Should I save for my kids' future or my own retirement first?

You opened this tab because you feel guilty either way.

Save for yourself and you’re a bad parent. Save for your kids and you’re being irresponsible about your own future. Either direction you turn, there’s a quiet voice telling you you’re getting it wrong.

That voice isn’t wisdom. It’s a money script — and understanding where it comes from might be the most useful thing you read today.

What’s actually happening in your brain

Dr Brad Klontz, financial psychologist and researcher at Creighton University, coined the term money scripts to describe the unconscious beliefs we form about money — usually before age ten, usually absorbed from watching the adults around us.

These scripts aren’t logical. They don’t update when your circumstances change. They just run in the background, quietly steering decisions that feel like choices but are actually reflexes.

One of the most common scripts Klontz identified goes something like: “Good parents sacrifice for their children.” Another, often sitting right next to it: “You have to look after yourself before you can look after anyone else.”

Both scripts are in there. Both feel true. That’s why the question feels impossible — you’re not weighing two financial options, you’re watching two deeply held identity beliefs arm-wrestle.

Why standard financial advice doesn’t help here

Most financial content will tell you the answer is obvious: prioritise your pension. Your kids can borrow for university; you can’t borrow for retirement. Put on your own oxygen mask first.

That advice is correct. And it still won’t move you.

Here’s why. When a decision feels identity-threatening — when it makes you feel like a bad mother, a selfish person, someone who got their priorities wrong — the rational part of your brain goes quiet and the emotional part takes over.

This is what psychologists call affect heuristic (Slovic, Finucane, Peters, MacGregor, 2002): we don’t evaluate risk and reward neutrally. We feel our way to a conclusion first, then construct a logical story afterwards. If contributing to your own pension feels selfish, no amount of compound interest graphs will shift that feeling.

And if you’re in a shame spiral about money already — if you’ve avoided looking at this properly for a while — the identity threat is even louder. Looking at the numbers feels like confirming you’ve already failed.

So you stay stuck. Or you fudge it. A bit here, a bit there, nothing structured, nothing that actually works.

The present-future tradeoff (and why your kids complicate it)

There’s a second layer to this, which is the well-documented tension between present and future selves.

Behavioural economist Richard Thaler’s work on mental accounting and Kahneman’s research on temporal discounting both point to the same problem: our brains are terrible at giving future-you the same weight as present-you. The version of you at 68, needing money, is genuinely hard to feel connected to. She’s abstract. She doesn’t feel urgent.

Your child’s needs feel urgent right now, today, viscerally.

The problem isn’t that you value your kids too much. It’s that your brain can’t feel the future — and that asymmetry quietly warps every financial decision you make.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a feature of human cognition that holds across cultures, income levels, and education. You are not the exception.

But it does mean that any plan you make has to account for it. Relying on willpower — just deciding to prioritise your pension — almost never works long-term if the underlying identity script hasn’t been examined.

What actually changes the equation

Let me give you the structural facts, cleanly, because they matter.

• Your pension comes with money attached. Employer contributions, tax relief at your marginal rate — a basic-rate taxpayer putting in £80 effectively contributes £100. That 25% uplift is immediate, guaranteed, and disappears if you don’t use it.
• Your kids have options you don’t. Student loans in the UK are income-contingent and arguably more like a graduate tax than a traditional debt. Many graduates repay far less than they borrowed before the loan is written off. Your pension has no equivalent fallback.
• Delaying pension contributions is expensive. Due to compounding, money invested in your 30s is worth significantly more at retirement than the same money invested in your 40s. This gap is real and it doesn’t care how good your intentions were.
• A financially secure parent is not a burden on their children. This is the part the guilt script never shows you. The alternative — reaching retirement with insufficient savings and relying on your adult children — is a much heavier weight to place on them.

None of this is to say never save for your kids. Junior ISAs, gifting, helping with a house deposit — these are all meaningful things. The structural argument is about sequencing: get the pension to a point where you’re capturing employer contributions and tax relief in full, first.

The specific small action worth taking this week

Don’t overhaul everything. Don’t build a spreadsheet. Don’t set a budget.

Just do this one thing: find out what your employer will match into your pension, and check whether you’re currently contributing enough to get all of it.

Log in to your payslip portal or email your HR team. One question: “Am I currently receiving the maximum employer pension contribution available to me?”

That’s it. No commitment to change anything yet. Just information.

This works because it lowers the psychological cost of engagement. Research on implementation intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999) shows that the more specific and small a first step is, the more likely it is to happen — and that taking any action on a goal you’ve been avoiding reduces the avoidance behaviour over time.

You’re not deciding your whole financial future. You’re just finding out one number.

The script that’s worth rewriting

Here’s the thing about identity money scripts: they’re not fixed. Klontz’s clinical work, and the broader literature on cognitive behavioural approaches to financial behaviour, consistently shows that when you name the script, it loses some of its power.

The script “good parents sacrifice for their children” sounds noble. But run it forward: a parent who reaches their 60s financially depleted, anxious, dependent — did the script actually protect anyone?

The rewrite isn’t “be selfish.” The rewrite is: “Securing my own financial stability is part of how I take care of my family.”

That’s not a mantra. It’s a structurally accurate description of how family financial systems work across a lifetime.

You are allowed to hold that belief. You don’t have to earn it.

Before you go

If any of this landed — the identity stuff, the guilt, the sense that your relationship with money is shaped by things you absorbed a long time ago — the Money Beliefs Quiz is worth a few minutes of your time.

It maps where your particular money scripts are likely operating and gives you a clearer picture of what’s driving the decisions that feel stuck.

Not a fix. Not a sales pitch. Just a useful starting point for understanding your own patterns before you try to change them.

You can find it [here].

— Joel