When the last child leaves home, what happens to your money?

It's an odd mix of things to feel at once. You're proud, and you should be. You've spent eighteen years raising someone capable of leaving, and they've gone and done it.

You're also a bit bereft. The washing pile halves overnight, nobody comes in at one in the morning, and you find yourself looking wistfully at the photo in the hall of a six-year-old in a uniform two sizes too big.

That's a big stage of a long job, done well. It deserves a few weeks to sink in.

Then, usually around half term, people start thinking about something more practical. It comes out as a slightly guilty question, asked half under the breath in case it sounds mercenary: are we actually better off now?

Why doesn't it feel like there's more in the bank?

Last October a client asked me whether he was better off now that his daughter had gone, and then told me he'd got his sums wrong.

His youngest had started at the University of Sussex the month before. He'd worked out he'd be around £700 a month better off once she'd gone, and he'd decided what that would buy him: retiring at 62 instead of 65, which he'd been promising himself for years. Six weeks in, he checked the account. The difference was £180.

We went through it line by line. The standing order to his daughter was £250 a month. Her phone was still on the family contract, £32. She came home about twice a month, which was £60 in train fares. The car she'd left on the drive was still taxed and insured, £95. And their weekly shop had fallen by roughly £40, not the £150 he'd assumed, because two adults still eat.

That's £520 of his £700, and he hadn't been careless with a penny of it. He'd budgeted for his daughter leaving. He hadn't budgeted for his daughter leaving and still costing.

He's in good company. The average student is about £500 a month short of what their maintenance loan covers.¹ Three in five parents of over-18s help with that difference, and one in eight of those parents is putting less into their own pension as a result.²

Should you be helping less?

None of this is an argument for supporting your children less.

Helping them is not money wasted. It is one of the things you earned it for. Family comes first, and most of the parents I sit with would trim their own retirement long before they'd trim what they send their child at university.

What matters is knowing the figure, because £520 a month across a three-year course is £18,720. That is a serious sum to hand over without ever seeing it written down. Decide to spend it and you've made a choice. Spend it without noticing and you never really made the choice at all.

What did we actually do?

e came in with a folder, a couple of recent statements and a vague memory of a pension from a job he'd left in 2008.

He didn't have to do any of the chasing himself. We traced the old pensions – there were three, and the 2008 one held £46,000 he'd more or less forgotten about. We requested his state pension forecast, checked his National Insurance record for gaps, and set the whole lot out on one page. That tracing is the part clients are most relieved to hand over, and for good reason: it's tedious, and it's exactly what we're here for.

That 2008 pension had sat in a cautious default fund since the day he left the job. He'd been cautious for eighteen years with savings he wasn't going to touch for another eight. Move it into something better suited to an eight-year run and he has a fair chance of ending up with more, though the value can fall as well as rise and he could get back less than he holds today. That's why we agreed to review it together every year, rather than leave it alone for another eighteen.

Then we did the sums on 62. He can still stop at 62. He can also keep the standing order going until his daughter graduates, and he's decided to leave the mortgage overpayment for now. What he couldn't do was all three at once, and he was glad to find that out in good time rather than a year before he planned to stop.

He didn't need more money. He needed someone to lay out what he had, and then tell him plainly what it would and wouldn't stretch to.

What if your youngest has just gone?

If your own youngest has just left, give yourself the autumn. A quiet house is not a problem to be solved, and most people I speak to feel differently about it by Christmas.

But at some point in the next few months, it's worth writing down what you've got and asking what you want the next ten years to look like. You've just finished the longest job you'll ever do, and you did it well. The part that comes next is allowed to be about you as well as them. So ask the question, and don't feel guilty about it – live the money, enjoy the money.

Daren Wallbank, Chartered Financial Planner and co-founder, Ginkgo Financial

This is a typical client story based on the kind of situations we help with every day. It is for illustration only and shouldn't be taken as advice.

¹ Save the Student, National Student Money Survey 2025 (1,151 students, June to August 2025). https://www.savethestudent.org/money/surveys/student-money-survey-2025-results.html
² Standard Life research, published 31 March 2026. https://www.standardlifeplc.com/news-and-views/press-releases/article-page/bank-of-mum-and-dad