Gen X Is Stuck in the Middle and Financially Squeezed. How One Financial Adviser Is Helping.

Gen X families, including affluent ones, face a hornet’s nest of financial challenges, from helping out their adult children to providing care for ageing parents to managing careers in a perilous job market.

Zach Mangels, a senior vice president at Wealthspire Advisors in San Rafael, Calif., estimates a quarter of his clients are in the Gen X demographic.

“Mortgage rates are higher, carrying costs are higher, educational costs are higher, groceries are higher, eldercare is higher—all of that stuff eats into cash flow. And even people with higher incomes are feeling that,” says Mangels, 40.

Barron’s Advisor spoke with Mangels about the financial challenges facing his Gen X clients, people between the ages of 46 and 61.

Mangels touched on how he creates short-term plans for clients concerned about career setbacks, why he recommends boundaries for Gen X parents who want to financially support adult kids, and how he guides clients with ageing parents.

How has financial planning for Gen X clients changed?

Typically, when you create a financial plan, you’re looking at long-range goals.

But now I look at more immediate needs because of the pressures Gen X families are dealing with.

For example, I see more clients whose children are coming back home after graduating from college, needing financial support for a much longer period of time than previous generations expected to receive.

How should help for adult children be structured?

If they need to support their child, I want to understand the nature of what the support will look like.

I have a client whose kids just graduated and whose majors don’t lend themselves to a high income right now.

They knew their kids would be coming back home after graduation and we talked about what the nature of their help would look like.

First we looked at their financial plan to see what kind of support they could provide and we defined the maximum amount.

Then we designed the support in a way that would be planned, explicit, and with purposeful boundaries.

That’s very important for the younger generation. Parents need to know how to help their kids without them becoming dependent.

The children need to have agency and to know they don’t have access to an unlimited piggy bank.

What was the plan?

The clients had a conversation with their kids about what to expect.

The kids could live rent-free for three years, with a small stipend, an amount that didn’t disincentivise them from looking for a job.

In this environment, entry-level jobs are increasingly hard to come by, but any job that moves you closer to a career you want is worth looking at. In this case, their daughter got a job as an assistant to a personal shopper, which was related to the direction she wanted to follow.

Do you help the parents practice what to say?

I didn’t provide a ton of details to the parents with what exactly to say. But I coached them on the basics—having a clear, purposeful, intentional conversation and getting buy-in from their kids.

How do you advise clients with ageing parents?

The cost of long-term care for seniors has increased dramatically.

One of the conversations I have with my clients is how they perceive their parents’ financial circumstances and to what degree they might have to provide a layer of financial support. My dad was in memory care for a few years and we paid maybe 15 grand a month.

My clients’ parents are usually relatively stable financially. But the most important issue is the use of the family residence to help provide support. A lot of people in California who have owned homes a long time have a lot of equity in those homes. That’s the ultimate backstop, the last line of defence.

What about the job market?

Gen X is also dealing with career and income volatility. We’ve seen all the headlines about tech layoffs and the rise of AI. A lot of my clients work in the tech industry.

The conversations I have more frequently focus on clients’ concerns about their ability to continue earning at the same level.

We look at diversifying their equity component more quickly, getting it out of company stock, especially for those in tech.

For example, some clients at Amazon have restricted stock units they can sell periodically. But now they’re selling those (Amazon) stocks and then deploying the [cash into other equities] more slowly.

We’re hearing about how quickly AI is going to change things. For people in software on the front lines, they’re pretty anxious about it.

Can you provide an example?

One client who works at Google told me he expected a lot of change with AI as the disruptive force.

A few companies will benefit, he feels. A lot won’t. So he’s actively selling his company shares.

Historically we would reinvest the proceeds as they’ve come in. But now he wants to slow that down. Hold cash a little bit longer and slowly deploy it.

His perception is that change is coming quickly. He doesn’t know what that will look like but it probably won’t be good.

In behavioural finance, we know you feel a loss much more significantly than you feel a gain. And he’s trying to avoid putting money in the market right before there is a big correction.

It sounds stressful.

It’s super stressful. And as we go into 2026, especially in the tech sector and among those with high incomes, I see a lot of anxiety.

I have another client who works in finance, but the nature of his job moves with economic cycles.

He was laid off at the start of Covid and he’s getting nervous again. It’s a “vibecession” that a lot of people are feeling right now.

How do you help someone worried about a job loss?

Over a year ago, we restructured where his investments are held, so that if he gets laid off and ends up spending his emergency fund, the next thing he’ll tap is a more conservative account we created.

It’s not that we took his overall asset allocation and made it more conservative. We just put more investments in this other account. It’s a matter of asset location and it gives him peace of mind knowing he has a fallback he can tap.

