Number of baby boomers forced to move in with their parents jumps 60% after the financial crisis destroyed their retirement nest eggs



Report: Number has risen at double the rate of their younger counterparts

Comes in wake of great recession and US economy’s slow pace of recovery

Older middle-aged forced to move back with their even older parents



Baby boomers across America are moving back in to live with their parents – despite being in their 50s and early 60s.

The number of older people going to live with their parents has risen at double the rate of their younger counterparts, according to a new report.



The extraordinary turnabout by a generation generally reckoned to have had every opportunity to succeed comes in the wake of the great recession and the sluggish US economy’s slow pace of recovery.



Baby boomers in America are moving back in to live with their parents - despite being in their 50s and early 60s

Driven by economic necessity, the older middle-aged have been forced to move back with their even older parents.



For seven years through 2012, the number of Californians aged 50 to 64 who live in their parents' homes swelled 67.6 per cent to about 194,000, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development.



The jump is almost exclusively the result of financial hardship caused by the recession rather than for other reasons, such as the need to care for aging parents, said Steven Wallace, a UCLA professor of public health who collated the data.



‘The numbers are pretty amazing,’ Professor Wallace told the Los Angeles Times. ‘It's an age group that you normally think of as pretty financially stable. They're mid-career. They may be thinking ahead toward retirement. They've got a nest egg going. And then all of a sudden you see this huge push back into their parents' homes.’



While many more young adults live with their parents – 1.6 million 18 to 29-year-old Californians returned to their childhood bedrooms – there has been a 33 per cent jump from 2006, half that of the 50 to 64 age group.



The number of older people going to live with their parents has risen at double the rate of their younger counterparts, according to a new report

Most people in their 50s and older only move home as a last resort. Many have lost their jobs and can no longer afford the mortgage or soaring rents in areas like Los Angeles and San Francisco.



Debbie Rohr, 52, moved back in with her 77-year-old mother in Salinas, California with her twin teenage sons after both she and her husband became unemployed at the same time.



‘I said 'Mom, I'm so sorry but I don't know what to do,'’ she told the Times. ‘I dreaded it. If it wasn't for my boys I wouldn't have done it. I would have lived in my car.’



Janine Rosales, 53, is back living with her mother in San Francisco. ‘I'm being treated like a child, being told when to turn off the lights and when to go to sleep,’ she said.



Jenny Chung Mejia, a public policy consultant at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development in Los Angeles, said: ‘It's unexpected vulnerability at this point in your life.

