 This is a commentary on modern day capitalism. Yeah, nobody wants to get married. No one wants to have kids. No one wants to move the suburbs. They just want to date each other and have dog plants. Are your immigrant parents relying on you to support them financially? And is it fair for them to ask that of you or not? Either way, you're going to find this video helpful. Yeah, there's a New York Times article going viral right now in the Asian-American community. It's called, Their Children Are Their Retirement Plans. It's written by a Chinese Vietnamese author. He basically talks about the burden that a lot of second-gen kids if their parents either didn't make a lot of money or didn't save a lot of money. For whatever reason, the burden financially falls on the second generation of kids to support the parents. There's a whole article about it. There's this story. There's that story about it. And there was a bunch of different reactions to it. But we also got to get to our recommendations for anybody who finds themselves anywhere close to this situation. All right, so if you're excited to hear our tips and tricks and recommendations, the ones that we came up with and found on the internet, please hit that like button right now. Check out other episodes of The Hop Hop Boys. Real quick, man. Let's just get into some of the reactions. You know, the way it was written, some people were like, you know, I don't like this lopsided victim mentality, man. It's an honor to take care of your parents. Plus, they can offer so much value. They could clean your house. They could live with you. They could just take care of your kids. They could cook the food. So I just didn't like how this article only looked at it as if it was a burden. Obviously, everybody's family's case is like person to person, though. Right, and then this other person said, well, actually, this is how society always has been for the last 100 years. The kids are supposed to take care of the parents and some of the parents live with the kids. Even in any other country outside of America or the westernized countries, it will be this way. So this is relatively a new thing. Right, this is a commentary on modern day capitalism and all the systems. Nobody wants to get married. No one wants to have kids. No one wants to move the suburbs. They just want to date each other and have dog plants. Nah, I'm parents. Definitely a doomer perspective. Some people were pointing out, you know, specific incidents where they saw this as really terrible. Some white person was like, you know, our next door neighbor is a woman. She's supporting her parents, her uncles, and some of even her brothers and sisters that couldn't get good jobs. And then she's LGBT and she can't even come out to her family. This is such a terrible situation I feel bad for. And of course, like we said, everybody's family situation is person to person. Some people are going to be over here. Some people there. Some people in the middle. Obviously, that was a downside case, unfortunately. Yeah, and some people commented that we're non-Asian. We're like, hey man, a lot of ethnic communities have this. Any immigrant community will have this and you don't have to be an immigrant. You don't even have to be ethnic. You can be white, black, whatever. And you might still go through this guys. And yeah, this is just a common thing right now. Like a lot of kids are feeling this way that they have the financial burden of their parents. Yeah, and some other person was like, well, what about me? I've got like terrible parents. They never loved me. They were lazy. They retired too early. They have bad spending habits. They don't make good investments. And now I'm responsible for taking care of them. How am I gonna take care of myself and my kids? If I gotta take care of them, this is like such a stupid burden to put on the children philosophically. Yeah, tough situation. Someone else said, wow, you know, I didn't know it until later in my life, but I didn't understand how good those upper middle class kids had it. They could go to college. Any college they wanted it would get paid for and they wouldn't have to worry about what major career they picked because they didn't have to make a lot of money to support their parents. And wow, just that is a privilege. Yeah, that is true though. I mean, I would say that most people you meet, there are creative directors in like LA or New York. To be honest, they do come from upper middle class families or even rich ones. Moving on, other people were also like, you know, this is just a socioeconomic class issue. I just don't like how all these articles are written from the perspective of that all New York Times readers are like upper middle class white people. Why is that? I think this was a good article, but it possibly could have been a little stereotypical in the way the writer framed it. However, I don't blame the writer because to be honest, and this is a little bit of an aside, Andrew, there has to be a little bit of poverty porn sometimes as an Asian writer to get your articles published in the mainstream media, especially a top tier publication like NYT. For me, I thought the article was okay, but ultimately there's no solutions in this article. There's no tips and tricks, you know? So what we did was we read a lot of the posts on the internet that had been posted about this issue in years before. Guys, this is not the first time this is being discussed. A lot of kids throughout history are feeling the burden and being like, oh, I don't know what to do. Kids in even other countries like kids in China, for example, which all, you know, they had the single child policy. So now one single child is kind of feeling the burden of a bunch of different parents and grandparents. So anyways, I think it's a relatable situation. And obviously we understand every family is different. Every parent is different. Some parents are more well off. Some parents are in a certain situation. They can't make money or whatever. They have gambling