About the Blog

The Squared Away Blog has been recognized by both The Wall Street Journal and AARP.  “In clear, straightforward language,” writes AARP blogger and NBC Today financial editor Jean Chatzky, the blog “delves into what future and current retirees need to focus on.”

Squared Away: Financial Behavior: Work, Save, Retire is not a personal finance blog – there are dozens of those. This blog covers anything having to do with financial behavior, psychology and our U.S. money culture. We want to provide any information that might help Americans of all ages better understand their behavior so that they can act in their own best interest – and get their all-important financial matters “squared away.” Sponsored by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, this blog is for individuals, as well as practitioners in the field of financial literacy, including financial advisers, educators, employers, government and foundation officials, and researchers. The topic is so interesting and important that we hope everyone will want to read Squared Away.

Weekly blog posts will cover cutting-edge research on why some individuals handle their money well while others pile up debts, or how some individuals manage to prepare for retirement or college and others fail to save.  Squared Away will also explore the emotional and psychological – even neurological – reasons people do what they do and will cover employer and government initiatives to improve financial literacy.

Squared Away has five departments, including Research, Field Work, Behavior, and Money Culture.  And because the Web is the primary form of communication for most Americans, the fifth department – On the Web – is devoted to innovative ways people can learn about money online.

Kim Blanton is a veteran financial and economics reporter, most recently for The Boston Globe, who has also written for The Economist and other publications.  She uncovered scandals during the savings and loan crisis in Texas back in the late 1980s, trekked around the world to cover finance and economics in the 1990s, and ventured into Boston neighborhoods to cover the recent subprime mortgage crisis.

While covering subprime mortgages, Blanton began to see the importance of financial behavior and literacy.  Wall Street excesses certainly fueled the crisis, but a poor understanding of complex financial products also played a major role.  She interviewed dozens of homeowners in the grip of foreclosure who had agreed to home loans that they did not understand and that their brokers did not or could not explain to them.  The consequences for these individuals – and the country – were disastrous.

Blanton uses the same dogged reporting skills to cover financial issues of growing importance today, including the personal crisis that concerns millions of baby boomers: Retirement.

If you would like to alert her to anything of interest about financial education or behavior, please email her at kimberly.blanton@bc.edu.

Harry S. Margolis founded Margolis Bloom & D’Agostino, a ten-lawyer law firm with offices in Wellesley, in 1987. He is a graduate of Swarthmore College and New York University School of Law. His practice concentrates on elder law, planning for individuals with disabilities, and estate trust administration. Margolis was the founding editor of The ElderLaw Report, a monthly newsletter for elder law attorneys, the ElderLaw Forms Manual and  The ElderLaw Portfolio Series, all published by Wolters Kluwer. Mr. Margolis is a Fellow of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys and of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel. He has served on the adjunct faculty of Boston College Law School, has been designated a “Super Lawyer” since 2005, one of top 100 Super Lawyers in New England for 2014 and in Massachusetts from 2019 through 2024. 

Margolis was the founder and President of ElderLawAnswers as well as a co-founder and director of the Academy of Special Needs Planners. More recently, he created the website www.AskHarry.info where he answers consumer questions about estate planning issues and published Get Your Ducks in a Row: The Baby Boomers Guide to Estate Planning and The Baby Boomers Guide to Trusts: Your All-Purpose Estate Planning Tool. He also answers consumer questions about estate planning in columns on MarketWatch.com and TheStreet.com. Margolis believes strongly that the best legal solutions are achieved through the partnership of well-informed clients and attorneys who combine great technical expertise, experience and an ability to listen.

Readers are welcome to send their thoughts about issues that affect them or their story ideas to Harry at hsm@margolisbloom.com.