Our clients Ameriprise Financial released the recent study we conducted for them, Parents & Finances, earlier this week. We surveyed more than 3,000 American parents with at least one child age newborn to 30 with the goal of exploring how these parents approach money as their children grow. The results help us understand parents’ goals, concerns, and perspectives.
Overall, we found that parents today are balancing competing priorities, with many goals vying for their hard-earned dollars as well as their time. Nearly all respondents say parenthood brings them joy and purpose (96%) yet is harder than they expected — both emotionally and financially.
Other key findings include the following:
- Parents reported their top financial goals are saving for retirement (59%), paying for children’s education (39%) and managing day-to-day living expenses (36%).
- More than half of parents (60%) are concerned that the tradeoffs they need to make among these varying priorities will impact their long-term financial goals.
- Eighty percent of parents factored their financial situation into the decision to have a child, and a similar percentage (89%) plan to pay for some portion of their children’s college education.
- Seven out of 10 parents (72%) experience parental guilt with more than a third (35%) putting pressure on themselves to be the “perfect parent,” — which led to increased spending on their children.
The research also revealed four tips parents can implement to help balance their varying goals.
Check out the Parents and Finances press release on Business Wire and see the study summary here [PDF]. We’re lucky to have been working with Ameriprise for years; most recently, they published segmentation research we did to profile different personalities in retirement.
