Parenting Grown Children: What Dr. Spock Forgot to Tell Us

Money Matters: Who should get your favorite chair?

Could there be a more boring term? Estate planning is somehow put-offish, in every sense of the word. And yet it's got to be done and it needs to be revisited from time to time. You may not be here when your last wishes are read aloud, but you can rest easy knowing you've taken care of not just the big things but the iconic treasures as well. Here's one interesting observation about that planning process from an expert in the field:

"Make the key decisions. Too often, estate owners say, "Leave it to the kids and let them decide." Non-decisions often lead to family strife, wasted assets, and a general estate planning disaster. Estate lawyers always are amazed at the things adult children and other heirs fight over. Long suppressed issues and conflicts come to the surface. Seemingly meaningless items can have great symbolic value to someone, or at least the person claims they do.

Personal property and iconic items such as the family residence or vacation home are the most likely to cause such problems."

Money Matters: Sharing the wealth--or at least your plans for the wealth.

You never know where some gem or germ of wisdom will come from. Here's a little sensible advice from a law firm's blog. Of course, the writer is selling estate planning, but still, the comments make sense even if you're not drawing up an official plan. First, there's the question of whether you should share your estate plan with your heirs--the grown kids or even the grandkids, if they're grown, too.

The lawyer-writer answers that point this way:

"If you have a significant estate to leave to your heirs—but you are still alive and well—to whom does that significant estate belong, you or them? This seem a silly question, of course the property belongs to you, but many adult children have come to count on the property their parents will leave them, and—rightly or wrongly—to feel a sense of ownership over it. As potential beneficiaries, do your heirs have the right to be informed ahead of time of your plans for your own estate?

David Cay Johnston, in his article Learning to Share, suggests that "although parents have no responsibility to inform their children of their plans, not talking to your kids about your estate plan is a surefire way to foster hurt feelings and inter-family fights once you've passed on.

Every family and situation will be different, and some parents will have good reasons for keeping their plans under wraps. But in many circumstances, whether your intention with your estate plan is to ease the way for your heirs or merely to ensure that your wishes are carried out to the letter, open communication with your children or potential heirs is the best way to support the accomplishment of those goals."

Money Matters: How to talk about money

They've got tips--100 of them--for discussing money, an always touchy topic when it comes to talking to your adult kids without making them feel like you are muddling in their financial life. They are Kathryn and Captain Frugal of the Money Saving Blog.

Here are some of the tips aimed at the adult children themselves (and that we, as their parents, should bear in mind):

39. Set clear boundaries. Decide on your own what you will and won’t discuss with your parents and financially and stick to those boundaries.

40. Respect your spouse and children. As you get older, your family priorities shift away from your role as a child and towards your role as a parent and spouse. When discussing finances with your own parents, respect the rights to financial privacy that your other family members have.

41. Rely on parents for financial help only as a last resort. After you’re on your own, you need to be responsible for your own finances. If you rely on parents for help, then they are going to feel that they have a right to tell you how to spend and save and you want to avoid that.

42. Don’t overreact. You don’t live in your parents’ house anymore so you don’t need to get all worked up about their opinions on your money. Just listen and let it go.

43. Find non-money things to discuss with your parents. Parents sometimes try to get us to talk about money because it gets us riled up. In a weird way, this makes them feel that they’re still closely involved in our lives. If we are close in other ways, this will be less of an issue

44. Use the “I” word. Parents still feel responsibility for your finances since you’re their child. They’ll feel less responsible if you talk about your own feelings and situation without blaming them.

45. Stop talking about the past. The financial past is over with so deal with it and move on.

Here are some tips for you, as the parent of grown and independent kids:

72. Do more listening and less talking. Your kids needed you for advice and financial guidance when they were young. Now they need to sort things out on their own with your sound financial ear as support.

73. Let your adult kids know that you’re willing to help them learn how to budget, save money and get into investing. Then wait until they say they are ready for your help. When they ask, be there to assist.

74. Invite them to attend financial classes and workshops with you.

75. Solicit your kids’ advice on technology as it applies to money. They probably know more than you in this area!

76. Admit your changing financial fears. As your kids become adults, they are ready to hear the reality of your fears about money as you get older. Admit this and find a proactive way to eliminate those fears together.

