Throughout the pandemic, many adults turned to a likely safety net: their parents. From buying food to paying for their cell phone plan or covering health and auto insurance, half of parents with a child over 18 provide them with at least some financial support, according to a report by Savings.com.
These parents are shelling out roughly $1,000 a month, on average, on such expenses, the report found. Young adults just starting out have faced significant financial hurdles over the last few years, including an uneven job market, hefty student loan bills from school, and soaring housing costs.
In 2020, the share of those living with their parents (often referred to as “boomerang kids”) temporarily spiked to a historic high. And yet, 62% of adult children living at home don’t contribute to household expenses at all, Savings.com found.
Half of parents with an adult child provide them with at least some financial support. Twenty-six percent of these parents say they’ve had to provide more support since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sixty-two percent of adult children living with their parents don’t contribute at all to the household expenses.
The report detailed that on average, parents who financially support their adult children give them $1,000 per month for expenses like food, health insurance, rent, cell phones, tuition, and even travel. Parents who are still working and supporting their adult children spend 23 percent more on their children’s expenses ($605 per month) than they do contributing to their own retirement or savings ($490 per month).
If their adult children needed financial help, one in four parents said they’d pull money from their retirement accounts and 22 percent said they’d delay their retirement in order to provide support.
