Families have bonded in a common mission: to protect the family financial ecosystem. It's one thing to “get financially naked” with your partner; it's another to do it with your kids no matter their age.
The door has been opened to financial conversations happening more often and more organically. It's pretty much impossible to filter conversations when you are with everyone all the time. People started to let down their guard while we were quarantined. Information leaked out. And we started to see things we used to be too busy to notice.
For my family, because we are all in the same place, all the time, the kids literally see how intensely my husband and I work. They see how our cashflow expectations can sometimes impact our decision-making. They have a front row seat to witness tough decisions we sometimes make about how best to spend our money. They also see that we still make some mistakes along the way and that it is not always smooth sailing. They see how frustrated we get when we can't buy something because we have to allocate savings to something urgent and unexpected, like a big repair or a medical bill. They see us make tough choices about spending and how often we can go out with friends to nice dinners. They know our financial resources are not unlimited despite each of our accomplishments.
On the flip side, we have also been able to see more clearly why the kids make decisions that used to baffle us. We observe more and can better understand the context. Money conversations that used to focus on simply getting money to pay for something they want have largely gone away. When they do come up, there is a new sense of appreciation of all the work it takes for us to earn the money to give to them.
Will this progress in communication and transparency last when the world opens up again and we no longer have a captive audience? Let's hope.
For families, I see an opportunity to hit the restart button on some of the bad habits we as a society have developed that undermine our true goal: launching the next generation of financial grownups and giving all of us the best shot at the financial security and freedom that we all deserve.
Introduction
In October 2019, Kelly Ripa appeared on The Jimmy Kimmel Show and joked about how her son, Michael, was adjusting to being an adult: “He hates paying his own rent, and he's chronically poor. I don't think he ever really experienced extreme poverty like now.”
The comment, taken by some out of context, sparked some backlash. But Ripa stood by her parenting strategy, posting later on Instagram, “Michael goes to college and is a senior and works full time. He is in his first non-parent subsidized apt with roommates. I didn't grow up privileged and neither did @instasuelos [her husband, Mark Consuelos].”
The truth is, Ripa and her husband are probably doing a better job at helping their kids become financial grownups than the majority of Americans. Data from Merrill Lynch and Age Wave shows that 79 percent of parents are providing support for their adult children.1 As so-called helicopter parents get older, they seem to be doubling down on their overparenting. This is having a huge impact on their adult children's ability to gain financial independence. Many aging Gen X parents are on a dangerous path that could have catastrophic consequences for their own golden years. I first witnessed this phenomenon as a parent. And then, as a business journalist and a certified financial planner™, I realized I could become part of the solution.
It started on New Year's Eve 2019.
My two older kids, both in college, had come home for the holidays. We had been discussing putting their earnings from their jobs into Roth IRAs. They would then be able to grow their money without paying taxes on the earnings. They both had agreed to do it. #parentingwin
Yet here we were, hours away from the deadline to open an account. It wasn't done. Nothing was happening. I had given them both the phone number and email of the brokerage firm we used as well as the contact information for an actual human they could call with questions who had been assigned to our family. I had told them that I was available if they had any questions. And they were free to research and find their own investing platform if they didn't want to use the same company. I had reminded them of the deadline. They had said they would do it.
But here we were.
And here I was, having spent a couple of decades as a financial journalist. I actually wrote the book about becoming a “financial grownup.” After the book came out, I had gone one step further to bolster my knowledge and became a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ practitioner. I was facing the harsh reality that I, as a parent who knew on paper what should be getting done, could not get my own kids to do this one simple thing.
My own journey into this laser focus on getting adult kids to pay attention to their personal money situation started a few years earlier when I was a full-time business news journalist at Reuters. After 15 years in the business, I was the old guard. Younger colleagues would ask me for money advice. I always thought that was odd, because literally everything is available online. (The IRS website, irs.gov, if we are being honest, is pretty awesome. Check it out sometime.)
But the advice was never put in human terms, so it felt like a chore to them. They wanted to hear from someone they viewed as accomplished. They wanted to hear how successful people – role models – made financial decisions in the context of real life. And of these financial decisions, they wanted to know which ones were the most important for accomplishing their larger adult goals. From my experience offering guidance to my younger colleagues, I came up with the idea for my first book, How to Be a Financial Grownup.
In my years of journalism, one skill that had carried me far was my ability to identify and then get high-profile people to be interviewed. I always made sure they had a great experience, so they would come back. At one point, when I led booking at CNN's short-lived business news network, CNNfn, I supervised a staff that scheduled as many as 50 guests a day on various programs. I loved chatting with them before and after the segment. The guests were fascinating people with so much more to say than the three minutes typical of a television segment – often focused on data and quick tips – would allow. They had valuable life lessons to share. But a short television segment did not allow for that.
And then the big idea: What if I could give these high-profile people the opportunity to share personal money stories, not just regurgitate the data their company compiled in a survey. Now that would motivate and inspire readers to become financial grownups. I started close to home with the editor in chief of Thomson Reuters: Steve Adler. He loved the concept but was skeptical about whether I would be able to get what were effectively business “celebrities” to really share personal stories. That said, he was the first one to agree to participate, and I am forever grateful.
In the end, I pulled it off. How to Be a Financial Grownup featured a mix of business headliners from Tony Robbins, Kevin O'Leary, and Sallie Krawcheck to Cynthia Rowley and Jim Cramer. I even managed to snag an impromptu interview with actress and entrepreneur Drew Barrymore. I extended the concept in podcast form, and with about 350 episodes have been able to continue the conversation with young adults (and financially young adults of all ages) through that platform.
But I've also come to realize as my own children become young adults that parents play a bigger role than many of us fully appreciate. In an ideal world, my young colleagues at Reuters who were so hungry for money advice would have started their journey toward financial literacy at home.
Sometimes we, the parents, are the obstacles keeping them from truly growing into their own and moving away from dependence on us. The term helicopter parent grew in our culture for a reason. It's pretty accurate for many of us. If we coddle our kids financially, they will
