How Family Risks Affect Retirement Planning

Planning for and navigating retirement means contending with many sources of uncertainty, from how investments will perform, to how much healthcare will cost, to how long savings must last. Some of these risks are mitigated by sharing them with other family members – a family is, among other things, a risk pool, where members who do well can support those who need help. Yet being part of a family also brings risks of its own, either because members shoulder burdens that fall on others, or because the partnership itself can be disrupted. These family-related risks to retirement security are the subject of this paper.

Family risks can be divided into two broad categories: family structure changes and family financial support. Structure changes stem mainly from widowhood or divorce, events that can erode both income and wealth. Financial support reflects insurance within the family and takes the form of transfers to other family members, such as adult children or aging parents. Some support is largely planned, like helping a child pay for school or buy a house, while some is more like insurance, such as paying for medical or long-term care for a sick family member.

Existing research suggests that these risks are relatively common and costly, but the limited evidence on awareness and planning hints that households may not fully understand or prepare for them. This special report therefore examines three questions. First, how often do near-retirees and retirees experience family structure changes or provide significant financial support to family members, and is support that could be anticipated funded differently from support that could not? Second, how accurate are their perceptions of family-related risks, compared with what similar households have actually experienced? Finally, have households taken concrete steps to prepare for these risks?

To answer these questions, the analysis relies on a new survey of 1,019 Americans ages 45-80, conducted in March 2026 in collaboration with Jackson National Life Insurance and Greenwald Research. The survey covers past experiences of family-related risks, future expectations of such risks, and financial preparation for them. To assess whether expectations are plausible, they are compared with the actual experiences of approximately 15,000 respondents in the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Study (HRS).