If you have adult children living at home, you’ve got “kippers”.

The acronym, created by a UK insurance company, stands for:

Kids
In
Parents’
Pockets
Eroding
Retirement
Savings

Sounds a bit more serious than what North Americans tend to call adult children living at home: boomerang kids.

So what can you do to get your kids out of your pockets and make sure your retirement savings is still there when you want to retire?

It can be tough: The simple truth is that more people in your house = more dollars. With an adult child at home, you’ll be using more heat, hot water, and electricity. You’ll need to buy more groceries. You’ll need more gas for the car.

You need to work out a budget for your household and ensure it’s something everyone can live with. If you don’t know where the money to make the situation work will come from, you need to think long and hard about whether you can help your adult child by having them live at your home. Otherwise, as the acronym says, it can be easy to let your retirement savings be eroded away.

With some simple budgeting strategies you can get a good overview of the situation before your child moves home – and keep those kippers out of your pockets!

If you’ve been living with no kids in your house for a while, you’re used to a certain level of freedom and privacy. You may not run naked through the kitchen, but there’s something satisfying about knowing you could if you really wanted to. Your child, too, will be used to certain freedoms if they’ve been away form home for a while. Nothing ruins a good social life like having mom and dad around, so they may be smarting a bit at the anticipation of how much freedom they stand to lose. While the simple truth is that there will be a loss of freedom for you and your adult kids – it’s unavoidable when you all live in the same house – the good news is that by establishing some simple guidelines, you can ensure a reasonable degree of freedom and privacy is maintained. The bonus contract that comes with the Adult Children Living at Home ebook is a great tool to help you establish expectations and guidelines to make sure everyone understands exactly how they’ll have to compromise in this area – and what is simply unacceptable.

If your adult child is moving back home with you in a time of crisis – or if they’ve never left your comfortable nest – it means they see you as a stable force in their life, a warm and welcoming parent who will be there for them through thick and thin. And the truth is, you want to be that parent who can solve everything for your child.

But when two generations of adults live in one household, it’s extremely easy for anger and resentment to build up on both sides. And once those bitter emotions have crept into a relationship, they are extremely difficult to overcome.

That’s why it’s critical that you and your adult child work together to develop communications techniques and strategies that will deal with negative feelings before they take over – and potentially damage your relationship with your child forever.