Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI For better or worse, America treats retirement like a personal problem. Yes, there's Social Security, but it's only designed to make up about 40% of your retirement income. As for the rest, the answer is to work hard, save up, and pray your calculations are right. Even if you manage to get it all right, what happens when your parents don't do the same? Baby boomers are in their post-work era — an estimated 10,000 of them retire every day. As a whole, they're a very wealthy generation, but they're not all cruising toward their golden years financially sound. According to a Vanguard estimate, just 40% of boomers between 61 and 65 are on track to afford their lifestyles in retirement. Americans believe they need $1.6 million to comfortably retire, according to a survey from Charles Schwab. Boomers, on average, have a fraction of that saved up. For families, it's a conundrum. Suddenly, adult children are tasked not only with helping with medical appointments and grocery runs — they're also scrambling to support their aging relatives financially, potentially blowing up their own savings in the process. It's a case of intergenerational financial contagion: One generation's under-saving rewires another's math and rewrites their future. "When you plan for yourself, you're also planning for your kids, because if you're not taking care of yourself, you're forcing your kids to be your insurance company," says Laurence Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University. When Brandon sat down with his mother to look at her 401(k) a few months ago, he was gobsmacked at how little she had saved up. Her goal was to retire at 67, which is just two years away, but her account sat at $112,000, far short of where the fund was meant to be. She plans to start drawing on Social Security next year, but she's still got a mortgage and car payments that the check won't come close to covering without her keeping a full-time job. "At the current spending rate, she's never going to be able to retire," Brandon tells me. Despite the brutal calculus, his mother seems to think everything will magically work out. "She doesn't see the cliff coming," he says. Brandon, a 39-year-old Florida truck driver who asked his last name be withheld to protect his family's privacy, is starting to suspect that his mom has a backup plan: him. She helps take care of his 91-year-old grandmother and often makes comments wondering if she can expect the same from him. The problem is, he has a wife and two kids to focus on. He's got a 401(k) through his job and is smart about investing, but it's not enough to add another dependent to his ledger. "I feel a great deal of guilt for her future because I want my mom to be OK," he says. If you're not taking care of yourself, you're forcing your kids to be your insurance company. Situations like Brandon's are about to become more common as the first generation to rely on the modern individualized retirement system reckons with its shortcomings. We've swapped pensions for 401(k)s and IRAs that are a choose-your-own-adventure mechanism for savers, if people paid into them at all. Only half of the private sector workforce has access to retirement savings plans through their employer, says David John, a senior policy advisor at the AARP Public Policy Institute. For those who don't, the odds are very high that they're not saving for retirement on their own. "As long as this situation lasts, we're going to see more and more people who don't have sufficient retirement savings," he says. To make matters worse, for those who do manage to put money away, we don't really have effective tools or guidance to help them adjust their consumption habits once they've stopped working. Most people know they should have a plan for retirement spending, according to a recent AARP survey, but only about a quarter of them actually do. "Basically, a lot of people are going in blind," John says. Products such as annuities, which are designed to provide a predictable income in retirement, are expensive. Increased longevity makes financial projections harder. And the costs of items such as long-term care are so astronomical that there may be no way to save sufficiently to cover them. "You can get a loan for school. You can't get a loan for retirement," says Suzanne Norman, an executive coach and financial literacy educator. People may have a strong nest egg and a good plan for how to ride out their retirement, but we all know what happens to the best-laid plans— unexpected roof repairs don't go away once you hit 65. Allison, a 35-year-old in North Carolina, and her husband recently learned her father-in-law's house was in foreclosure — they had no idea he was in money trouble at all and just thought he was putting the house up for sale. In their initial panic, her husband contemplated dipping into his 401(k) to bail his dad out. Instead, they've gotten in touch with the real estate agent on the property — a cousin — and paid $5,000 to have the house painted and staged to help it sell faster. They found a place close to where they live for Allison's father-in-law to rent until they figure out what's next. "There are a lot of loose ends that will have to be tied up eventually," Allison, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, says. Recent research from Boston College examined unexpected expenses in retirement — think health