Latest / Mortal Support / The Daughter Tax
Transcript
- Kelli Maria Korducki V2 MASTER: Welcome to Mortal Support, where we share human stories and experiences around caregiving and death. I'm Donnie. And I'm Noelle. And we're building Blaze, a platform to help people navigate adult caregiving. Through this podcast, it's also our goal to discuss and name the feelings and challenges that come with caregiving. This work frequently falls on women, which is why this conversation is about my favorite topic: the daughter tax. Our guest is Kelly Korducki. Who wrote about it for Business Insider? In our conversation today, we're going to talk about what this daughter tax looks like with real examples, why it's coming to the surface now, and what practical bipartisan legislation can help ease the burden. Without further ado, let's get into it. Thank you again for taking the time to chat with us. I'm gonna kick us off with the icebreaker. Cool. My first question for all of us is what will people lovingly roast you about at your funeral? always being five minutes late. Always being five minutes late for everything. Yeah. I love that. I have time blindness and I have no idea if something takes me five minutes, five hours, or five seconds. So I'm with you on that. Relatable For me, people are definitely going to roast my style. I hate shopping. I never buy new clothes. And so my especially my siblings will roast me for that. Yeah, but you could you have good clothes though too. I appreciate that. The other thing that I would get roasted for is being a messy eater. Like burgers, pasta, anything. Yeah. End up wearing it unfortunately. My mom always jokes that had my parents gone out for wings on their first date, they wouldn't be married, so I don't avo I I would avoid wings on the first date. How about that? That's really good. Yeah, Noel, how about you? My family will roast me for my absurdly loud hiccups. My mom for a long time thought I was like making it up, but I I wasn't. Like it's it's truly painful. Anyways. Whoa was me. okay, so I after the reason I wanted to chat with you, Kelly, is after several years building an estate planning tech startup, people kept sharing their experiences either because they were already t taking care of their parents or they had just lost their parents and had gone through that journey. And I kept hearing over and over that there was this sort of like role and and group of responsibilities that people had that was just challenging. And I think all of that coupled with the fact that by 2030, one in six people around the world will be over 60 years old. This is happening more and more. And through that journey I kept hearing different terms for this concept. So it was things like the default daughter, Eldest daughter, daughterhood penalty, sandwich generation. and then of course I came across your piece in Business Insider in April of 2026, where you talked about, the daughter tax and the daughterhood penalty. And what was so impressive to me about your reporting there was that you didn't just talk about this thing that's happening to so many people, but you actually dug into the numbers and the data behind it. So In your piece in The Business Insider, it says that by one recent estimate, unpaid family care costs, American women on average of $295,000 and lost wages and retirement savings over the course of a lifetime. So I'm curious, how did you come to that? Like what got you into this and helped you calculate all that? Yeah, so that that $295,000 figure. Is from a 2023 Department of Labor study that it's the projected wage loss over a working lifetime for women born between 1981 and 1985. And that's just like a projection. The reality might actually surpass that for all we know. But just based on like the current estimated costs that mostly arise from childcare, but also like adult care. And you know, care work has always been of interest to me because I'm a millennial woman. I don't have children, but many of my friends do. My parents are boomers who are aging and we're beginning to think about these kinds of things. So it's just I've become more acutely aware of the extent which our society runs on women's unpaid caregiving. And while this has always been of interest to me, it's really becoming closer and closer to home. And I think that's the case for so many millennial women right now. This is the reality of our lives now. And that financial piece really does not get spoken about enough, especially as it pertains to elder care. We do discuss childcare and those costs a lot more frequently. But elder care is kind of this unspoken I think it's just such an unpleasant thing to think about and talk about that people avoid thinking about it and talking about it until they're there. That makes a ton of sense. And I'm curious, was it thinking about yourself as a millennial daughter and with your parents, aging, was that what drew you more from personal experience to dive into this? What really prompted it and what did you find? Yeah, so I was just like reading the news and I came upon a study that named the phenomenon of the daughterhood penalty, which I thought was just a grabby idea. and the more that I looked into this concept of the daughterhood penalty, the more that I realized that it's actually a much deeper problem than even like the study that I was initially reading addressed. And also just the timing of it, I came upon this concept earlier this year. This is the year that the oldest baby boomers are turning 80. So we, as the offspring of the baby boomers, are kind of all being confronted with this issue now, and it's sort of like hitting us in the face. It's very real for me and for a lot of people who are my peers and contemporaries. Do you mind sharing the exact