128. Financial Wellbeing and Work: Supporting the Sandwith Generation with Aadil Abbas and Prina Shah

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Hello and welcome to this episode of Ways to Change Your Workplace with myself, Prina Shark, where we uncover ways to make your workplace a much better place to be.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Hello and welcome to this very important episode of the Ways to Change Your Workplace podcast with someone who you are quite familiar with now, my friend Adil Abbas, all the way from Sydney, who is a financial planner, uh co-owner of Own Financial Planning. And Adil, today I want to talk to you about a very, very important topic of the sandwich generation. First off, Adil, welcome. How are you?

SPEAKER_02 0:46

I'm good, Prina. Great to be back here again. And uh it's always good to talk to you and your audience.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Always fun, Adil. Now, I'm I'm gonna spill a lot of information to you because I really want to pick your brain in this one. Adil, I want to talk to you today about the concept of the sandwich generation. Now, Adil, for people who don't know, I will define what a sandwich generation is. A sandwich generation is a generation of people who have caring duties for their kids, themselves, which is the missing piece often, as well as their elders. So whether it be their parents or their in-laws, okay, and they are sandwiched in between both generations for caring duties. Now, Adel, many of my clients and many, many, many people in the workplace are in the sandwich generation. And it's hard, it's really hard from a financial wellness perspective, which is why I've brought Adil into the conversation. Because this is a conversation that we don't often get to have at all within the workplace, Adil. So I want to just open this can of worms. So it means that you're supporting your family top and down, and you have to look after yourself as well. So, from a workplace perspective, it's really important for you to know your own circumstances and be sure to enable enough time for yourself to wind down as well as learn at work. And, you know, there's workplace things that workplaces offer, such as carers leave, flexible work options. So check out whether you're eligible for that. But there's a massive, massive thing that's gonna happen shortly, Adil. And this is gonna time our conversation. It's gonna add a time limit to it. But this is something that the workplace and society, I don't think, are even ready for or even properly considering. This is something I've been banging on for ages, Adil. Baby boomers are soon to be retiring. Hello. There's gonna be a mass exodus of these people in the workforce, and therefore, people like us of our age, Adil, we're in our mid-40s. Hello, mid-40s. We are gonna be carers for the people at the top, and if we had kids, we'd be, you know, caring for our kids as well. Adil, we're not ready for this conversation, we're not even considering this from a sandwich generation perspective and a workplace wellness perspective. I'm gonna throw this over to you and ask for your concepts and thoughts as a financial planner who helps people to deal with their life and create the lifestyle that they want. How on earth do we deal with the sandwich generation dilemma, Adil, first off?

SPEAKER_02 3:41

Trina, what a fascinating topic to talk about today. Because this is a topic, interestingly, this is an everyday conversation for me because the prime majority of my client base are people in their 40s and 50s. That is my majority of my client base. And I think the challenge really begins at the fact that I find that people themselves are not, I have not accepted the change which is about just tearing them down the barrel. They are in denial themselves to begin with. First of all, so how would they even go and raise it with their employer? Um, and so and this is becoming very common because with increasing life expectancies, uh it's becoming far too common that during our peak income earning years, and we know that at our peak income earning years, which is typically in your 40s and 50s, just when you thought that, oh, I'm making enough money to enjoy my life, save up, pay down my debts, etc., you're also staring down, you're staring down significant expenses as a somebody in the standard generations. And let me explain that as to what these expenses could look like. It could be in relation to your kids, for example. For example, helping them with high school, private school fees. Your kids will be at that stage, uni fees, helping them maybe for some people, even it's like helping their kids getting into their first, I would say, property. Those are big expenses which parents would like. These are aspirations you have for your kids and you would like to do them, but these are big numbers. These are big numbers. Private school fees are approximately today. What is the average? Here in New South Wales, it's $30,000 a fee. Five years of private school fees, and you've got $150,000 to kind of be able to budget for. And that's not that's the one angle of being the sandwich generation. Look at it if you look to your parents, your parents are potentially now reaching a stage where they're going to need help out, be it your time, it could be time or it could be money, helping out with their care, helping out with maybe medical cost. And then when it if it gets to that stage where they need to move into a move out of home and move into some sort of a residential care facility, an aged care facility, there are large sums of money involved when it comes to funding that move. And depends, everybody's different. Your parents may be prepared for it, may not be prepared for it. And as it's only natural that you would want to help your parents continue leading a good lifestyle, but all of that takes money.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:04