emergencies, divorce, car breakdowns, etc. On average, those unexpected costs gobble up as much as 10% of annual retirement income for retirees, and only 60% of retirees have enough cash on hand to cover them in any given year. "It's a pretty substantial amount," says Angie Chen, associate director of savings and household finance at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College and one of the authors of the research. When these emergency shocks hit, some people look to their families, particularly their adult children, for support. People who are able to help their parents out generally don't significantly harm their retirement security — kids tend to lend a hand only when they're well-off, Chen says. But there are exceptions: Black and Hispanic households are likelier to fall behind on retirement because of giving to their older parents, largely because they often start pitching in, financially, earlier and therefore miss out on years of compounding investments. "They do end up with less retirement wealth and less total wealth at the end," Chen says. Sudden expenses can come in all shapes and sizes later in life, including scams. That's what happened to 62-year-old Laura's 82-year-old mother-in-law. Laura, who lives in Illinois and asked that her last name be withheld to avoid embarrassing her family, estimates that her mother-in-law has given tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars to scammers over the past five years, buying gift cards to send to people she's met on Facebook. Despite the family's attempts at intervention, she refused to be deterred. "We told her and told her and told her that she would be a target because they look for widows and people who are lonely," Laura says, but her mother-in-law wouldn't hear it. I've worked all these years, I've put every penny I could into retirement, and here it goes. She eventually stopped paying her bills, and her house was foreclosed on. Last year, Laura and her husband had to scramble to get her into a senior living home that costs $3,000 a month. Between Social Security and retirement savings, her mother-in-law can cover it on her own, but Laura and her husband have still spent $50,000 on various parts of the ordeal — getting her moved, covering unpaid bills. It's made Laura reflect on her own retirement, which is happening this summer. "I've worked all these years, I've put every penny I could into retirement, and here it goes," she says of her attitude toward it. As for her mother-in-law, things have settled down, and they got her a Jitterbug phone that does not have access to the internet. The costs adult children pay when their parents' financial plans fall short aren't shared evenly. Women often bear the brunt of support, costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost wages and missed retirement savings. Pew Research also found that one in 10 American adults is a caregiver for a parent 65 or older, and low-income people, disproportionately, end up shouldering the weight. This comes with emotional, logistical, and financial tolls. "About half of family caregivers report at least one negative financial impact because of caregiving, and this hits retirement planning very acutely," says Jason Resendez, the CEO of the National Alliance for Caregiving, a nonprofit that supports family caregivers. He says family caregivers spend some $7,000 out of their own pockets annually. As older generations retire, more and more families are staring down an uncertain economic future, and personal finance experts say communication is key. As much as budgeting discussions can be an "unpleasant task," AARP's John says, they're necessary. "You can start to look at this and say, 'All right, what steps can I take to make sure that I'm using my income both more effectively but frankly more enjoyably?'" he says. Conversations with parents can be tricky — after spending most of their lifetime in charge, they may feel like their kids are being condescending or nagging. But the more the family knows about what's going on, financially, the better everyone can prepare and seek out options. "If you don't know what it costs to run your life, it's very likely that your life will run out of control," Norman says. Marcelo Cardenal, a 47-year-old from Florida, and the rest of his family decided that the best avenue for his 89-year-old mother-in-law is to spend down her $100,000 in assets so she can qualify for Medicaid. It could take as much as three years to do it, though, given her deteriorating condition — she has dementia — he thinks it will be faster. "Somehow, she's been able to survive all of this time just living off of her Social Security," he says. He and his wife have helped out financially in a "minimal way," he says, but they feel the right course of action is to get her into the social safety net rather than dip into their own savings and potentially hamstring themselves down the line. It has "bought us time to think about what we need to do, we're not rushed to make decisions," he says. Families can budget differently. They can delay Social Security, downsize homes, sell investments, or make tough decisions about long-term care. What they can't do is go back in time and save decades earlier. That means the retirement crisis won't stop with one generation — it will shape the financial future of the next. Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy. Read the original article on Business Insider