Your Pipeline Is Full of Parents Whose Kids Went to College and Still Live at Home

Look at your book. A large share of your clients are parents, and a large share of those parents have an adult child who did everything right. Finished school, went to college, took on the debt everyone said was the smart bet, and still ended up back in their childhood bedroom.

At the peak of 2020, 52% of young adults were living with a parent, the highest share since the Great Depression, past the previous record of 48% set in 1940 (Pew Research Center). It eased when the economy reopened but never returned to normal. Today roughly one in three adults ages 18 to 34 still live at home, and that share rose again in 2024 (Pew Research Center, 2025).

The debt is the reason. Americans owe about $1.7 trillion in federal student loans across 42.5 million borrowers, an average near $39,000 each (Education Data Initiative). A large share of that sits on parents who cosigned, took Parent PLUS loans, consolidated, or simply never stopped writing checks.

So your client is not only worried about their own retirement. They are quietly funding an adult child and delaying their own goals to do it. That is a planning problem sitting in plain sight, and almost no one is solving it.

Here is the move. Offer to sit down with your client’s 28-year-old and show them the honest math on their loans: which repayment plan actually gets them out fastest, and what each path really costs. Three things happen at once. The parent stops bleeding money into a problem no one had quantified. The parent trusts you more than they trust anyone. And you have just met your next client, twenty-five years early.

Nobody has ever shown this generation the real numbers. Be the advisor who does, and you do not win one client. You win the whole family.