Financial support for kids after leaving home

[twinklearms]

Anyone else worried about how they're going to help their DC when they leave home?

Between the cost of housing / rent, general cost of living, and university I think it's going to be really hard for them to make ends meet independently.  I have this horrible feeling that their lives might actually be worse than our own. 

Me and DH are mid-30's so it's not like cost of housing and uni wasn't an issue for us but we definitely had it easier, in part because our parents were able to help. We're lucky enough to own our own home (with hefty mortgage obviously), but our parents were able to give us some money towards the deposit. The thing is, the help that we had from our parents is something that I can't see us being able to give to our own kids, and the same is true of everyone I know in our age bracket.  All of them had some help to get on the housing ladder, and none of them could afford to give it to their own kids as we're all struggling to pay the mortgage etc.

We earn enough that the kids will only get the basic maintenance if they do go to uni, but unsurprisingly, like everyone, we don't have spare money after paying the mortgage.  One of us is public sector and so pay in real terms has just kept falling and health problems make long term earning potential iffy to say the least. The maintenance approach assumes we have enough left to finance them, but I can't see how this is possible. Sure they could live at home and we could manage, but we definitely couldn't subsidise rent for 2 kids! Without our help, paying rent looks incredibly difficult, even with working alongside uni.

Our kids are still young, but I feel pretty powerless to do anything about it. I manage to save £30 a month for them. But it feels pretty laughable. Is there something I'm missing here? It just feels like it wasn't always this way. I hope for their sakes (and ours) that they're not doomed to live with us forever.

[DreadPirateRobots]

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, at some point your parents' generation will die and their accrued wealth will pass to you, at which point you can choose to use some of it to set your children up in life. If your children are young then presumably you have childcare costs right now, which will fall away, and as you pay your mortgage the proportion that goes against the equity will slowly increase. So don't get massively ahead of yourself.