issues. I mean, we have some friends who are in a tough situation. I'll tell you this growing up near an Asian community and having an Asian community that we were constantly in contact with. You've seen it all. You've seen it all from really rich parents all the way to like, man, just a lot of issues. So these recommendations, of course, like we said, all families are different, but hopefully this just helps you get down the right train of thought, okay? I would say this. My number one thing that I wanna encourage all Asians, and this is gonna be relevant regardless of whatever level of financial literacy or capacity your parents are at, is you gotta mix and match your teachings, you know? You gotta take the good things and then you gotta kick out the bad things that your parents taught you, especially about money and taking new good things because there's so many good books and so many successful people you can learn from on the YouTube and just the YouTube, but like on YouTube and books and stuff these days and you gotta do that to supplement it because they may have taught you things that are not only not beneficial to you, but not beneficial to you taking care of them. Right, like, you know a lot of old school parents are gonna be like, okay, we taught you how to be frugal, only frugal, but it's like, dang, in this day and age, you kinda need to know how to invest and stuff like that. Wow, David, what if I say, you know, you're talking about mixed advice, we call it MMA, mixed money advice. Anyways guys, point number two, unless it's a rare circumstance and you know, of course the circumstances are out there, you probably should not be viewed as your parents' retirement plan, but you probably should be open to helping them out. And what I mean by this is because the title of this article is like, oh, these kids are their retirement plan. That's a lot to ask, retirement plan? Retirement plan, that's so much money and that's a huge burden. While where it's like, it's more realistic that every kid can contribute a little bit, pay for a few bills, they can pay maybe a set amount. You know what I mean? But all that contribution is way more effective when you actually have a system. When you and your siblings actually think of a real plan, sit down and hash it out on a piece of paper, it's like that contribution is gonna be way more better than like a haphazard random way of doing it. And knowing what your parents need versus what they want, it's not about what they want, bro. The tables have turned, you are now supporting them, you have to give them just what they need. But I think that's a whole process on its own. A number key thing that I saw that was really interesting and it's a funny way to put it is just to some extent, you just gotta lie to your parents. That could be for good things or for bad things. Literally, I know a lot of kids, especially like immigrant Asian kids for some reason, they don't wanna like lie to their parents, but sometimes you just have to to make the whole system better. As long as you know that you are lying to your parents for a good thing, I think it's totally okay. Hey, the dad's like, you know, you wanna improve his quality of life, but he doesn't wanna get rid of the old TV. All of a sudden one day the TV's gone and there's a new TV there. Hey, dad, I sold your old TV for $50 and I got you a new one. But the truth is obviously you just got rid of the old one, he just gave him a new one. No, I realized, David, for like helping our parents, like stop asking them if you can do this for them. If you can do it for them, just do it for them and just make up some of the reason. Don't tell, even someone said that I was like, oh, this is pretty interesting advice. They were like, listen, I know my parents are nagging me a lot and if I tell them that I make a lot of money, they're gonna even ask for more money. So I'm just gonna lie and tell them that I make a little bit less so they have lower expectations and that's gonna be more comfortable for me. And I don't think that's wrong. Dude, you're still helping your parents. You're just being a manager. The managers of any sort of system, they never tell the employees the full truth because they're the manager. Their goal is just to keep the system flowing. Moving on to number four, Andrew, get professional help. And this kind of goes back to the mix and match thing because a lot of people, their parents, especially if they were not that financially savvy, told their kids do not trust in financial advisors because maybe they had a downside case when they first immigrated, somebody tricked them or scammed them or something like that. But here's the truth, guys. Financial advisors or financial counselors, if you can find the right one, which there's more than there is and of course there's a variance and there are some scammers, they will help you tremendously. Sometimes they can identify the EBT or the assistance programs that your parents qualify for provided that they hit those marks. They can even help you analyze their finances, analyze your own finances and you just kind of gotta mix and match until you find the right ones. And you gotta do that legwork. I get it, not all of them are good. Do you wanna go with a mainstream one? Do you gotta go with one systems in the enclaves with the CPAs? But listen, if you find the right professionals, that's one thing I learned about rich people. Rich people got professionals to help them but the thing is they got the good professionals. Yeah, and I don't, I'm not telling you to just give your money to some wealth manager or asset manager like that. What I'm telling you is actually if you get a good CPA, they can actually help you do some financial planning for the year, set up a budget that you can give to your parents and make it a strict budget. What I'm saying, you, even though they're your parents, we all love our parents, but you are not just giving them your life still. You owe them gratitude. You do not owe them your dreams. You do not owe them