Quote:
Originally Posted by Unregistered
I am quite surprised (actually shocked) that at this day and age, people are still expecting their children to support them financially. We should move away from the mentality of depending on our children for financial support.
In our parents' generation, most of them have lower education, earn lower wages and thus have lower savings. They have no choice but to depend on their children to support them in their old age. And we (our current generation) ended up supporting our parents and our own families. It is tough, having to handle housing loans, car loan, running a family and yet having to take care our aged parents.
I am thus very determined to be financially independent when I retire and not to be a burden to my children. I think they will find it even tougher going forward, having to compete with all the cheap labour flooding the job market world wide.
I have been saving and investing since I got my first pay check, a good 30 years ago. I am now enjoying the compounding effect of my investment returns and can see my networth increasing steadily. With a few more years of working and reinvesting my returns, I am confident that not only will we not be dependent on our children, we could also leave behind quite a decent bequest to them.
|
Very well said and a decent post.
We are also taking the same approach, having experienced the stress of taking care of my parents (medically and financially) since I was 13 yrs old and >30 years later, this situation has not changed much if not worse. For me, life is tough to be in the sandwich generation so I would not want my children to experience the same.
Hence, besides educating and preparing ourselves on achieving financial independence as early as possible, we also take responsibility in leading a healthy lifestyle as we would not want my children to worry about our health too.