parts of that calculation in terms of the it's it's missed wages? It's an estimate of lifetime employment losses from unpaid family care. Got it. So that includes, you know, the fact that I may not get a promotion because I can't stay a little bit extra at work because I have to go home and care for someone or drive them to the doctors. That includes, you know, maybe taking a leave of absence from work for because I'm a caregiver. That includes being able to put as much into my retirement account or take and it switch roles because I can't move out of state. Is that all encompassing there? Yeah, you summed it up really, really well, actually. That's exactly like it's it's just all these cumulative little costs, the missed opportunities at work, missed professional growth opportunities and wage growth opportunities. That's a huge one that that you covered. We don't necessarily think about these small cumulative over the course of a career decisions and the long term impact that they'll potentially have. And it's not one that is really being like planned for policy wise or or in many working women's professional lives. It's not something that you're necessarily conscious of until you're in the middle of it. I'm curious what sort of examples and stories did you come across when digging into this? Yeah, so I spoke with a number of women who are in various phases of the parental caregiving experience. I spoke with one woman who's in her early forties who left the workforce in her early twenties to take care of her mom, and she's still living with her mom, caring for her mom. She hasn't been in the workforce for almost 20 years. It's completely defined her life. She doesn't have much of a work history. She doesn't really have much of a social life. She doesn't have her entire existence has been shaped by this responsibility. And I I talked to her a little bit about it actually after the article came up. She got in touch with me just to follow up on like the response that she's gotten. And she mentioned that people have been commenting on like Reddit and stuff. saying that she wasted her life. She's wasted her life. She's thrown away her life to care for her mom. And she found that very hurtful, but at the same time she's like, well, I don't think it's a waste, but it's been a sacrifice. I would say it's more accurate that I sacrificed a lot. And her example was I think probably the most I wouldn't say extreme, but she's the person who's the youngest and who's been in this situation for the longest. But to to varying degrees that was a a shared kind of sentiment. I spoke with another woman who had to leave her job. She was working as like a defense contractor. And she lost her security clearance because she'd been out of the workforce for so long. And getting a security clearance renewed is a whole ordeal, as you might imagine. And she's been caring for her dad for the better part of a decade full-time and drained her savings and unsure of her employment prospects. And yeah, there's just so much uncertainty and sacrifice that goes into this. It's emotionally taxing. It's socially isolating in many cases. And there's this big kind of unknown question of what happens next. What happens when the parent passes away or when the situation changes. People are sort of left without much a life or safety net to return to and rely on wow, those examples and I'm curious specifically, you mentioned this year with the the oldest of the baby boomers turning eighty. How is this different from generation to generation and why is this happening more so now versus what it might have happened previously? Well, for a number of reasons. The baby boomer generation is a huge generation. So it's just a lot of people, a huge aging population aging all at once, which is demanding a lot of caregiving resources all at once. And the second piece is that people are just living longer now. Like, you know, people are living to be well into their nineties frequently. This is becoming a norm, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're spending like the last decade or however many years of their lives, living independently. So you're having people who are frequently being in long term care for for many years. And so that's another consideration that maybe it it's sort of become a problem before it was anticipated as a potential problem. And it's a problem that families are having to figure out how to deal with on their own. I recently heard a phrase which was that we're not living longer We're just dying more slowly. And that sounds really intense. I don't know, it feels yucky. Like the phrase is just yucky, right? I don't want to think about it that way. But to your point, we have created a system that allows us to handle and and and delay the things that normally would have killed us. However, what At what cost? And it it's so hard to say that because we're talking about people's lives, but I do also think that as a society we need to start understanding you know the implications of our decisions when it comes to extending life, right? And for ourselves, for our loved ones. And I don't think there's necessarily a right answer. And there's definitely not a right answer For everyone, but there is a need for us to have more conversations about it earlier. Yeah, and if we're going to be extending life, we need to extend infrastructure to support the extended life. We simply have not that has not happened. So we're not quite in the thick of it yet. But in ten years or even five years. These questions are gonna be much more in your face and our faces. It remains unseen and unknown as to what that's gonna look like. From the people you spoke to, did those folks have a plan on how they were gonna catch up financially? The first