So all of this really requires, first of all, acceptance of changes which are going to happen in your life and the lives of people around you who you love and care about. And then it requires some action consistently, year on year, to cater for these significant changes which are staring in your face for the next decade or so. Because remember, life expectancies are going only going up these days. One of the specialist areas, which I'm Prina, I don't share with you, or you may be aware, but one of the specialist areas I support my clients who are in the sandwich generation is around age care financial planning for their parents. And what this is about is like as your parents age, and what we do is as your parents age, they're going to need more help and support just with activities of daily living. Things like simple things like cooking or showering or doing the groceries or cleaning. And more often than I more often than I find, what more often than not, I find that actually for most of my clients, the challenge is even to have this conversation with their parents around help required to maintain the health and well-being. I've had this conversation with my parents. We are both Sandwich Generation Freena. We know the conversations we have with our parents because you can see them age and what help they may require. And I can say from experience, it's not an easy one. Forget discussing. Easy one to raise, forget discussing this. The signs are there for everyone, but accepting and embracing the change which is coming in your life is never easy, both for us to see our parents age and for our parents themselves to realize that they're going to need some, they're going to need some help. And our age care system, believe it or not, I know you hear a lot about it in the media. Actually, if I think about it as a financial planner, is quite a good one and a fair one. This may sound very controversial. And this I'm just comparing it to other developed countries in the world. But what makes it very frustrating and challenging for people, and you get all this bad media and press around it, is that it's very the complexity of rules and constant changes being made to it are actually making it very extremely challenging to understand and navigate. And then when you're navigating the system and mom and dad are in hospital and you're being told they cannot go home but need to go into a care facility, I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. But unfortunately, I find this happens far too often. Getting calls from clients in a complete state of disbelief and panic about making a significant decision about mom and dad, mom and dad's life and finances, when there has not been even one conversation about mom and dad's wishes prior to this, to their wishes and care and living arrangements prior to something like this happening. So we are big, like in my work, because I work a lot with the sandwich generations, I talk a lot about the idea of advanced care planning around these potential situations which help you stay in control, have a framework to make decisions, especially at a time of heightened emotions.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

Oh my gosh. Adel, you have just reminded me of oh gosh. Three years ago, I had a coachy, beautiful, beautiful woman, senior executive. Um, externally, you know, you just think she's a superwoman. Internally, in our conversations, her heart was so broken. She wanted to meet the expectations of the workforce and you know, her own objectives and her needs from a career perspective. She had kids. She had kids, she wanted to be the best mom in the world. And then this is what happened all of a sudden. Her dad turned sick and he had to be put into aged care immediately. The sickness wasn't an overnight thing. We were seeing it slowly, slowly creep up. However, Adil, she didn't have the conversation, she didn't even plan. And then, you know, out of this, Adil, the other horrible thing that happens is potential family dramas with your siblings and whatever else that might come. You know, so we haven't even gone there, that's a whole different ball game, isn't it? But yeah, I think you make some very important points here. I think two points that I want to summarize and finish with. Number one, do not ignore the conversation at work. If you have significant life moments that are going to impact your well-being and your need to be present and you know, the best self at work, have the conversation, tell your workplace, find out what's there for you in terms of carers, leave, flexibility, whatever. Find out what you are entitled to, have that conversation. Number two, Adil, do not ignore the conversation with your parents, as Adil says. And Adel beautifully summarized it by calling it an advanced care plan. I need to do this for myself, Adil, with my mom. I need to have the conversation. I cannot thank you enough for the millions of insights you've given again today, Adil. I want to bring you back again.

SPEAKER_02 10:55

Always a pleasure, Prina. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

How good was that episode? If you liked it, be sure to share it with a couple of other people. Also, in the show notes are details about my newsletter. Keep in touch. I send a newsletter out around once a month. It won't be spammy, it will be very practical. And if we're not connected on LinkedIn yet, we must be connect with me on LinkedIn. And on Instagram, I am Krina.shar. I will see you somewhere else or in the next episode. Until then, goodbye.