Foreign Perspectives

With the credit squeeze still upon us, it shouldn’t be a great surprise to learn that many parents are still tapping the Bank of Mum & Dad even as adults.

The research commissioned by Scottish Widows indicates that over a third of parents have had to tap into their retirement savings to fund these requests from their children. That’s a scary thought as it implies that those parents may well need to call in that loan at some point if/when they run out of money for their own retirement and I’m sure it’s not something that the “kids” have considered.

It’s not peanuts either as the research indicates that the amount involved is well over £60 BILLION.

Now, it’s probably fine for the 30% who were asking for money to fund the deposit on a house in that they’ve actually got something “in the bank” so to speak but over 40% were asking for the money to repay debt and that’s money that’s quite simply gone. Quite what those “children” are going to do when their parents come to them asking for the money back so that they can retire in the manner in which they’d planned to is a very good question. One suspects that they’ll end up needing to consider secured loans on the parental home at some point.