Seeking advice on supporting elderly parents

[johnny123]

Hi all, am starting this thread because I want to get advice about supporting elderly parents from everyone as I believe people on this forum may be more senior than I am and probably wiser and more experienced on the matter.

Quick context, I am a single child about to graduate in one year from a local uni and just found out that my elderly parents want to both retire early the moment I attend my commencement and expect me to fully financially support both of them.

After some queries, I found out that both of them have zero savings in their savings bank account, have no private health insurance except for Medishield Life, no pension and both hasn't even gotten the basic minimum sum to qualify for a decent annuity payout. In addition, both are in financial debt because of bad spending decisions before and we are overleveraged in terms of our housing loan. They also have zero investments or side income.

Personally I always knew that my family financial situation is bad which is why I have opted not to take pocket money from them ever since I started working part time at 16, and NS with the allowance. And in school I worked part time to pay off my student loans and used partial scholarships to offset some of the costs. I also lived very frugally with no more than 4 dollars for every meal and gave up any overseas or exchange programs because I wanted to save money for myself and have managed to have a small tiny pool in my bank account.

I want to be a filial child and take care of my parents and I love them but I also feel quite trapped in this situation because I study a course which is practical but which starting salary may not be that high. At least not so high that I can fully bear the debts and expenses of 3 people. And even the small pool of money I have will be completely wiped out the moment I start to try to settle my mum's credit card debt for example.

I dont want to compare and I am not a jealous person by nature but when seeing many of my peers get to go on overseas programs, graduate debt free, have their parents pay for their BTO deposit or weddings etc I feel a little sad that I don't have any of that and instead will graduate into a bunch of debt that I see no way out of. And I can't trust my parents to financially plan their own retirement because they are not very educated and are quite stubborn when I try to sit them down to plan their financial retirement. Think aiya you graduate can already earn money take care of us.

The only way I foresee moving forward is to completely give up trying to set up a family of my own, i.e no spouse or kids and instead just dedicate totally to taking care of this household. Not sure if I am the only one facing this, although NTUC did come up with the sandwich generation ad so maybe not. But maybe I can avoid that situation by just not creating the second half of the sandwich.

So seeking the advice of people on this forum, hopefully if anyone has faced this before to offer some useful tips.

These days, you need to work like an addict to be able to afford to retire.