If you are helping aging parents while still supporting children or young adults, you are part of the sandwich generation. You may spend your time attending medical appointments with your parents, helping your children financially or balancing both responsibilities at once.
When several generations depend on you, it is easy to focus on everyone else’s needs first. Yet the choices you make for your parents and children today may affect your own future as well.
Plan for your own future
You may spend a great deal of time thinking about your parents’ future while giving less attention to your own. However, an illness or injury could affect your ability to manage money or communicate health care decisions at any age. Several documents can address those situations:
- Appoint someone to handle financial matters through a durable power of attorney
- Name a health care agent in an advance health care directive
- Authorize access to medical information through HIPAA documents
- Identify emergency contacts who can be reached quickly
These documents identify who may act for you if you cannot manage certain matters yourself.
Encourage aging parents to have a plan
If you already help your parents with finances, medical appointments or daily tasks, you may have discussed what could happen if their health changes. If they have not documented their wishes, your family may face important decisions without knowing their preferences.
Estate-planning documents often identify who will manage finances, who will make health care decisions and who will handle property after death. Many families discuss these issues before a health event places additional pressure on everyone involved.
Review your beneficiaries
Your family may look very different today than it did years ago. Children become adults, grandchildren arrive and financial circumstances change over time. Those changes can affect more than daily responsibilities. They can also affect who receives certain assets in the future.
Retirement accounts and life insurance policies usually pass to the beneficiary listed on the account. Those designations operate separately from a will, making them an important part of your estate plan.
Address caregiving realities
You may already see differences in how family members contribute when a parent needs help. One sibling may provide transportation to appointments while another helps pay for care or household expenses. Those differences often bring attention to:
- Caregiving responsibilities among siblings
- Financial support provided to parents
- Concerns about unequal treatment
- Expectations about future inheritances
These issues often become more important when families discuss inheritances or future responsibilities. Estate plans sometimes reflect those caregiving arrangements, especially when one person takes on more responsibility.
Protect your own financial future
You may provide support to your parents and your children at the same time. That support may involve helping with care expenses, housing costs, education expenses or other financial needs.
Estate planning often involves balancing the needs of the people you care about with your own financial security. That balance can become more important when retirement goals and future health care needs remain part of the picture.
When everyone depends on you
You may spend much of your time helping other people prepare for the future. At the same time, you may find yourself making decisions that affect multiple generations.
Estate planning often puts structure around responsibilities that already exist within your family. The same people who depend on you today may be affected by the decisions you make about finances, health care and future planning.