source that's mentioned in the story does have a plan, and her plan is basically to kind of draw the line at how much of her own savings she's going to put in toward her mother's care. So this is a single mom in the Pacific Northwest who's in her forties. She has two teenage children. And her mother needed to go into care kind of early, like in her mid-sixties, I believe, and had not really saved anything. She had not much retirement savings. And so this woman that I spoke to kind of made the decision to transfer her mom into a Medicaid care facility, kind of like a transitional facility, so that once her savings are spent and she's no longer able to pay for her own care, she will be transferred into a Medicaid funded unit within the facility that she's been living in. And Medicaid funded facilities, while they are free for the people who qualify to live there and for the families. They're often overcrowded. There are reports that there are often a high number of residents per staff person. So it the care is not always optimal just because of the limited resources available to these facilities. So it's not an ideal situation for a lot of people, but this woman made the decision that she would not drain her own savings and then ultimately be putting her own children in the situation that she's in. Yeah, I think that that's also a tough question that that many people are going to be asking themselves and are asking themselves, to what extent am I going to jeopardize the financial futures of my children and future generations in order to care for the elders in my life who I want to see well cared for. It's a really, really difficult mind and a choice that I think causes a lot of turmoil in many families. I hear you on that. And the fact that we are feeling this so acutely now, with as they call it, the silver tsunami hitting us of all of these folks aging at the same time, it's tremendous. And I think that sharing examples of how different people are managing in the sense that that one mom has made the decision, I will pay X amount of money. And then at that point, my mom is gonna have to go into a a different facility. I think that that is so challenging because you have to take the emotion out of it. But I I wonder if that is a great example that folks can use, right? So for example, you know, you sit down with your parents and you say, Listen, we need to talk about what sort of plan you have and how much money should I expect to pay outside of what you have, right? Setting that up as a conversation ahead of time so that it's not this like, you know, this draining and and then that way you know what that number is, my hope is that that can help more people feel, I don't know, sleep better at night. One thing that I've seen that you'd mentioned is around the WISH bill, which is actually a bipartisan bill. Can you give a brief explanation for our listeners what that is and also what kind of relief that might provide in specifically these situations, building infrastructure for that? Yeah, so it's it's called the WISH Act, which is an acronym. It's for ha I have it written down. It's the Wellbeing Insurance for Seniors to Be at Home Act. And it was introduced last March, March of 2025. So the bill would create a federal catastrophic long-term care insurance benefit for eligible people at retirement age with serious ongoing functional disabilities, and it would provide benefits after a waiting period of one to five years, and the period would be tied to earnings. And the full benefit it would be based on the estimated median cost of six hours of paid personal assistance daily. It would also establish a federal long-term care insurance trust fund. Now the bill is currently tied up in the House. There hasn't really been any movement on it. So it's a really hopeful bit of legislation and it remains to be seen whether that will be advanced. But It it does go to show that at least policymakers are really starting to think seriously about this and will hopefully continue to do so. If nothing else, it's reflecting the beginnings of I think a bit of a sea change in terms of the legislative response on the federal level. That makes a ton of sense. And it sounds like it would function similarly in a in a lot of ways to Social Security, but in kind of kicking in once that threshold is met for For Americans that end up having to take care of somebody for longer than they were potentially expecting. And I'm particularly thinking around dementia care as well, with the higher occurrence of that and just what kind of a planning is put into place. Does that resonate with you in terms of where this could potentially be coming from? Yeah, totally. I think you nailed it on the head. Yeah. What kinds of other resources are you familiar with that folks are using to alleviate this daughter tax, daughterhood penalty? Are you familiar with any? Not really. As far as I'm aware, people are kind of making it up as they go along and spending down savings and taking on debt. There's no real like single solution that I've seen. Great. Yeah, I I know. Isn't that great? So many people are aging at once and we're like, Well, Grin and Barrett, go get a credit card, like Yeah. I mean that that seems to be historically a kind of our approach to to these things. Kind of relying on a free or almost free workforce to bear the brunt. And I wanna talk about that portion of this as well as around this falling onto daughters and women more disproportionately than sons or men. Why is that? in your mind? Cultural and societal gender norms. there's so many reasons, but even if we think of it in terms of just practical logistics, women make less than men for the same work. We know this. I think it's what, eighty cents to the dollar. So if somebody's