Wealthspire’s Zach Mangels helps Gen Xers plan so that they can simultaneously help support adult children, care for ageing parents, and cope with potential job loss.
5 min
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Gen X families, including affluent ones, face a hornet’s nest of financial challenges, from helping out their adult children to providing care for ageing parents to managing careers in a perilous job market.
Zach Mangels, a senior vice president at Wealthspire Advisors in San Rafael, Calif., estimates a quarter of his clients are in the Gen X demographic.
“Mortgage rates are higher, carrying costs are higher, educational costs are higher, groceries are higher, eldercare is higher—all of that stuff eats into cash flow. And even people with higher incomes are feeling that,” says Mangels, 40.
Barron’s Advisor spoke with Mangels about the financial challenges facing his Gen X clients, people between the ages of 46 and 61.
Mangels touched on how he creates short-term plans for clients concerned about career setbacks, why he recommends boundaries for Gen X parents who want to financially support adult kids, and how he guides clients with ageing parents.
Typically, when you create a financial plan, you’re looking at long-range goals.
But now I look at more immediate needs because of the pressures Gen X families are dealing with.
For example, I see more clients whose children are coming back home after graduating from college, needing financial support for a much longer period of time than previous generations expected to receive.
If they need to support their child, I want to understand the nature of what the support will look like.
I have a client whose kids just graduated and whose majors don’t lend themselves to a high income right now.
They knew their kids would be coming back home after graduation and we talked about what the nature of their help would look like.
First we looked at their financial plan to see what kind of support they could provide and we defined the maximum amount.
Then we designed the support in a way that would be planned, explicit, and with purposeful boundaries.
That’s very important for the younger generation. Parents need to know how to help their kids without them becoming dependent.
The children need to have agency and to know they don’t have access to an unlimited piggy bank.
The clients had a conversation with their kids about what to expect.
The kids could live rent-free for three years, with a small stipend, an amount that didn’t disincentivise them from looking for a job.
In this environment, entry-level jobs are increasingly hard to come by, but any job that moves you closer to a career you want is worth looking at. In this case, their daughter got a job as an assistant to a personal shopper, which was related to the direction she wanted to follow.
I didn’t provide a ton of details to the parents with what exactly to say. But I coached them on the basics—having a clear, purposeful, intentional conversation and getting buy-in from their kids.
The cost of long-term care for seniors has increased dramatically.
One of the conversations I have with my clients is how they perceive their parents’ financial circumstances and to what degree they might have to provide a layer of financial support. My dad was in memory care for a few years and we paid maybe 15 grand a month.
My clients’ parents are usually relatively stable financially. But the most important issue is the use of the family residence to help provide support. A lot of people in California who have owned homes a long time have a lot of equity in those homes. That’s the ultimate backstop, the last line of defence.
Gen X is also dealing with career and income volatility. We’ve seen all the headlines about tech layoffs and the rise of AI. A lot of my clients work in the tech industry.
The conversations I have more frequently focus on clients’ concerns about their ability to continue earning at the same level.
We look at diversifying their equity component more quickly, getting it out of company stock, especially for those in tech.
For example, some clients at Amazon have restricted stock units they can sell periodically. But now they’re selling those (Amazon) stocks and then deploying the [cash into other equities] more slowly.
We’re hearing about how quickly AI is going to change things. For people in software on the front lines, they’re pretty anxious about it.
One client who works at Google told me he expected a lot of change with AI as the disruptive force.
A few companies will benefit, he feels. A lot won’t. So he’s actively selling his company shares.
Historically we would reinvest the proceeds as they’ve come in. But now he wants to slow that down. Hold cash a little bit longer and slowly deploy it.
His perception is that change is coming quickly. He doesn’t know what that will look like but it probably won’t be good.
In behavioural finance, we know you feel a loss much more significantly than you feel a gain. And he’s trying to avoid putting money in the market right before there is a big correction.
It’s super stressful. And as we go into 2026, especially in the tech sector and among those with high incomes, I see a lot of anxiety.
I have another client who works in finance, but the nature of his job moves with economic cycles.
He was laid off at the start of Covid and he’s getting nervous again. It’s a “vibecession” that a lot of people are feeling right now.
Over a year ago, we restructured where his investments are held, so that if he gets laid off and ends up spending his emergency fund, the next thing he’ll tap is a more conservative account we created.
It’s not that we took his overall asset allocation and made it more conservative. We just put more investments in this other account. It’s a matter of asset location and it gives him peace of mind knowing he has a fallback he can tap.
That strategy would be helpful for anybody today. The challenge is if you have accounts with a lot of capital gains.
My work with baby boomer clients often involves conversations about supporting their Gen X and older millennial children.