77. Consider their finances when planning family things. You may want your kids home for Christmas but if this puts a financial burden on them then it creates a lot of stress. Discuss the issue openly to resolve the financial aspect of these things.

78. Put your financial affairs in order. This will help when dealing with money as you get into your older years.

Money Matters: Hard Hit and Hating It

Many of us who have grown children have been hit hard financially by the economic crisis. Money we thought we'd have to live comfortably on and still help out our adult children is gone. Is that changing our relationship with our adult children? Some of us may be worried about becoming dependent on them, or that they'll be dependent on us and we won't have the wherewithal to help.Or we jsut feel so bad about what's happening that we take it out on the grown kids, as one financial adviser noted recently.

Friends who used their second homes as vacation retreats for their children are having to sell those homes. May not sound like the worst crisis in the world, but it means the loss of a family gathering place and a familiar setting--one that may date back to their children's childhood--for their grandchildren to spend idle weeks of summer.

Friends who had planned to help their children buy a home are finding they don't have the cash to help out with the down payment. Or to pay off college loads. Again, it may not sound like a terrible crisis, but the loss of power--of still being the Big Daddy or Momma--are palpable. So many of us want to make life easier for our children, and this fiscal crisis is playing havoc with that plan. Maybe this is healthy--maybe some of us coddled our children. But a lot of us didn't. We just took great enjoyment from using the money we'd earned and saved over a lifetime to make our children's lives easier. And for many of us, that ability is gone.

How are you coping with fiscal losses? Is it affecting your relationship with your grown children? Or your own feelings about yourself vis a vis those children?

Money Matters: When the kids face foreclosure

To lend or not to lend when your grown children face losing their home. Not an easy call--especially if your own fiscal well being is greatly diminished. Here's some general advice on the subject from a Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary. Singletary is answering a question posed by a sister about saving her brother's house when the brother is an undisciplined spender:

"If you ask someone to use a cash gift in a certain way, such as for college tuition or catching up on a mortgage, the recipient should honor your request to the best of their ability. However, once you extend a gift, the money or item is no longer yours to control. You have to leave it to the person's conscience to do the right thing.

"Before giving someone thousands of dollars to save a home, you should ask to see a written budget and the underlying documentation, such as pay stubs, bills, etc. Yes, this is an intrusive demand. Yes, the person or couple might balk, refuse or even cuss you out.

"But if people are asking for a significant amount of money, they need to prove to you that your money won't be wasted. They need to prove their financial situation has improved. Or they need to demonstrate they are becoming better money managers. Otherwise if you bail them out, and a few months later they are behind again on their mortgage and the lender forecloses anyway, you've done what your mama told you never to do -- throw good money after bad.

"If you're not equipped to help someone establish a budget, then require that the person see a qualified credit counselor. Send the person or couple to DebtAdvice.org or call 1-800-388-2227. DebtAdvice.org is a service provided by the members of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling."

"Even if a friend or family member's foreclosure is looming, don't let that person's desperation result in your giving money that in the end will just postpone the inevitable. Help if you can, but in a way that means your generosity won't be in vain. "

Re-Nesting: Moving home--to help us out

Here's a twist on refilling the empty nest. In these tough economic times, families are piling in together to cut costs, but it isn't always kids moving back to have mom and dad help them out. The kids may move back in to help out with the parent's rent. Here's the recent story:

"Last year, Kanessa Tixe’s dad had just finished building a three-family house when he lost his superintendent job in February. He wasn’t sure how to make the $5,000-a-month mortgage on the new house in Queens, N.Y.

So Tixe and her siblings decided to help out in an unusual way: They moved in. In December, her father moved into the first floor; her stepsister and husband moved into the second floor; and her stepbrother and Tixe took the third floor. The entire family has become roommates, banding together to pay rent and help their dad with the mortgage until he finds long-term tenants."

Sign of the times?

Here are the stats to watch: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, In 1915, the average number of people sharing a home, including parents, offspring, and “extended squatters,” was 4.5. By 2006, that number had shrunk by nearly half to 2.6. By 2010--who can say what that number will be. And how many of us will be inviting our kids home to help out with the overhead.

