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Living At Home To Save Money. Should Parents Invite Children Back Home After Graduation?
It’s a challenging time for new graduates. The employment environment is difficult in many sectors/industries, plus the cost of rent and housing have outpaced inflation for years and years. It can feel very daunting to leave post-secondary when faced with mediocre job prospects and sky-high housing costs.
In some situations, the “bank of mom and dad” will step in and provide support. But, for the majority of families, that isn’t an option.
So how can parents help provide new grads a “leg up” in this challenging time?
More and more parents are inviting their adult children back home for 1-2 years after graduating to help them save money and pay off debt.
It may not be a cash gift, but it can provide nearly the same advantage.
Living at home to save money is a strategy that is on the rise. Parents are encouraging their children to take advantage of this opportunity and more and more adult children are doing it.
Living at home after graduation creates the opportunity to save $20,000, $30,000 or $40,000+ in one year, an opportunity that may never happen again.
Living at home for 1-2 years provides a huge head start for a new grad. This head start can be used to pay down student debt, build an emergency fund, start investing, buy a house etc. etc.
But it’s not all positive though. Living at home for a couple years also has risks. Without having a strategy in place it’s very easy to succumb to pitfalls like lifestyle inflation etc.
Here’s why parents should encourage their adult children to live at home for a couple years after graduation, and why new grads should seriously consider taking advantage.
Three Ways To Transfer Retirement Risk To Someone Else
Retirement is full of risk. There is longevity risk, spending risk, health risk etc. But two of the largest risks in retirement are investment risk and inflation rate risk.
What if you could transfer some (or all) of that risk to someone else? That would make retirement that much more enjoyable, less to worry about and less to stress over. There would be more time to enjoy retirement itself rather than worry about retirement finances.
The problem with risk is that it’s hard to understand and hard to quantify. We’re pretty bad at assessing risk and probability. We might look back at the accumulation phase and think that we can manage the emotional impact of investment risk and inflation risk. After all, we’ve been managing those risks for 30-40+ years before retirement, why would that change in retirement?
The difference during the decumulation phase is that those risks are exacerbated by annual investment withdrawals. In retirement, these withdrawals, necessary to support retirement spending, multiply the effect of fluctuations in investment returns and inflation rates.
During the accumulation phase, investment contributions help reduce the impact of fluctuations (dollar cost averaging is a big benefit during accumulation). During the decumulation phase however, investment withdrawals multiply the impact of fluctuations.
As you’ll see below. The based on historical standards, the variation during the accumulation phase is nothing compared with the variation that’s possible during the decumulation phase.
So, transferring retirement risk to someone can become quite appealing when transitioning into retirement. It can help reduce that variation. Transferring even a small amount of retirement risk to someone can significantly improve peace of mind. Plus, it can help create a “floor” of retirement income that is virtually guaranteed.
Three Ways Investors Negatively Impact Their Investment Returns (With Examples)
Behavioral investment pitfalls can have a significant impact on investment returns for the average investor. The impact can be anywhere from 0.5% to 1.0%+ per year. But that’s the average impact on the average investor. The reality is that this impact will manifest differently for each investor and it could be years or even decades before an individual investor gets trapped by one of these behavioral pitfalls.
An average impact of 0.5% to 1.0% makes it sound like this happens every year. While this is true on average, it actually reflects many different experiences for many individual investors.
The truth is that some investors will experience no behavioral impact on their investment return for years and years before suddenly experiencing a negative effect. The AVERAGE impact of 0.5% to 1.0% means that in a given year some people experience no impact and others experience a small or large impact.
The problem is that this can lead investors into a false sense of security. It can make it seem like everything is going well until suddenly it’s not.
In this post we’ll provide three examples of how behavioral investment pitfalls can actually manifest in an investor’s portfolio and how they impact long-term investment returns.