What's Harder, Having "The Money Talk" With Your Kids, Or Your Parents?

For some reason, there’s little more difficult money-wise than talking to our loved ones about money. We’re not so sure why this is the case, but for some reason the financial conversations aren’t that easy between one generation and the next. The Wall Street Journal brings up the issues associated with family money discussions in a couple of recent articles…

…discussing many of the difficulties in financial dialogue one generation up and one generation down. With the parents, you’re usually discussing how much money they have, if they can make it in retirement, what their estate plans are, etc. Tough stuff since the kids usually don’t want to “meddle” and mom and dad can feel put on the spot.

With kids, the conversation is different, though can be as challenging. After all, how do you explain that a rough economy is having financial impact on your family to kids that really can’t understand it? (Especially when you can’t understand much of it yourself.) It’s certainly difficult.

So we thought we’d ask you — which is the more difficult discussion: talking to mom and dad about how well they’ve prepared financially for the end of their lives or explaining to the kids that they have to forgo camp/a new iPod/vacation because some banks made bad loans/investments across the world?

FREE MONEY FINANCE (Photo: Remy Sharp)

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