Supporting Family Remains a Retirement Challenge

Americans who support an aging parent or an adult child give an average of $12,000 a year to their family members.

One in five (22%) Americans supports an aging parent and/or an adult child, with these “financial supporters” spending an average of $12,000 a year to help their family, TD Ameritrade found in its 2015 Financial Support survey.

While only 22% said they need to dip into their savings to help their family members and only 30% made small sacrifices and lived more frugally, financial supporters hold nearly $100,000 in debt. This includes $22,000 in credit card balances, personal lines of credit or student loans, and $75,000 in mortgage debt.

Nearly two-thirds (64%) of financial supporters say they are very glad to help a parent, and 53% are very glad to help a child. Just over one-third (36%) would delay their retirement to financially support their adult children. A majority (69%) of financial supporters plan to continue supporting their adult children until they find well-paying jobs.

Financial supporters are nearly twice as likely to support a mother (43%) than a father (23%), giving their mothers $5,000 more in support each year.

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Conversations about financial support happen when a family member asks for help, with 44% of financial supporters’ parents having asked for help and 52% of children having asked for help. However, 79% of financial supporters have not discussed their support of others with a financial professional.

“The financial downside of living longer may mean not only planning for our own extended retirement years, but also caring for aging family members in ways that can take a solid bite out of any well-laid plans,” says Matthew Sadowsky, director of retirement at TD Ameritrade.

ProcessUnity Expands Adviser Support Services

Updated sales and compliance support capabilities from ProcessUnity now link directly with Salesforce.

Cloud-based application and technology provider ProcessUnity revealed an expansion of its sales- and compliance-support services for financial advisers and investment service providers, as well as new integration with Salesforce and other customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

In a conversation with PLANADVISER, Lisa Weil, the firm’s vice president of industry solutions, noted the expansion includes new features across “24 key application areas, all designed to expand data access, eliminate manual processes and ensure overall program and user effectiveness.”

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Weil explains ProcessUnity’s capabilities can help advisory firms “come up with specific points of view around the best ways to deliver all the various services they are selling and delivering. As a third-party service provider, ProcessUnity helps firms catalog and organize all of their services and client relationships, with a major goal being to provide all client-facing representatives and associates with a consistent point of view and set of capabilities to sell.”

Perhaps most important, Weil says her firm can help providers organize their staff in the most reasonable and efficient way to serve the book of business. Benefits include cutting down on unnecessary duplication of effort and getting the right staff to focus on the right work at the right time.

“These sound like straightforward concepts,” Weil says, “but they’re not always easy to accomplish in a large financial services firm with a substantial book of assets under management.”

Weil explains the expanded services from ProcessUnity offer improved functionality in the GRC space—short for governance, risk and compliance. For example, the update includes enhancements to vendor risk questionnaires that give users the “ability to include advanced conditional logic that displays questions and sub-questions based on specific responses.”

The new release also adds support for vendor facility information gathering and reporting for fourth parties, among other new features. Weil says an ongoing goal of ProcessUnity is to make the firm’s capabilities accessible within more of the solutions and sales platforms advisers are already using—so additional expansions are anticipated.

More information on ProcessUnity’s expanded suite of solutions is at www.processunity.com.

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