More adult children support aging parents

updated 12:14 p.m. ET Oct. 18, 2008

Sue Martin does her best to be a dutiful and loving daughter.

So when her 84-year-old mother finally retired from a family electronics business — at age 82 — Martin bought the small three-bedroom ranch house next door to her own home in Claymont, Del., and moved her mother in.

It hasn't been easy. Martin, who's divorced, had planned to retire next year from her job as a legal assistant at a pharmaceutical company. But while she has a retirement fund of her own, her mother does not.

So now, Martin plans to work, indefinitely, to help cover the portion of the mortgage and living expenses that her mother's Social Security and small allotment of food stamps don't.

"She's still very independent, just broke," says Martin, who's 59.

Indeed, Betty Gresick is spry and healthy. She's an avid piano and bridge player and is able to drive to visit friends in the Delaware town where she and her late husband ran the family business — one that, unfortunately, had little net worth when she sold it.

"He didn't look past his nose when it came to the future," Gresick says of her husband. "So here I am with nothing to show for those years."

Retirees living longer
Even into adulthood, there is this notion that parents will be there to take care of us, emotionally or financially, possibly with a nice inheritance. That's still the case for many families.

But increasingly, adult children like Martin are finding themselves cutting into their own savings and retirement funds or even going into debt to support their aging parents.

"The fact of the matter is there's only so many dollars to go around," says Dan White, a financial adviser with Daniel A. White & Associates in Glen Mills, Pa.

He and others see it all the time: Retirees are facing massive health care costs. They're living longer, so retirement funds are being depleted. And now rising prices, for everything from food to gas and heating oil, are only making matters worse.

Recent statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau found that the number of parents who've moved into their adult children's homes increased 67 percent, from about 2.1 million in 2000 to 3.6 million last year.

Other children are supporting parents who live in a separate home and who, in some cases, aren't even of retirement age.

"It's a lot more common than people realize," says Donna Wagner, director of gerontology at Towson University in Maryland. "One of the issues is that people don't talk about this, maybe only to their best friend."

Wagner, who oversaw a caregiver survey last year, found that respondents spent an average of 10 percent of their income to support parents.

She recalls one woman from the survey who was among a small group who kept a diary. She had four siblings, but was the only one willing to have her dad, who was 50, move in with her.

"He just couldn't keep a job. There's all that kind of messy stuff, too. It's not just sickness," Wagner says. "There are a lot of people operating on the margin."

She says she last she heard from the woman about a year ago, shortly before the woman's phone was disconnected.

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