Wealthspire’s Zach Mangels helps Gen Xers plan so that they can simultaneously help support adult children, care for ageing parents, and cope with potential job loss.
5 min
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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The lunar flyby would be the deepest humans have traveled in space in decades.
4 min
It’s go time for the highest-stakes mission at NASA in more than 50 years.
On April 1, the agency is set to launch four astronauts around the moon, the deepest human spaceflight since the final Apollo lunar landing in 1972.
The launch window for Artemis II , as the mission is called, opens at 6:24 p.m. ET.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration teams have been preparing the vehicles to depart from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the planned roughly 10-day trip. Crew members have trained for years for this moment.
Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut serving as mission commander, said he doesn’t fear taking the voyage. A widower, he does worry at times about what he is putting his daughters through.
“I could have a very comfortable life for them,” Wiseman said in an interview last September.
“But I’m also a human, and I see the spirit in their eyes that is burning in my soul too. And so we’ve just got to never stop going.”
Wiseman’s crewmates on Artemis II are NASA’s Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
What are the goals for Artemis II?
The biggest one: Safely fly the crew on vehicles that have never carried astronauts before.
The towering Space Launch System rocket has the job of lofting a vehicle called Orion into space and on its way to the moon.
Orion is designed to carry the crew around the moon and back. Myriad systems on the ship—life support, communications, navigation—will be tested with the astronauts on board.
SLS and Orion don’t have much flight experience. The vehicles last flew in 2022, when the agency completed its uncrewed Artemis I mission .
How is the mission expected to unfold?
Artemis II will begin when SLS takes off from a launchpad in Florida with Orion stacked on top of it.
The so-called upper stage of SLS will later separate from the main part of the rocket with Orion attached, and use its engine to set up the latter vehicle for a push to the moon.
After Orion separates from the upper stage, it will conduct what is called a translunar injection—the engine firing that commits Orion to soaring out to the moon. It will fly to the moon over the course of a few days and travel around its far side.
Orion will face a tough return home after speeding through space. As it hits Earth’s atmosphere, Orion will be flying at 25,000 miles an hour and face temperatures of 5,000 degrees as it slows down. The capsule is designed to land under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean, not far from San Diego.
Is it possible Artemis II will be delayed?
Yes.
For safety reasons, the agency won’t launch if certain tough weather conditions roll through the Cape Canaveral, Fla., area. Delays caused by technical problems are possible, too. NASA has other dates identified for the mission if it doesn’t begin April 1.
Who are the astronauts flying on Artemis II?
The crew will be led by Wiseman, a retired Navy pilot who completed military deployments before joining NASA’s astronaut corps. He traveled to the International Space Station in 2014.
Two other astronauts will represent NASA during the mission: Glover, an experienced Navy pilot, and Koch, who began her career as an electrical engineer for the agency and once spent a year at a research station in the South Pole. Both have traveled to the space station before.
Hansen is a military pilot who joined Canada’s astronaut corps in 2009. He will be making his first trip to space.
Koch’s participation in Artemis II will mark the first time a woman has flown beyond orbits near Earth. Glover and Hansen will be the first African-American and non-American astronauts, respectively, to do the same.
What will the astronauts do during the flight?
The astronauts will evaluate how Orion flies, practice emergency procedures and capture images of the far side of the moon for scientific and exploration purposes (they may become the first humans to see parts of the far side of the lunar surface). Health-tracking projects of the astronauts are designed to inform future missions.
Those efforts will play out in Orion’s crew module, which has about two minivans worth of living area.
On board, the astronauts will spend about 30 minutes a day exercising, using a device that allows them to do dead lifts, rowing and more. Sleep will come in eight-hour stretches in hammocks.
There is a custom-made warmer for meals, with beef brisket and veggie quiche on the menu.
Each astronaut is permitted two flavored beverages a day, including coffee. The crew will hold one hourlong shared meal each day.
The Universal Waste Management System—that’s the toilet—uses air flow to pull fluid and solid waste away into containers.
What happens after Artemis II?
Assuming it goes well, NASA will march on to Artemis III, scheduled for next year. During that operation, NASA plans to launch Orion with crew members on board and have the ship practice docking with lunar-lander vehicles that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have been developing. The rendezvous operations will occur relatively close to Earth.
NASA hopes that its contractors and the agency itself are ready to attempt one or more lunar landing missions in 2028. Many current and former spaceflight officials are skeptical that timeline is feasible.
