Some 54% of Americans in their 40s having a parent age 65 or older while also raising a child or supporting an adult child financially, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in October 2021. For Americans in their 50s, 36% are in this situation, Pew Research Center said. Roughly 16 million Americans qualify as members of the so-called sandwich generation, according to data released in July 2025 by the AARP and National Alliance for Caregiving. Some 73% of middle-aged adults with at least one child over 18 provided some form of financial support to that child in the past year, according to a 2013 analysis from Pew Research Center. For financial advisors, that shift is no longer a side conversation — it is reshaping how retirement, estate, and portfolio planning gets built from the ground up.
Four advisors who work with multigenerational clients say the traditional model of a single blended allocation, deployed once and revisited annually, no longer reflects the financial reality their clients are living. But not all agree the 60/40 itself needs to change.
Tim Thornberry, financial planner at Prudential Advisors and founding partner of Cornerstone Financial Partners, says estate planning work used to center on transfer at death. Now, he says, most of the real money moves during life — and unless that support is built in as a known obligation from the start, it quietly erodes the client's own retirement security.
"Disciplined tax management matters more here than people expect," Thornberry said. "Every dollar we keep from leaking out unnecessarily is another dollar of support, another option, another year of runway as we work through these multilayered goals."
Thornberry rejects the idea that the rise of multigenerational support requires abandoning the 60/40 portfolio. The problem, in his view, was never the allocation itself — it was treating any single allocation as a universal answer.
"When a client may be funding family for decades, you can't run one portfolio against three different time horizons and call it balanced. Near-term support needs liquidity and stability; it has a deadline, so it doesn't belong in equities. Long-horizon money stays invested because a thirty-year obligation still needs a thirty-year engine behind it," Thornberry said.
For Thornberry, the growth, income, liquidity, and risk questions get answered separately against each financial obligation a client carries — and the overall allocation emerges from that work rather than driving it.
Ryan Botzong, vice president and financial advisor at 49 Financial, says more than half of his clients in or approaching retirement are providing financial support to both aging parents and adult children simultaneously. On one side, they are weighing long-term care costs for parents; on the other, they are watching adult children struggle with rising home prices and a difficult labor market.
"Being in their 50s and 60s, retirement isn't just about themselves anymore," Botzong said. "That's why I believe a shift in planning perspective is so critical right now. There are too many variables for retirement planning to be strictly investment management. What clients actually need is an individually specific process — one that accounts for their full picture, not just a portfolio."
Botzong argues the rise of the permanent sandwich generation does require a structural rethink of the 60/40 model, particularly now that interest rates are higher than during the previous decade. A single blended allocation, he says, cannot serve a client whose obligations pull simultaneously in several directions.
"What works, in my opinion, is buckets — built around what the client actually needs. Growth oriented toward legacy. Income for their lifestyle in retirement. Liquidity for the obligations that don't wait. That's exactly why you can't just focus on basic portfolio construction and call it done," Botzong said.
Brian Baker, a chartered financial consultant at The Baker Financial Group, and an affiliate of Strategic Financial Alliance Partners, says the biggest shift he has observed over the past decade is that financial planning is no longer built around a single generation. It now spans multiple generations living increasingly interconnected financial lives.
"Many of our clients are helping aging parents with healthcare, housing, or long-term care needs while also assisting adult children with education costs, housing, or simply getting established in a much more challenging economic environment," Baker said. "Those conversations have become a routine part of our planning process. That's one reason we place such a strong emphasis on truly understanding our clients' lives, not just their investments."
As a result, Baker now spends as much time during annual client meetings discussing family dynamics, health concerns, career changes, and life goals as he does reviewing portfolio performance — a recognition that those personal conversations often carry more weight on a financial plan than market returns alone. "Helping clients navigate those complexities is one of the most rewarding parts of what we do," Baker said. "We view our role as helping families make thoughtful financial decisions that reflect both their resources and their values."
Rex Berger, private wealth manager at Generation Capital Advisors, a wealth management practice operating through Integrated Partners, offers a different lens entirely. For his first- and second-generation clients who built significant wealth through decades of market upside, he says the sandwich dynamic is not a crisis to survive — it is an opportunity they are often thrilled to act on. Many of these clients hold an excess estate, more than they will reasonably spend in their lifetimes, shifting the central planning question from "Will I have enough?" to how best to deploy that wealth across the family while they are still alive to see its impact.
Berger points to helping an adult child purchase a first home as one of the clearest examples. In the current housing market, he says, a down payment gift is often the single highest-impact dollar a parent will ever transfer to a child.
"We've turned estate planning from a death event into a living strategy: annual exclusion gifts, the lifetime exemption for larger transfers like a home, and direct tuition or medical payments that sit outside the gift tax system entirely. It's no longer about dying efficiently. It's about giving with purpose, while it still changes a life," Berger said.
Taken together, the four advisors describe an industry adjusting in real time to a structural shift in how American families move money across generations. The 60/40 portfolio is not obsolete, but treating it as a one-size-fits-all answer increasingly is. Advisors who restructure plans around specific obligations — and who treat family dynamics as core planning inputs rather than background context — are positioning their practices for a demographic reality that is only set to deepen as the population ages.
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