For those who haven’t heard the name, boomerang kids move back to their childhood home after school’s out.
A movie like Failure to Launch gives these young adults a bad name.

Financial planners fear their clients will spend much needed retirement dollars on Junior.
Some demographers question whether it’s even a growing trend. Many Americans used to live at home until they got married.

But can’t it be a smart move?
I never lived at home after the start of my sophomore year. But that doesn’t mean my parents haven’t helped financially over the years when they could afford to.

How about you? Are you a boomerang? Have a boomerang? What are the pluses and minuses of the setup?

Thanks to Aimee for wedding week.

One of the many reasons I love blogs is that it provides a place for us journalists to make mention of the great work others are doing and expose it to an audience that wouldn’t otherwise know about it.

I make a stop at the Wall Street Journal’s family blog The Juggle almost daily.

Fortunately, it’s part of the Journal’s free features section (which if you haven’t taken advantage of you’re really missing some great stuff).

It covers a lot of family and work issues related to having children, but it also tackles financial issues from time to time.

Yesterday, riffing off of an ethics column in Time Magazine, the blogger posted about whether couples should split household expenses 50/50, even if incomes are vastly different.

The poor woman who wrote to Time seeking advice is running around with a dude who has millions yet insists that if they get married they split expenses in half. To that, I say, RUN, although if it works for her, then good for her (although if it did I guess she wouldn’t have written an advice columnist).

I used to make far less than Matt. Now I make a more. Yet as our careers shift, the way we split our finances doesn’t.

We deposit all of our money into a joint account and from there money is siphoned off into various savings accounts and a small separate account for each of us.

That separate account amount is different– he gets $150 a month. I get $240. I get more not because I make more, but because we each added up how much we’d like to spend on stuff and how much the household budget could shoulder and created an amount we could both live with. If he suddenly decided that wasn’t enough, we’d talk and tweak.

I’ve spoken to couples who organize money like this: one doles out an allowance each week or month to the other and when it’s gone, the recipient must ask for more or patiently wait for their next “pay day.” I don’t think I could deal with that. But different methods will work for different people.

How do you split your finances with your s.o.? Should the highly paid have more cash for play? Should everything be sliced down the middle?

Kiplinger magazine, which focuses on personal finance, clearly thinks so.

The magazine named Minneapolis-St. Paul one of the best cities for married

First an apology. Add tax coverage to financial literacy month events and I’ve had precious little time for my blog.

Today’s the tax deadline and today was also the community forum about Minnesota financial education. So with both out of the way, I have time to share research from two Fidelity studies.

The first was released last month and speaks to the title of this post.

If Generation Xers continue to save a the rate they are today, they will be hit with a 46 percent pay cut when they retire. That’s steeper than the 38 percent drop expected for the boomers.
The boomers have about a 4.3 percent personal savings rate while the Gen Xers have a 2.9 percent rate, despite the fact that the two generation’s incomes are about $5,000 apart annually.

That doesn’t surprise me. Gen Xers are juggling more financial balls in the air. For dual income families, imagine the damage they can do to their 401(k) maximums once the kids are out of day care. Or once the students loans are paid. At least that’s where the money had better go, since fewer in this cohort (I love that wonky word) will see a pension.

Here’s the full study.

The second piece of research only interviews investors born before 1964. But for those of us who are younger, I think it serves as health food for thought.

About a third of couples had completely different answers about retirement age, lifestyle in retirement, and work in retirement. The study doesn’t appear to be posted yet but the press release is.
Some financial advisers have said they are seeing more divorce because couples don’t talk about life after work.
Just one out of four couples said they manage their money together. I wonder if this number is much lower than the number who would say they don’t manage money together but know their money management strategy or accounts.

After all, as we get busier and busier, it’s hard for families to sit down together and manage the money side by side. The laundry is one chore; money management another.

That said, there’s no time like now to start talking about money with your S.O.