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.

Note: Usual Northern Sea Route shown for illustrative purposes Source: Sea Legend Daniel Kiss/WSJ

Shipping cargo through an Arctic shortcut never made economic sense—until now.

Climate change and war in the Middle East are flipping the math that previously kept ships plying longer routes from Asia to Europe. A Chinese company on Saturday is starting the first regular cargo service to Europe through Arctic waters, seeking to reap the benefits of quicker travel time and less fuel use.

The shipper Sea Legend will dispatch the Dubai Tower from Ningbo, China, to Felixstowe in the U.K. on what it calls the Arctic Express, following a route along Russia’s north coast. The voyage by the vessel, which is capable of carrying 1,740 20-foot containers, is the biggest commercial step in the Arctic since a Maersk containership first completed the route in 2018.

Global warming is a big factor behind the new route, but it is not the only one. Nearly half the Arctic region’s summer ice—an area four times the size of Texas—has melted over five decades, clearing a fairly reliable path in the summer months. Meanwhile, high oil prices and attacks by Houthi rebels in the Red Sea have made the traditional routes costlier and more dangerous.

Members of China's 16th Arctic Ocean scientific expedition team take selfies on the ice surface. — Members of a Chinese scientific expedition team on surface ice in the Arctic Ocean this week. Wen Jinghua/Xinhua/ZUMA Press

Beyond that, Beijing has ambitions to play a role in the Arctic’s future, lending a geopolitical dimension to the Chinese company’s shipping route.

Last year Sea Legend completed a trial run from Asia to Europe in a record 20 days. That is roughly half the time of a voyage via Africa’s Cape of Good Hope that many carriers now take because of the Red Sea uncertainty.

Fuel accounts for 70% or more of the costs while at sea, said Alan Murphy, a former Maersk analyst who runs research firm Sea-Intelligence.

Saving fuel by shortening the journey doesn’t automatically make a route profitable. Insurance premiums for the Arctic are 40% higher than the Cape of Good Hope route, said Jonathan Steenberg, an economist at credit insurer Coface. Sea Legend’s Arctic vessels are relatively small. And even after warming, an icebreaker is still sometimes needed to help the cargo ship.

But if the ship can go without an icebreaker, Coface said the Arctic route is now cheaper than a Cape of Good Hope voyage in some circumstances. It estimated that at current oil prices of around $90, the cost of shipping liquid bulk such as liquefied natural gas could drop roughly 33% compared with the Cape of Good Hope route, while dry bulk goods such as cereals would cost about 8% less.

The container ship Istanbul Bridge being unloaded by large blue and red cranes at the port of Gdansk. — A containership operated by Sea Legend in the port of Gdansk, Poland. jackowski/epa/Shutterstock

The route is only passable in the summer and fall. Sea Legend plans eight voyages between August and late October, before conditions get too icy.

“It’s not the Suez Canal but it’s a significant number for the Arctic. It shows there is potential,” said Malte Humpert, founder of the U.S.-based Arctic Institute and author of a book on Chinese shipping in the Arctic.

Even in summer, ships have to navigate around dangerous ice floes and deal with rapidly changing weather. By the end of the shipping season in October, the sky is dark most of the time.

A Russian tanker suffered serious damage to its hull while sailing along the Arctic route despite being assisted by an icebreaker, its insurer, AlfaStrakhovanie, said Thursday, adding that it paid out roughly $650,000.

Coface estimates 3.5% of trade among East Asia, Europe and North America will be able to use Arctic routes within the next five years, representing $64 billion in goods.

Last summer, a record 23 cargo ships transited the Northern Sea Route, which hugs Russia’s north coast. That is tiny compared with the Suez Canal, where more than 30 ships transited daily.

Western companies that want to follow in Sea Legend’s path have to navigate treacherous politics. Russia claims sovereignty over the entire Northern Sea Route and permits for ship traffic are issued by its state-controlled nuclear operator, Rosatom.

Aerial view of a port with many cargo ships, red cranes, and rows of stacked shipping containers. — The Dubai Tower’s route will begin in the Chinese port of Ningbo. Huang Zongzhi/ZUMA Press

“Western companies are in a tricky position,” said Humpert of the Arctic Institute. “At what point do they jump back in the water? When does it become economically necessary, and how do you weigh that against environmental risks and the political dimension?”

An alternative Arctic route, the Northwest Passage that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans via the Canadian Arctic, is less passable because it is dominated by narrow waterways where ice gets bunched up. The highest number of cargo ships completing the passage in a year was 13, in 2023.

China has declared itself a near-Arctic state despite not having access to Arctic waters. It depends on Russia’s goodwill to use the Northern Sea Route.

“Beijing is concerned that if they don’t establish a significant strategic presence in the Arctic now, it’s going to be more difficult in the future,” said Marc Lanteigne, expert in polar geopolitics at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. However, he said, “China needs to be careful not to give the impression that they are trying to challenge the strategic order in the Arctic.”

Sea Legend didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Any polar venture contributes to China’s quest to master Arctic travel. The country also has three icebreakers and a support vessel currently on a monthslong scientific expedition north of Greenland. Scientific and commercial voyages can yield data about natural resources awaiting below melting ice caps and information for positioning nuclear-armed submarines.