I’ve seen a lot of parents and grandparents of Gen Xers looking for ways to accelerate their generational wealth transfer, trying to provide assistance now when it’s more impactful on their kids’ lives.
For example, a baby boomer client was looking for ways to help her Gen X son, who is married with a child in middle school, but had started accumulating a lot of debt after he was laid off.
We worked together to model the level of support she could provide and how to structure the assistance so it wouldn’t impact her son’s sense of independence.
Ultimately, she decided on a one-time gift that would cover about six months of living expenses. I call this indirect Gen X planning.
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Gold miners are emerging as a compelling way to navigate market uncertainty, with analysts pointing to strong cash flows, attractive valuations and rising profit margins. As gold prices stabilize above US$4,000 an ounce, mining stocks could offer investors both downside protection and long-term upside.
3 min
Gold is one of the market’s go-to hedges in rocky times. Don’t forget that gold miners’ stocks are too.
The stock market’s gains in 2026 belie the rocky macroeconomic picture: elevated inflation, heightened geopolitical tensions, and jitters about the artificial-intelligence trade. That backdrop, in theory, should be the time for gold to shine. Instead, the price of the yellow metal has tumbled more than 5% so far, after last year’s blistering 65% rally. In part, the U.S. dollar’s recovery has stymied gold, which benefited from the greenback’s weakness in 2025.
Even with the precious metal’s recent weakness, gold mining stocks could be the best way to profit from this year’s uncertainty.
Gold miners “are a valuable hedge against macro risks that would likely be damaging for equities,” BCA Research’s Noah Weisberger and Rishabh Shah wrote this week.
Concerns about the Federal Reserve’s next moves to tackle inflation, the increasingly crowded AI trade, and steep valuations for tech stocks are just some of the drivers that could help gold’s price get on even footing— and lead to even bigger gains for miner stocks.
These stocks’ prices tend to outpace gold’s moves, because the companies have fixed operational costs. So when gold’s price rallies, their profit margins soar, and vice versa. For instance, the VanEck Gold Miners GDX +7.39% exchange-traded fund has fallen 11% this year as the metal has slumped.
Now, gold’s price just needs to stabilize to help miners’ stocks take off, and that seems to be happening. The precious metal has recently found support above the $4,000 level, and has stuck in a narrow range since the end of June. But its price rose ever so slightly in July, ending a four-month losing streak for the metal. Technical analysis also suggests that gold is due for a comeback.
Barron’s recently wrote that the pullbacks for both gold miners and the metal itself are overdone. Senior technical analyst Doug Busch noted that the VanEck ETF is on the “verge of a breakout” and has the potential to hit $11o in early 2027, up more than 40% from its current price.
Gold miners also have more than their role as a market hedge going for them. Their fundamentals are solid, too, says Chris Mancini, portfolio co-manager of the Gabelli Gold Fund.
“Precious metals miners are generating substantial amounts of free cash flow given profit margins of over $2,000 per ounce, and are returning this cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends,” he said in an email.
“Buying the miners is a cheap way to get exposure to the price of gold,” he added. His fund owns Newmont NEM +6.71%, a Barron’s stock pick last year, and Agnico Eagle Mines as top holdings, as well as miners Northern Star Resources, Endeavour Mining, and Kinross Gold K+8.59%.
Miners are better businesses than they used to be, the BCA team added.
“Capex is more disciplined, margins are high and rising…and they are largely independent of the AI story,” Weisberger, BCA’s head of equities, and Shah, a senior analyst, wrote.
That last part is key. AI is disrupting the software industry and many other services and information-oriented businesses, and investors have piled into AI stocks. But ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and other large-language models aren’t going to replace the need to mine for metals.
“Equity portfolios can benefit from exposure to quality that is uncorrelated to AI risk, and gold miners fit the bill,” the BCA team said.
They recommend that investors buy the VanEck Gold Miners ETF, which owns top miners such as Agnico, Barrick Mining ABX +7.24%, and Newmont.
An important bonus for big gold miners’ stocks is that their valuations are attractive after the gold’s pullback, too. The VanEck ETF is now trading at just a little more than nine times next year’s earnings estimates. That’s a big discount to its five-year average price-to-earnings ratio of 14, according to FactSet.
What’s more, the ETF is currently valued at a more than 50% discount to the S&P 500 SPX -0.17%, which is trading for about 19 times earnings estimates for 2027. Mining stocks have typically traded at just a 25% discount to the broader market over the past five years. So there is significant upside for the group if valuations move back toward normal levels.
One factor that complicates mining stocks as a market hedge, of course, is if stocks bounce back, which has been the case so far in August.
But both the market and economic outlooks remain cloudy, and investors remain nervous about the Fed’s next moves and AI stocks. Gold miners should do just fine, even if the anxious mood on Wall Street persists.
