Annie Tsai

You’ve heard of Baby Boomers, Millennials, GenZ & Alpha, the Silent Generation. Maybe a few of you have even heard of GenX (wave, hi). But have you heard of the Sandwich Generation? 

For nearly seven years, I’ve been helping grow a Facebook community of working professional mothers in the tech space  called Moms in Tech. It’s been a labor of love as most volunteering is, and today the community is over 18,000 strong of undeniably impressive mothers leading, starting, advising, and growing businesses that hundreds of millions of people around the world depend on while sharing in the increasingly complex experience of raising children in today’s society. My second brain, I often refer to Moms in Tech as. 

These days, I lead community engagement and put together workshops and webinars on hot topics throughout the year so we can stay on top of “all of the things”. This past week, I facilitated an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session with a Bay Area based Certified Financial Planner that over the last few years had found her niche in empowering working professional women to take control over their finances and build a plan for the rest of their lives.

While there were a wide range of questions over the course of our two hour AMA, one couldn’t help but notice the sheer volume of inquiries tied to either saving for college or saving for elder and long-term care. Sometimes, members asked about both at the same time in the form of, “I’m lost on how exactly I’m supposed to be planning and saving for both of these things at the same time.” 

And this – this is the epitome of the Sandwich Generation. 

You are in this cohort if you have living parents over the age of 65 and children under 18 or are financially supporting adult children. One might initially think that those in the Sandwich Generation are either spending equally at both ends or spending more to support their living parents, but the truth is that nearly 60% of people aged 45-60 with adult children are financially supporting them in some manner, and more often than not the focus of elder care is a bit of financial and a lot of emotional support. 

This is an increase from 44% a decade ago, according to Pew Research. Today, half of Americans in their 40’s have both a living parent over the age of 65 and children under 18 or adult children they are financially supporting. And between now and 2030, 10,000 Americans are going to turn 65 every day so more and more Millennials and Gen Xers continue to join Club Sandwich. 

By now maybe you’re wondering why so many adult children are requiring financial assistance from their parents. Well, the answer is complicated yet simple. 

Housing is often the single highest expense a person has. In San Mateo County, you need to make over $200,000 a year in order to afford to comfortably rent a market-rate two-bedroom apartment. The median income for a family of four is $186,000 and if you make under $154,000 that family qualifies for low-income housing. 

The primary driver of housing prices is supply and demand. When there is not enough supply, prices go up. According to the San Mateo County website, between 2010 and 2010, 79,000 jobs were created yet only 3,844 new housing units were constructed. From 2017-2019, another 5,600 homes were built but 30,000 jobs were created. Perhaps the goal was never to catch up, but it certainly shouldn’t be to stay impossibly behind. 

The truly fascinating thing about all this is that those who sit comfortably in their homes with low interest mortgages or paid off homes have absolutely no view into how serious the situation is unless they are one of those Sandwichers providing financial assistance to either their parents or adult children who are struggling to afford the cost of living. I don’t know how to change this, but it is a very real impediment to implementing policy that can help solve this problem.

Going back to the members of Moms in Tech who were asking very detailed, logistical, and thoughtful questions about how to survive being a Sandwicher – the levels of stress and concern were palpable, even through the device. You could tell that these women – incredibly accomplished in their own right – fully understood that most Americans will never be able to save to the levels required to support both young and aging simultaneously in this country. No one should have their stasis be at these levels of stress, but it’s incredibly common amongst Sandwichers. It’s something that keeps me up at night because I just don’t know how long it can continue like this, but we need to do something.