all of your money but you do owe them respect and gratitude and this is the way to do it. Or go to somebody at your local like large bank corporation and tell them you wanna set up a separate bank account where there's direct deposit and then that goes into their light bill or that goes into their water or energy. Like it splits off in a way where you could track it. Point number five, I think that if you can inform your friends or you can talk about this kind of stuff with your friends, it can only help. So I think a lot of Asian kids are like, no, I don't want my friends to think I'm in this situation. I don't want them to feel burdened by this. You're not asking them to take responsibility for it but you never know who your friends know. I know when we start asking around our friends that we know for things, maybe it's not necessarily financially related but everybody's like you, someone knows somebody else that can help us a lot of the time but you never know. Do not be ashamed of your situation, man. I know that more people are willing to help, especially if you've got good friends around you. You never know who can help you unless you ask. Number six, Andrew, this one's kind of a fun little tip. Andrew, kind of give them a lot of content to consume themselves. You know, sometimes not everybody's parents are open to learning or increasing their own financial capacities but sometimes you can find like in language, YouTube channels that offer them very solid advice on how to handle their own financial future or life planning and things like that. There's a lot of channels, even the second gen kids don't know about that are out there. You can get this app right here. I'll just pop up the name. That's got like every single show from every single country available on it. Yeah, also maybe if there's a gym nearby that you know that they can enjoy, get them a gym membership, give them something physical to do just to get them up moving around and maybe give them a built, I don't know, maybe it's a lot of work, build up a garden or give them some type of mission or some type of distraction so that it's less time of them just sitting there thinking about you and thinking about how much money they need and all that other stuff. Yeah, and I think it depends obviously family to family. I think anybody can use this tip regardless whether your parents are bugging you for money or for time or for anything. Point number seven, Andrew, in the New York Times article, they were talking about feeling that burden because the parents didn't make a lot of money and didn't have a lot saved up for retirement but then feeling that burden if they got a journalism or a nonprofit job because those jobs typically do not make a ton of money. Yeah, and this is advice that I've literally told my friends who were thinking about getting into the creative field or like they were always asking us like, hey guys, like I wanna do this or what do you think? And I'm like, listen, if you have a well-paying job and it's not soul sucking, if you don't hate your job, that's a pretty good situation. Not everybody is even fortunate to have a well-paying job that they don't hate. Now, if it's absolutely killing you inside, think about leaving, think about pivoting, think about doing something else, I get it, but don't just feel like you wanna leave your job so quickly, to be honest, and maybe it's more easy for me to say because I'm already in the creative field, I get that, but I've had a lot of friends who asked me this and I would tell them that to their face and I say, listen guys, it's not bad because you basically are, you have good finances, you can help your parents out, you can still try these things on the side and I'll help you do those things on the side if you want, but do not give up this great financial situation just to make yourself like 30% more happy. Right, because if you get 30% more happy and then your income drops by 50%, and then now you're feeling all this pressure because your parents are nearing that age where they're not generating income anymore, you're just creating a very, very difficult situation to help, and then obviously you're looking at other siblings or cousins potentially depending on their responsibility. Yeah, and I'm just saying like, I think today's culture is about like leaning into like, oh, like, do the creative field, do this and that, it's so cool. I was like, yeah, but you know what is also cool is literally taking care of your parents or having good finances, like, so, listen man, money is obviously useful. Like you need money in life, you know? So I think don't always just give that up so quickly. And I know there's a ton of other tips and tricks that you guys can leave in the comments section below, but so those are just some of the ones that sparked immediately in our minds. And I just always like see these articles and then I read the comments sections and then I read the Reddit, but nobody ever has like recommendations because my biggest thing is like, I understand, you know, growing up in the church, I saw so many different reps. I saw people with rich parents, middle-class parents, lower middle-class parents, upper middle-class parents, poor parents. And I just wanna give, make sure the kids get the best advice possible because, you know, we all got different cards in life, but a lot of it is also how we do play those cards. Yeah, exactly guys. You guys don't get to choose the family that you're born into, but you do get to choose how you react and the things that you do with your life, of course. And so everybody, let us know in the comments down below if you got any other advice or let us know your story. Like maybe you're in one of these situations and yes, again, all families are different and some families aren't a tougher situation, but it's at least good to discuss it and know where you're at because that's the first step to helping yourself. So thank you everybody so much for watching. We are the Hop Hop Boys. And until next time, we out. Peace.