The week's best financial advice

Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial advice, gathered from around the web:

A risk for empty nesters

Empty nesters "aren't reining in" their spending once their kids leave the house, and it's imperiling their retirement, said Ruth Davis Konigsberg at Time. Empty-nest savings are "supposed to spike by a whopping 12 percentage points," but a recent study by Boston College's Center for Retirement Research found that parents' 401(k) savings only increase by a paltry 0.3 to 0.7 percent once their children leave home. Often, it's because the kids still require financial assistance. Some 61 percent of Americans say that they've helped an adult child financially in the past 12 months, according to Pew Research. Other empty nesters refuse to cut back on their lifestyle, and continue to eat out or take regular vacations. They may feel like celebrating their independence, but the "inability to downshift spending is putting their retirement in serious jeopardy."

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Borrowing from the boss

"Worried about their financially strapped workforce, a handful of companies are stepping in to offer employees alternatives to payday loans and other expensive financial products," said Rachel Emma Silverman at The Wall Street Journal. Six percent of employers now offer "low- or no-interest loans for nonemergency situations," while others provide assistance consolidating debt or buying big-ticket items like appliances without going into credit-card debt. At Atlantic American, an Atlanta insurance provider, some 15 percent of the staff now have loans through Kashable, one of a growing number of startups that help fund and service employer loans. Payments are deducted from employee paychecks, with rates ranging from 6 percent to the high teens.

When to share a planner

Married couples may share a bathroom, but many of them are leery about sharing a financial planner, said Chris Taylor at Reuters​. Some 13 percent of couples keep their own financial planners after getting married, according to a study by Fidelity Investments. That's a perfectly legitimate decision at first, since "Americans are getting married later than ever" — after careers and financial plans have been established. But it can cause problems down the road, including "conflicting strategies, overlapping holdings, and duplication of fees." To stay on roughly the same page financially, couples should get their planners together quarterly, or at least annually, to make sure they're not offsetting each other's strategy or paying more than necessary.