Money Matters: Can we still help our kids if the 401k melts?

A friend says she was only joking when she told her grown children she might have to borrow back the money she and their father had "lent" them to pay for college and graduate school.These are friends with a small apartment in New York City and a sizeable vacation spread in Vermont. But came the shock of the bear market and their portfolio has been sliced in half.

It's a scary time for them. They are both retired. They are tightening their belts: cutting off travel plans, eating out less, going to local movies rather than the Broadway shows, laying off the woman who cleans their apartment. But they still have to carry two homes on half a portfolio--and what if one of their grown children loses a job or runs into a financial problem? They've always been there to tide them through, and though they may joke with their children about "repaying" education "loans," what if they do need help with two mortgages--this is not exactly an easy time to unload a house or two.  

Are these troubled times going to see a shift: From comfortable parents always there as a safety net to help grown children in case of a fiscal emergency to parents who may have to lean on their adult children to survive.

Her last email to me read, "Let's hope for an uptick in the stock market." It went down another 300 points the next day.

Money Matters: Health insurance for your grown kids is not an indulgence

Paterfamilias and I had dinner with friends the other night--friends whose oldest child is about to graduate from college. They are recovering from the $50,000 a year it's been costing them and looking forward to his independence, particularly his financial independence. He doesn't, of course, know exactly what he wants to do. He's hoping to take a year or two to figure it out.

That brought back a lot of memories for me and the pater. When our kids graduated from college--lickety-split, within one year of each other (talk about recovering from tuition stress)--our daughter headed out to the West Coast : She loved painting and wanted to be an artist. Our son went to New England: He wanted to see if he could make it as a writer. Both of them took part time jobs to support themselves--to pay their share of a shared room in a group house and their share of the spaghetti that they lived on. So they were independent--except that they did not put aside any of their earnings from part-time work for health insurance. Naturally not. What 22-year-old who has had nothing more than some sports-related injuries to deal with, thinks about health care coverage.

But we did. There they were, far from home and on their own. But what if something terrible happened to them--an illness that put them in the hospital or required high-priced specialist care. Naturally, we'd want to make sure they were in the best hospital for their problem and hire the best physicians we could find. There is nothing in life that we love or treasure more than our children. So we took out so-called catastrophic health insurance policies for them. I say for them--it was not something they were going to do. And we didn't see it as an indulgence. We weren't insuring them so much as our assets. A 10-day stay in a hospital and a few visits to a specialist could wipe out our savings.

Our friends at dinner hadn't had the chance to think this little "dependence" issue through yet. One thing that has changed in the past year or two is that several states have passed laws allowing parents to cover their adult children--most set limits at 26 years of ag but in Florida, it's 30.

Insurance for those young adults is something worth planning for. We'll all need our assets for the little luxuries of life for our children's children--when they finally arrive.

Empty Nesters: Filling the adult child's nest--with you

Lots of self-help tips for parents of grown children center on what to do when the adult kids move back to the family home. But now there's a new trend: The U.S. Census reports that there is a 75 percent increase in parents under the age of 65 who are now living with their adult children--in their children's homes.

What's behind this reverse trend? Some of it is the troubled economy--foreclosures, loss of jobs (older baby boomers have a particularly tough time re-attaching once they've lost employment) and overall difficulty making ends meet. 

According to the census data, the average size of both families and households grew from 2000 to 2007, after shrinking slightly in the 1990s. The average family in 2007 had 3.2 people, up from 3.14 in 2000.

Money Matters: The Brits are just like us.

The Brits are not just our friends across the pond: They seem to be very much like us when it comes to giving their adult children a financial boost. A recent survey by the insurance company Liverpool Victoria had these findings:

94  percent of parents surveyed still make financial contributions to their children's education and major financial purchases, such as houses and cars.

55 percent assist with general costs of living, even more so during the credit crunch.

In the current economic climate [it's just as bad over there as it is here], the parents are the hardest hit and tend to bypass their own needs to help out the kids.

Eight out of 10 of those with grandchildren were helping to support both generations

Almost half of parents aged 70 or older said they were still helping their children financially.

Almost two-thirds of mums and dads said they helped their adult children because "they need the assistance", while 17 per cent said their child had asked them for financial support.