Time to be selfish

Late 30’s and early 40’s is that time in our life when our expenses just outrun our income or our income is just enough to meet our expenses. This is a time when we would have got married some years earlier, spent a lot of money on the marriage. Then purchased a house and you are still paying off your loans.

You have children who have started growing and would just be going to school and their school fees and expenses. Not to forget socializing, with your family and friends growing. Your spouse’s family included. Add to all this your parents. Yes, parents. They took care of us and they would be either reaching their retirement age or would have retired.

It has become your moral duty to take care of them. Not to forget sometimes it would become your moral duty to contribute towards your in-laws as well. If your parents and in-laws have retired and managed to create a good retirement corpus, good for you. Even then this would be an age (of your parents) when they would be very careful of spending their money.

So you would still contribute some amount to help them. It’s not easy for them as well. What with expenses going up and the biggest expense, which does not come cheap is medical expenses. What you could do is take a medical insurance policy for them. This way they will be a little reassured.

Taking a medical policy in your parents name is beneficial to you too. You get income tax deductions and also the satisfaction that your funds will not be touched, in case they fall sick. If they are close to retirement, then start retirement planning for them, so that the burden on you would be reduced when they retire.

If your parents stay in their own house and you are really hard pressed for money, look at reverse mortgage as an option (refer to this article for details). This would help give them monthly income and when things ease a bit you can start building a corpus to repay the loan.

As you plan to start building a corpus to repay the reverse mortgage loan don’t forget to start building some other corpus’s as well. Some to them are Children’s higher education and your own retirement. You don’t want to be dependent on your children, right.