in old age, to avoid becoming the responsibility of their children,” Kathleen Gerson, a sociology professor at New York University, told me. Most Americans our age aren’t so lucky: Just 39 percent of working adults in the United States have managed to save enough to get themselves through five years of retirement, let alone give a leg up to their progeny.īut even without adequate savings, parents and grandparents these days are quick to offer monetary help to younger generations-sometimes raiding the nest egg they might need for themselves. Read more: The age of grandparents is made of many tragediesįinancially, my husband and I are lucky we’ve been careful with our spending, yes, but more than that, we’ve had relatively well-paying, stable careers. During that period, the amount given specifically for primary- and secondary-school tuition and school supplies-that is, to be spent on the grandkids-nearly tripled. One analysis of Census Bureau data found that between 19, the amount that Americans over 55 gave to their adult children increased by more than 70 percent. Intergenerational gift-giving has grown substantially in the past decade or so. And it doesn’t include other ways of helping beyond giving money, such as by being unpaid daycare providers. This figure is undoubtedly skewed by the wealthy (and disproportionately white) people who give their grandkids the largest amounts-but even grandparents who are just scraping by try to share what they can. A recent survey by TD Ameritrade found that the average grandparent couple spend $2,383 a year on their grandkids. According to the AARP, almost all American grandparents say that they offer some sort of financial support to their grandchildren, typically in the form of helping pay for their education (53 percent), living expenses (37 percent), or medical bills (23 percent). We’re living by the slightly morbid axiom my mother would invoke whenever she gave me a big check for a birthday or an anniversary: “I’d rather give it with a warm hand than a cold one.”
If we live another 20 years, give or take, as the actuarial tables say we might, our offspring in 2040 might have less need for the extra money than they do today, when they’re young. My husband and I have been pretty good at saving money over the years, which means that we have enough of a cushion to start passing along some of it to our children and grandchildren while we’re alive, rather than leaving it behind as their inheritance.
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