Dear Emily,
I’ve been a renter in New York for 20 years, and during that time I’ve seen most of my friends buy a home in the city. With the exception of one or two people I know in finance or corporate law, every single one of these friends has gotten significant help from their parents or grandparents. My parents live comfortably in retirement, as do my husband’s, but they aren’t able (or willing) to drop that kind of money on us.
There have been times when my parents floated the idea of helping in some way, but the conversations never went further than that. Over the years, I’ve gotten less and less subtle with my hints that, despite saving aggressively, we can never get far enough ahead of the market to afford a house. Sometimes they let these comments pass, though my mom has said she wishes they could help us more. They have also had to manage some expensive health conditions, and I think a lot of their decisions have to do with their own concerns about affording their end of life — which I completely get and sympathize with. Still, when instead of downsizing, they bought a bigger house and then undertook an expensive renovation to make it exactly what they wanted, it was hard not to think they spent my down-payment money on their new bathroom.
I know they’ve worked hard all their lives and deserve to spend their golden years however they want, but I can’t help feeling resentful that they didn’t set us up better. How do I squash this feeling that they should have helped me more?
Signed,
What Do Parents Owe Their Adult Children?
Dear What Do Parents Owe Their Adult Children,
You need to sit down with your parents, and your husband needs to sit down separately with his parents, and then you need to talk openly and honestly about exactly what their finances, and yours, are like right now. That means, on their side, being open about their investments, debt, mortgage, current and future home-improvement plans, long-term retirement and care strategies, and what’s in their will. On your side, it means talking about how much money you make, your debt, how much you have saved, and what your future housing goals are like, in as much detail as possible. Maybe you’ve had this exact conversation with them before, but I’m willing to bet (not much! I’m a writer) that you haven’t, because very few people I know have. It’s incredibly nerve-racking. But I have had this conversation, and it clarified a lot of things for me.
Like you, I have a lot of friends whose parents helped them out with a down payment. The wisest and luckiest among them got help to buy some kind of “starter apartment” before the 2008 financial crash, then when the market rebounded, they were able to parlay that into future real-estate purchases. The eternal curse of living in New York City is wishing you could turn back the clock to when things were just a little more affordable, with money that might have existed, and then, a few years later, not so much. I have a whole alternative history of my life in my mind wherein, instead of spending my first book advance on the priceless dream of being “just a writer,” I worked full time, saved the book payments for a depressing studio apartment in a neighborhood that was due to triple its property values, and waited till fortune was on my side to flip it for a real two-bedroom in the Clinton Hill Co-ops. Of course, this would have precluded having had the time and mental real estate necessary to write that first book, but in my imagination, somehow that detail is always elided — I would have found a way, I tell myself. (I wouldn’t have.) Anyway, the endgame is that I would have sacrificed my literary aspirations in exchange for a present in which my family and I own our home. Some days, I’d make that trade; other days, not so much. It doesn’t really matter because it didn’t happen that way and no time machine yet exists. So you can imagine how I feel, in my darker moments, about people who never had to trade their dreams for an apartment because their parents just gave them the cash they needed.
While you can curse fate for not setting you and your family up in this way, you can’t and shouldn’t blame your parents. Like the rest of us, they spent their lives making financial decisions that made sense at the time and that may not make as much sense in hindsight. But you can’t know for sure exactly what you might expect from them until you sit down and ask, and the answers may turn out to surprise you. Maybe that new bathroom is a lot cheaper than you think, or maybe their focus is on making sure they’re prepared to live long lives without needing any assistance from their children. There may even be money they’re setting aside for you in their wills, and your hints haven’t been enough to prompt them into realizing that you’d be better off if you had that money now. If you can show them you have a realistic plan for how you’d use that money in the immediate future, they may be able to help, even if it’s not to the extent that you’d once imagined. This is the rosiest possible scenario.
When I talked to my parents, it was a reality check for me. We had always kept things hazy about dollars and cents when I was growing up, and I had no real sense of their retirement savings or what they wanted the final quarter of their lives to look like. To make matters worse, I hadn’t even been all that curious, preferring to live in a fuzzy dreamland where all I knew was that they had more money than I did, always had, and always would. I didn’t think about how that would shift when they finally allowed themselves to stop working, and I didn’t think about their plans for their own futures. Getting set straight about that really helped me. It’s not even that I don’t expect help from them anymore; it’s that it would feel wrong to ask for it. They made lives for themselves and our nuclear family without help from their own parents. My generation will be no different. I don’t claim that I’ve stopped feeling envious of my friends whose families helped them with down payments — that would be superhuman. I’m just saying I have a firmer grasp now on the big picture, and I feel better about renting into the foreseeable future now that I know exactly where I stand.
Another thing that has helped is focusing on my friendships with people who haven’t had help from their parents and have even in some cases had to support them. If you have friends in these situations, it may be good for your own sense of perspective to spend time with them and have frank financial conversations with them, too. I have friends who work jobs they hate in order to afford their rent-stabilized apartments, and friends who budget each month just to afford their kids’ necessities, like food and clothes. If you don’t know people in these kinds of situations, maybe it’s worth enlarging your social circle. We can get trapped in our bubbles, and sometimes it’s easy to mistake something that seems “normal,” like getting financial help from your parents, for something that’s actually a relative anomaly. We also never really know what’s going on in other people’s bank accounts until we’re nosy enough to ask, and even your richest friends might have had to make sacrifices of some nature along the way. Even if they haven’t, even if they’ve led charmed lives in every regard, the fact remains that they aren’t you. Your path is never going to be exactly the same as anyone else’s. It’s one thing to wish yourself wholly into someone else’s brownstone. It’s another thing to wish yourself entirely into someone else’s life.
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