S4 E26 Bank of Mum and Dad: How to Help Your Adult Children Without Wrecking Your Retirement

The Bank of Mum and Dad is now somewhere between the fifth and ninth largest mortgage lender in Australia. That's not a metaphor. That's Finder research from 2025. Seventeen percent of first-home buyers now receive help from their parents to save a deposit — up from eleven percent in 2022. Seventy-five percent of that help is gifted, not loaned. And the average gift sits at $74,040… though in real life, as a former mortgage broker, Phoebe regularly saw two, three, four times that figure cross the table. And it's not just deposits. It's the wedding. The school fees. The second car. The credit card debt. The bond money when they suddenly had to move. The family holiday you "treated everyone" to. For many Australian women in their 50s and 60s, this is now the second largest line item in their financial life — after their own mortgage or rent. And here's the part nobody is talking about: we didn't sign up for this the way our mothers did. They raised us, packed us off with a Vegemite jar of cutlery and a casserole dish, and were essentially financially done. We're mothering and funding well into our 60s and 70s — and we're quietly tipping in without saying a word at book club, at dinner, or sometimes even to our own partner. In this episode, Phoebe Blamey unpacks one of the most important — and least discussed — financial issues facing midlife Australian women right now. Because the maths is brutal. The average woman aged 60–64 has around $318,000 in super. A comfortable single retirement needs closer to $595,000. The gap between those two numbers is exactly the kind of gap created by 10 or 15 years of "just helping the kids out." You'll hear: The three biggest financial blast radiuses of getting Bank of Mum and Dad wrong — including the $200,000 deposit that walks straight out the door in a property settlement, and the inheritance fight you create from beyond the grave without ever meaning to Why the Family Court treats gifts and loans completely differently in Australia — and the simple, inexpensive paperwork that protects your child (and your money) if a marriage ever goes sideways The five conversations to have at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning, when nobody is in crisis — before the phone rings late at night Why your only job when your adult child arrives in marital distress is to listen — and the one exception where the rules completely change How to have the fairness conversation while everyone is still alive (because fair and equal are not the same thing — and the version of this conversation that destroys sibling relationships is always the one held silently, in a will) The single biggest mindset shift that makes all of this stick: you are the lighthouse, not the lifeboat This episode is for the woman who is capable, educated, earning well, and increasingly realising she needs to be the one making the calls — not deferring to a husband, an adviser, or a default "yes" when her adult children ask. Because the greatest transfer of generational wealth in history is moving toward women, and learning to hold money — not just spend it or give it away — is the skill of this decade. Decide your line now, while the weather is calm and the seas aren't stormy. You can love your children ferociously and still hold your line. Those two things are not in conflict. The line is love. Disclaimer: The information in this podcast is general in nature and does not constitute personal financial advice or recommendations.