A retiree says the "financial shock" of retirement is clear: it's his children

Dirk Cotton.Courtesy Dirk Cotton

• Dirk Cotton retired from AOL at the age of 52. After retiring, he was surprised by two important expenses: health care and his children.
• Since he's founded a family later in life, his retirement and the college of his children have overlapped.
• He discovered that educating his three children and helping them later was a big expense.

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While the millennials have more difficulty standing up after college than previous generations, it is not surprising that their retiring parents have not exactly planned to support them for so long.

Dirk Cotton retired in 2005 at age 52 as an engineer and executive at AOL. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Since his retirement, he has spent his time researching and writing about retirement financing and blogging about it on his website, The Retirement Cafe.

Asked about the expenses he was not expecting in retirement, he cited two: his health care and his children.

He says that while his biggest surprise spending in retirement has been the rising cost of health care, his other major expense came after the departure of his kids from the university. "The second major financial shock is that today your children never leave home," says Cotton. "We still had adult children to help."

Cotton says that after college, it was not easy for her kids. "They had the same problems as many people and started their careers," Cotton said. "They came back from time to time when they were in between things."

In addition, he had to start by passing them to the university.

"My wife and I had our children later than most people," he says. "We had been out of college for about 13 years." So after his retirement, he continued, "After retirement, I also had to make sure that three children go to university." One of his children decided to pursue master's degree studies and go to medical school, which resulted in an increase in his tuition fees.

Cotton is far from the only one helping his adult children.

Parents are supporting their children much longer these days. Living at home with parents is now more common than living alone or with a roommate or partner among young adults, according to data from the Pew Research Center. Add to that people who choose to have children later in life, and that begins to mean that placing kids in college while living with retirement funds is a reality for many.

But now, two of Cotton's three children are married and live alone. "I do not expect any of them to come back," he says. "My intermediate son has visited many times for long periods, but now it is mostly us."

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