going to sacrifice potential earnings in a straight domestic partnership. It makes sense that it would be in most cases the woman to do it. And then it's also just a cultural gender norms. Women are seen as the caregivers of society. So yeah, it I I don't think it's rocket science. Like I don't I don't even I don't even know what to say. It's it's just it's just what happens. And there seems to be very little interest in remedying that dynamic in any meaningful way. It's interesting, Donnie and I talk about this a lot, right? Because we are building a platform to help more people find the tools they need faster when they're caregiving, right? And Donnie is the type of person that would be handling a lot of this. So I always joke and say it's daughters and Donnies. and and and the idea there is that like the same way that you can be a man and a feminist, the daughter tax can affect you even if you're a son, right? But it's it's the idea that it primarily affects daughters. And I very much believe that it it sort of starts happening before that. In my view, I have four brothers and I I'm of the opinion that the daughter tax begins with little things, such as being the person to remember the birthday gift or the Father's Day gift. And not only are you remembering it, you're figuring out what should be purchased, you're then coordinating with everyone to make sure it's fair and cash app requests and Venmo here and there. And and then it's also, you know, okay, who's talked to Aunt Susan in a while? Is she okay? Or what about the family heirlooms that grandmother had passed down and whose house are they gonna live at? And it's just like a ton of little things. And in my opinion, like the daughter tax actually starts before it it hits your bank account and starts depleting your income and your net worth. But ironically, as the tax increases and more is expected of you with regular taxes, that's generally when you have more money and so it's okay. But with the daughter tax, it's the opposite. You have to do more with less. So I'm curious, do you think that that sort of analogy and or that concept applies? In in the broader sense of not just financial, but from a a family aspect? Yeah, totally. the kind of time spent on logistics management. It's interesting. I mentioned this in my story, I I believe. One thing that has changed a lot in the last several years is that the gender parity for caregiving in general has really become a lot more equal. So there's are roughly as as many men who participate in caregiving as there are women. What where the difference is really striking is in the amount. So while both men and women are basically equally doing some caregiving, women are far more likely to be doing it full time, like overwhelmingly, or to be doing like a lot of it. Both genders will participate, but the lion's share is being shouldered by women. And that begins your Right, it begins very early and it happens in all sorts of ways across a a lifespan. I think that makes a a ton of sense and specifically I'm curious around if someone is not the primary caregiver but wants to offer support, what would be like some of the best ways that you've seen in some of your conversations or as you're even thinking about this potentially with your own care for your parents? Like what how are you thinking about what that would look like? Yeah. the interesting thing is that so everybody that I spoke with had siblings, actually brothers, who just were not at all involved at all. Like completely out of the picture, either like like totally estranged from the family or just like not involved at all in the care giving. I didn't actually speak with anybody who had any support. I I mu I shouldn't laugh 'cause it's not s it's It's not a funny thing at all, but it's it was very striking that that I s nobody that I spoke with was an only child, but they were all doing this by themselves. So I think that probably the most immediate answer is that sibling groups kind of need to have these conversations together and come up with a game plan together. I'm the oldest of three and I I've the only daughter, so I have I've two younger brothers. And I actually feel very good about The way that we're gonna handle things together when the time comes. I feel completely confident that my brothers are not gonna just like disappear. I do have faith in the enlightened millennial man and and and younger, but I do also think that it's not the kind of thing that you can leave up to chance and like faith and that conversations need to happen in order to. create a supportive infrastructure that isn't just like one caregiver and then like other people maybe supporting now and then. Thinking of caregiving as like networks of care would be a really important kind of paradigm shift for families and for policymakers in general. We've spoken about how it's not helpful to just say, that useless husband or that useless mantrope like that doesn't help anyone. and that's something that I think is really useful for us to call out because that's not gonna change anything. That doesn't allow someone to to feel empowered to to help out or do the right thing or giving them the opportunity or inviting them in, right? That's just you know, I'm I'm curious if you were a sister that hadn't had this conversation with her brothers and you wanted to help her bring it up, what would you recommend a sister say to her brothers directly? To help. I think that just approaching it as like a we, well, how are we gonna handle this? What's our game plan? And making it kind of a conversation that isn't like an instructional kind of lesson, but a collaborative plan making discussion seems to be the best approach for making sure that everybody's on the same page. And you know, different people have different strengths too, and I think that when everybody's coming at the situation from the perspective of having something to offer and being able to do what they can, it can become a more collaborative exercise. Rather than just having sort of one person who's the boss and like maybe delegating. Although that can also work, you know, who knows? I don't know. