Should you spend your money on retirement or give it to your kids?

How can you reap what you sow while sharing with your descendants too? | Pete Gamlen for Vox Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary.

I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave.

I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond.

Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.

I am a (gracefully?) aging mother of three and proud grandmother of four.

I keep hearing about how my generation (okay, I am a boomer) is hoarding wealth and failing to pass it down.

When I look at my lifestyle, I’m facing a fork in the road.

Either I splurge on a lovely retirement, or I save so my kids and their kids can have an easier life.

We’re all middle-class, so this is not a question of survival.

The kids have college funds.

Do I owe it to my descendants to scrimp as I age? Surely it’s not right for me to spend my savings on bucket-list vacations…How should I balance spending on myself and on the others that will come after me? Dear Rainy Day Funder, I’m so glad to hear you’re not in financial survival mode.

But you are facing some economic constraints : You can’t splurge on a luxurious retirement while at the same time saving a substantial nest egg for your kids and grandkids.

Have a question you want answered in the next Your Mileage May Vary column? Fill out this anonymous form ! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions.

Sign up here! It sounds like this feeling of either-or is causing you some anguish.