Helping ageing parents navigate their finances — while managing your own — is one of the most common and most emotionally complex challenges our clients face. We help families approach it with clarity and care.
Most of our clients in their 40s and 50s are at the most productive point of their careers — building wealth, planning for their own retirement, raising children, running businesses. Then, quietly, a new set of responsibilities starts to appear. A parent has a fall. A diagnosis comes through. Driving becomes unsafe. Suddenly you are managing two financial futures at once: your own, and theirs.
This is the defining financial challenge of the sandwich generation — and it is one that very few families plan for in advance. The conversations are uncomfortable. The systems are complex. And the decisions made (or not made) in the months around a health crisis tend to have consequences that last for years.
At Ferncourt Advice, we work with Sydney families navigating exactly this. We help you understand what is ahead, get the right documents in place, model the real financial impact, and make decisions from a position of knowledge rather than panic.
There is a window — sometimes only a few years wide — between the point when your parents are still well enough to participate in planning decisions and the point when those decisions have to be made for them. Acting in that window changes everything.
When families wait until a health event forces the conversation, choices narrow quickly. Aged care placements may need to be made within days. Legal documents may not be in place, requiring an expensive and stressful application to NCAT. And options that were available twelve months earlier — including certain asset structuring decisions — may no longer be accessible.
When families plan ahead, the picture looks completely different. Parents retain their voice in decisions that matter to them. Adult children are not making urgent calls under emotional pressure. And the financial outcomes are almost always better, because there has been time to understand the options properly.
We encourage our clients to raise this with us the moment they start thinking about it — even if nothing has changed yet. That is the right time to start.
Aged care in Australia is means-tested. Your parents' assets and income — including the family home in many circumstances — determine what they pay. For Sydney families, this is a significant issue in a way it simply is not in many other parts of the country.
A family home in Sydney's middle and outer suburbs that was purchased decades ago can now be worth $1 million to $3 million or more. Under the aged care means test, the family home is generally exempt while one parent remains living in it — but once both parents require residential care, the property is assessed. This can substantially increase the means-tested care fee, and in some cases the Refundable Accommodation Deposit (RAD) that must be paid to secure a room in a facility.
These are not small numbers. RADs at quality facilities in Sydney regularly run from $500,000 to $1 million or beyond. The decision about whether to pay the RAD in full, pay a Daily Accommodation Payment, or use a combination has real financial implications — for your parents, and potentially for your own inheritance expectations.
Understanding how the asset test works, and what your parents' actual position is, is one of the first things we help families work through. It brings the situation from abstract to concrete, and it tends to make the decisions feel far more manageable.
Before any financial planning can be meaningful, the legal framework needs to exist. Three documents are essential:
If your parents have not reviewed their wills recently, that is also a priority. Wills written twenty years ago may not reflect current family circumstances, superannuation structures, or asset holdings.
We work alongside estate planning solicitors and, where relevant, aged care specialists to make sure these pieces are coordinated. Our role is to help you understand what you need, connect you with the right people, and make sure nothing falls through the gaps.
One of the things we are careful to name — because many families do not — is that helping ageing parents can have a material impact on your own financial position. The costs are real and they take several forms.
Direct financial support is one dimension: contributions to parents' living costs, aged care gap fees, or home modifications. But the indirect costs are often larger and less visible. Adult children frequently reduce their working hours to take on care coordination. Career trajectories are interrupted. Superannuation contributions pause. The compounding effect of those interruptions on retirement savings can be significant.
There is no right answer to how much support to provide. But we want our clients to make those choices with clear eyes, having modelled the downstream consequences for their own retirement. The goal is to be generous where you can be, and to do so sustainably — not to deplete your own position without realising it.
Part of what we do is model your own retirement alongside your parents' situation simultaneously. Seeing both pictures together — rather than treating them as separate problems — usually leads to better decisions for everyone involved.
Families who have planned ahead consistently tell us the same things. The conversations with their parents were easier than they expected — most people, given the opportunity, want to express their wishes and know their affairs are in order. The aged care process, while still complex, was far less overwhelming because they understood what was coming. And the financial decisions were clearer, because they had a framework to evaluate them against.
The clients who struggled most were those who waited. Not because they were negligent — simply because the topic felt distant, or because they did not want to upset their parents, or because they assumed there would be more time. Health events do not announce themselves.
If you are starting to think about this — even tentatively — the right move is to have the conversation now. With Alastair, and ideally with your parents too, while the options are still open.
Book a Consultation with AlastairBook a no-obligation initial consultation — an honest conversation about where you are today and where you want to be.