man holding stethoscope with piggy bank

The headlines from the 2023 Medicare Trustees Re­port were that the Hospital Insurance (HI) program faces a long-term deficit and will deplete its trust fund reserves in 2031 and that the rest of the Medicare program will require increasing amounts of general revenues. While true, the outlook for program costs is considerably more favorable than…

Percent sign and gears in front of sunlight

The National Retirement Risk Index (NRRI) measures the share of working-age households that is “at-risk” of being unable to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living in retirement.  The exercise involves comparing households’ projected replacement rates – retirement income as a percentage of pre-retirement income – with target rates that would allow them to maintain their…

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In 2015, the number of individuals receiving Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) benefits began to drop for the first time in two decades.  This drop was caused by a wave of terminations, as beneficiaries aged into the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) program, combined with a steep decline in the incidence rate (the number of…

State and local government pension plans are important economic institutions in the United States. They hold nearly $5 trillion in assets; their annual payments to beneficiaries are equal to about 1.5 percent of national GDP; and over 11 million beneficiaries rely on these payments to support themselves in retirement. In recent years, attention has focused…

Homeownership is one of the largest sources of retirement wealth for most households and is promoted as a key tool for wealth accumulation.  However, a long history of discrimination in the housing market has constrained the ability of Black households to accumulate housing wealth relative to their White counterparts. Consequently, Black households approaching retirement…

student loan relief

The pause in federal student loan payments during COVID has been a golden opportunity to chop down the debt. In...

Senior couple reading documents and calculating bills

Late Boomers have low levels of wealth regardless of how it is defined – total wealth, retirement wealth, or 401(k)/IRA...

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Illustration of the 2021 federal stimulus check from the IRS with cash and social security card

Millions of Americans will probably get their Social Security checks even if Congress fails to reach a deal to raise the U.S. debt limit, economists and policy advocates say. 

Mortgage and loan rejected concept: paper house on a coin pile

In late 2019, Molly Stuart’s contract ended at the community college where she worked. “Normally, I’d just get a new job, but then Covid happened,” she said. So she collected unemployment for awhile, then retired.