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think that families should think about this as something that they're all in on together. Yeah. It's a circle of care and everyone can be in charge of something different, or it can be one person with various supporting cast members, but the delineation of roles based on either people's proximity to the loved one or you know the resources they have available to them, whether you know it's time or money, or even what they're good at. I think that we've heard that some folks when they approach it from a How can we show up as our best selves? What are we really good at? If this is the person that loves to get on the phone with insurance, then let's have them get on phone with insurance. And whoever they are, I'd love to talk to them because I want to hire them because I feel like that's what most people don't want to do. But having an understanding of what people's skill sets are sounds like a really helpful way to frame that. Totally. Yeah. And I think people want to be helpful and want to be included for the most part. Is there anything you have done with your family or you've heard of other families doing to get ahead of this in terms of either making sure advanced medical directives are complete or estate planning or, you know, writing down their wishes for their funeral or celebration of life before it gets too close? There's always that point of like, well, it's too early, it's too early, and then it's too late, right? So have you or anyone that you've spoken to? done that proactively and and do you think that that is helpful? That is very helpful. And yeah, my parents have done that actually. A few years ago, they told my brothers and I like that we would all have specific roles that they delineated. I think I'm like the executor of the estate and one brother is gonna handle like medical decision making and the other brother is going handle like kind of financial management. So we're we all have our jobs and that They're suited to our strengths. I'm the bossy oldest sister, so naturally I'm gonna be the executor of the or the executor of the will, sorry. I think that that is what like maybe the biggest gift that aging parents can give to their adult kids is just setting up a game plan so that their kids don't have to think about that kind of stuff and agonize over these decisions when they're in the thick of having to make them. Yeah. I wouldn't be me if I didn't say this because this is what I've my soapbox sentence that I've been saying for the last four years. But one thing a lot of people don't know is that a will will put you in probate. And probate on average takes sixteen months, somewhere between ten to twenty hours a week of work and can cost three to ten percent of the estate. And so I hear a lot of folks do leave, you know, being an executor to the daughter frequently. And I I always recommend looking into a revocable living trust with some sort of attorney because that can help frontload a lot of the work ahead of time. So you're not also grieving and having to be the executor of the will because it it truly does take a long time and the physical, emotional and financial strain can be quite tremendous. So Okay, stepping off my soapbox, but I I need to tell everyone. That's a good soapbox. And I had I I'm gonna be honest, I hadn't thought about that at all. So you're providing a valuable, a valuable service. The daughter tax never stops. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Kelly, thank you so much for this amazing conversation. I wanna make sure that people know how they can connect with you and find your work. Yeah, so you can find the daughterhood tax story on Business Insider. A lot of my work on everyday economics can be found on Business Insider. I'm on LinkedIn. Yeah, I'm all over the internet. You can I'm not hard to find. Kelly, I I can't begin to thank you enough. I have not stopped talking about the daughter tax since reading your article. So thank you again for sharing, for doing this work and Helping to make this easier for so many people because I think if people know that if you're the one coordinating little things now, those are gonna become big things in the future. And so this is your bright, flashing neon sign saying, make a plan. Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for having me. This is really important stuff to think about and talk about. So I'm glad that you initiated the conversation. Our guest today was Kelly Korducki. You can find a link to her article on the daughter tax in our show notes. The legislation referenced in the conversation, the Wish Act, is also linked in our show notes. Learn more about MortalSupport at mortalsupport.com and sign up for our newsletter. Next week's episode is titled Purpose is a Vital Sign, and it's a great conversation with a well-known geriatrician. Mortal Support is a production of Blaze, a free navigation platform for adult caregiving. We want to give a big thank you to all the folks that made it possible to get this on the airwaves. Our incredible producer, Odelia Rubin, original music from the talented Best Rogers, brand design by Matt Yao, and strategic support from Ali Bzel. Also, a special thanks this week to everyone who has reached out and told us they liked the first episode. It means the world to us. 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