How I’m Helping My Latino Parents Retire

I have a ritual for getting my parents to talk about money, and it always begins with an invitation.

“¿Vienen a comer el domingo?”

I invite them to dinner because a food offering is always a safe bet, and, I’d argue, culturally appropriate. We open with an agua fresca, followed by the night’s entrée, and some hearsay regarding family back in Sayula, Mexico. Once Dad gets his fill of food from the motherland and Mom boasts that she taught me how to prepare the traditional delicacies, I get down to business.

“A ver Apa, trajo los papeles?”

At our last dinner, we discussed the outstanding mortgages on the two residential properties they own in Chicago as our prework before a meeting with the lawyer that is going to help them establish their will and trust.

I began having these conversations with my parents a year ago, when I moved back to my hometown of Chicago. After working in business journalism for six years and reporting on topics ranging from entrepreneurship to personal finance at a national level, I realized that my work was deeply personal. And I could take my work to the next level by setting up my parents, to the best of my ability, for their retirement and financial future.

As it turns out, I’m one of many first-generation Latinos helping their parents retire.

Among them is Yoly Valencia, forty-four, a global commercial real estate professional who’s guiding her parents towards retirement in their home country of Mexico. Since they started having conversations about money, they’ve established life insurance and retirement accounts, developed new streams of income, and doubled down on organizing assets abroad—together.

Similarly, life insurance agent Luz Yesenia Vera, thirty, consults on related matters with her clients. She helps many Latino families understand how these policies could be a good fit for them.

“The average person is just thinking, ‘It’s going to pay off when I pass away,’” Vera says. “[But] it’s going to also help you in a way that you’re not going to worry about your income later on and you’ll be able to use that policy . . . if you never used it.”

Valencia shares that although together they were able to develop new plans to secure her parent’s retirement, it helped that her family bought a multifamily property in Chicago early on, which they paid for in cash, and then sold years later at a profit. While her mother and father, ages sixty-five and seventy, may be more financially prepared today, Valencia said that having her parents spend more time in Mexico greatly helps manage their cost of living.

“If it wasn’t for that, in the US, they would probably be struggling,” she says. “Even though I know they’re doing well because they’re splitting their time and cost in Mexico, I still worry.”

Diego Berrogal, twenty-nine, can relate to that worry. A tech employee whose parents are living in their native Peru, he shares that the journey to caring for his parents has not been linear. When he acquired his first six-figure job, he thought about others first: his parents and his future self—and to do so, he started by living far below his financial needs.

Since then, he says he’s begun indulging more, but continues to be forward-thinking financially. After finding out that his father wasn’t qualified for a substantial pension and was navigating high interest rate loans to pay for their home, Berrogal launched his own contingency fund for them.

“I started a rainy day fund where I would have things in stocks such that if my parents did have an emergency, I could just take [money] out,” he says, noting that his parents’ retirement plan didn’t account for unexpected expenses.

This fund came in handy during the pandemic when his father became very ill. While Berrogal wishes his dad was better prepared and saved for retirement, he practices empathy when planning for his parents by considering their history with money and banking institutions in Peru.

“I understand why my dad thought it would be better to put money into his house. They both lived through [financial] crises in Peru . . . there was a period of hyperinflation where you could literally have $100 and the next day you couldn’t buy a single loaf of bread,” he says. “It’s a way to pay them back.”

Jesus Castillo, twenty-eight, optical test engineer, has been talking to his parents about money since he was eighteen years old, when he thought about leveraging a future stable job income to help his parents acquire property. But he shares that having a dialogue about money with his family has not been easy between navigating trauma around money and their relationship. Today, he has made it his priority to focus on their health. 

“Likely, they will go back to Mexico when retirement comes into play for them,” he said. “They have a house in Jalisco.”

As for the Alfaros, my parents will likely split their time between the US and Mexico, too. We have a running checklist to prepare them for their future and what seemed like a behemoth of a project at first is now broken down into manageable, bite-size pieces.

Here’s a preview of our retirement planning checklist: Set times to talk about money and Roth IRAs, review their savings, figure out where they want to live after their seventies, account for the US and Mexican assets, get burial insurance, establish the aforementioned wills and trusts, and so on.

Next time we sit across the dinner table to discuss money, the weight of an uncertain future won’t be on their (or their children’s) shoulders. It’s a privilege (albeit a complicated one) to be able to help my parents think through a retirement of their own. They will be able to think about their future with ease and use money as a tool to get there.