That strategy would be helpful for anybody today. The challenge is if you have accounts with a lot of capital gains.

Does multigenerational planning help?

My work with baby boomer clients often involves conversations about supporting their Gen X and older millennial children.

I’ve seen a lot of parents and grandparents of Gen Xers looking for ways to accelerate their generational wealth transfer, trying to provide assistance now when it’s more impactful on their kids’ lives.

For example, a baby boomer client was looking for ways to help her Gen X son, who is married with a child in middle school, but had started accumulating a lot of debt after he was laid off.

We worked together to model the level of support she could provide and how to structure the assistance so it wouldn’t impact her son’s sense of independence.

Ultimately, she decided on a one-time gift that would cover about six months of living expenses. I call this indirect Gen X planning.

Every year, thousands of Australians make the decision to pack up life overseas and come home.

After years, sometimes decades, building careers, accumulating assets, and growing families in places like Dubai, London, Singapore, or Hong Kong, the pull back is understandable.

What most don’t appreciate until it’s too late is that the return journey is often far more financially complex than the departure.

Leaving Australia is, financially speaking, a relatively clean event.

You depart, you potentially become a non-resident for tax purposes, and a new set of rules applies.

Coming back, however, means reconciling everything you’ve accumulated offshore with an Australian tax system that hasn’t been standing still waiting for you.

The Tax Residency Trap

The first and most costly mistake is misunderstanding when Australian tax residency resumes.

Many returning expats assume residency only kicks in once they’ve formally re-established themselves, signed a lease, updated their address, started a job. The ATO doesn’t see it that way.

Under Australian tax law, residency can recommence the moment you land with the intention of remaining. That means any taxable events, investment income, asset disposals, foreign account distributions that occur after that point are potentially assessable in Australia, even if they’re sitting in offshore accounts you haven’t touched.

Superannuation: The Clock Doesn’t Stop

One of the most underappreciated issues for returning expats is what’s been happening inside their superannuation fund while they’ve been away.

Contributions may have paused, but fees, insurance premiums, and investment volatility haven’t. Some returning clients are genuinely shocked by how much ground their super has lost to fees during periods of lower balances or inappropriate investment settings.

The more strategic issue is what to do on the way back. If you hold foreign pension arrangements, a UK SIPP or QROPS, a 401(k), and international savings schemes, the question of whether and how to repatriate those funds requires careful planning before you return.

Once you’re a tax resident again, distributions from certain foreign structures can be assessable as ordinary income, and the window to manage that exposure closes.

Offshore Investments Don’t Disappear

Returning to Australia doesn’t sever your obligations in the countries where you’ve been living.

Foreign-held shares, managed funds, or investment accounts will be picked up by Australian tax reporting requirements from the moment residency resumes.

The Foreign Investment Fund rules, transferor trust provisions, and the reporting obligations under Australia’s tax information exchange agreements mean these holdings need to be declared and, in some cases, restructured.

Leaving investments sitting offshore in structures that made sense as a non-resident but create compliance headaches as a resident is one of the most common and expensive mistakes we see.

The restructuring cost, if it’s even possible post-return, typically dwarfs what it would have cost to plan properly in advance.

Property: Both Sides of the Balance Sheet

There are two distinct property problems for returning expats.

The first is what they’ve held while away, an Australian property rented out during the absence.

Depending on how long the property was the main residence and how it was treated during the rental period, the CGT calculation on eventual sale can be complex.

The six-year absence rule provides some relief, but it’s not automatic and has conditions that are frequently misunderstood.

The second is re-entry into the Australian property market.

After years of asset accumulation offshore, many returnees assume they’re well-positioned to buy.

The challenge is that their financial picture, including foreign income history, offshore assets and currency, doesn’t translate neatly into Australian mortgage serviceability.

Lenders read foreign income conservatively, and what looks like a strong balance sheet can create unexpected borrowing capacity issues.

The Fix: Plan Before You Land

The single most effective thing an expat can do is start planning the return 12 to 18 months before departure.

That timeline allows for managed asset disposals under non-resident rules where advantageous, superannuation catch-up strategies, foreign structure rationalisation, and property decisions that aren’t being made under time pressure.

The irony is that most Australians sought financial advice before they left on how to exit cleanly.

Far fewer seek the same rigour on the way back in. Given the complexity involved, that’s an expensive oversight.

Coming home should be a financial clean slate. With the right planning, it can be. Without it, you’ll spend the first few years back unwinding decisions that didn’t have to be problems at all.

Brett Evans is the founder of Atlas Wealth and the author of The Expat’s Handbook.