Back to the future: Living with your adult child
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One more thing: Think twice before changing the deed to your home. Tignanelli recalls the case of a 60-year-old widow who had a large mortgage on her home. Her married daughter proposed moving her family into the house and helping to pay the mortgage. The son-in-law thought the couple was entitled to part of the equity in the house in exchange for these payments, so their names should be added to the deed.

"She agreed to this, even though her lawyer warned her not to do it," Tignanelli says. "A year into living together, they couldn't stand living with each other anymore."

The mother decided to sell the home and move. After paying just $9,600 toward the mortgage over 12 months, the couple received $60,000 for their share of the proceeds, while the mother got $90,000. "Now, either they were the greatest investors since the beginning of time, or they ripped their own mother off," Tignanelli says.

Even if the relationship doesn't sour, there are other reasons why your kids' names should stay off the deed.

5. Consider long-term care needs
Some of the choices you make now about giving financial support to your children or reimbursing them for expenses could affect your ability to afford long-term care down the road. Say you need nursing home care at some point, but you're strapped for cash because of the large amount you put into renovating Sonny's house when you moved in. You look to Medicaid for help, and then comes the catch, says Tignanelli: "You report giving money to build the in-law suite, and you could become ineligible for Medicaid assistance."

A nursing home may not be your only option. "Absent being bedridden, there's no reason why parents can't stay in their children's home for a long time with a companion caregiver, at about two-thirds of the price that they're going to experience if they go to a nursing center," says Dan Taylor, president of Wealth Capital Group in Charlotte, N.C. and author of "The Parent Care Conversation."

The point is that you need to plan ahead. Beecham warns families he works with that long-term care "could be one of the biggest drains on their assets."

6. Make your wishes known
Ross says he and his wife encourage his live-in mother-in-law to speak up for herself when it comes to making family decisions about finances, lifestyle and care giving. He also urges clients to communicate their desires and expectations, and for the parents he adds another piece of advice. "If you don't have a will, get one," he says.

Along with a will, Taylor would add a power of attorney and a health care directive to the list of must-have documents. "They don't have to read those things to their children, but they should let their children know where those documents are, especially if the children are named as authorities inside those documents," Taylor says.

Sharing a home with an adult child again may not have been part of your retirement plan. But if you think carefully about what you need to make the situation work and discuss it upfront, the change could become less about losing freedom than about gaining a great companion. Even Wiener's free-spirited father told a business colleague that the best years of his life were the time he spent with her.