Squared Away Blog

The seemingly random patterns in low-paid and middle-class workers’ struggles are assembled into a cohesive narrative supplied by people who let the camera in for an intimate look. A few top executives are thrown in to highlight the economy’s inequality, which lower-paid workers like Randi recognize as deeply unfair. Randi, a health care aide in rural Mississippi, explains in a new documentary that her job “pays little and works you to the bone.” Produced by Netflix, “Working: What We Do All Day,” is narrated by former President Barak Obama, who occasionally talks about his middle-class family, interviews some of the featured workers, and explains the economic shifts – globalization and the explosion in Wall Street wealth in the 1980s –…

Automatically enrolling all new workers in an employer savings plan is a terrific way to push reluctant savers to prepare for a future in old age. They still have the option of withdrawing but usually stick with the plan once an employer signs them up. The preliminary results of a new study on Army personnel show just how effective auto-enrollment is. The strategy far outstripped other, less interventionist tactics that employers use to increase plan participation. In 2018, the U.S. Department of Defense implemented auto-enrollment in the federal Thrift Savings Plan for U.S. Army recruits and other new employees and started deducting 3 percent of their pay to deposit into their savings accounts. The plan participation rate for the new…

The drop in a key poverty measure to a historic low was an immediate result of Congress increasing the child tax credit in 2021 to make more families eligible and help them cope with COVID-19. The policy was particularly effective in reducing poverty in the Black community, according to researchers at Howard University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Wisconsin. Black Americans’ poverty rate has always been much higher than the White rate. But the researchers show that the effect of a more generous child tax credit was to dramatically reduce Black poverty all over the country. They overlaid the larger tax credit amounts and the expanded eligibility onto families’ 2019 financial data to estimate how many families…

The pause in federal student loan payments during COVID has been a golden opportunity to chop down the debt. In March 2020, Congress stopped charging interest on the loans when it suspended the monthly payments. The moratorium is slated to continue through June. The zero-interest loan means inflation actually eroded the value of the debt, putting borrowers ahead of the game. And redirecting the payments toward the principal, rather than new interest accruals, reduces both the debt and future interest payments, since smaller loan balances mean less interest. This was a smart strategy for the workers who held onto their jobs during COVID and could afford it. But it is not what they have done, according to a new study. Instead,…

Now that COVID is fading, researchers looking back on the financial assistance passed by Congress during the pandemic are concluding that it helped millions of Americans get through a time of unprecedented distress.   That the assistance would be adequate was not obvious in the midst of the economic turmoil in 2020 as COVID unfolded. But a year into the pandemic, Americans were feeling better off after the infusions of cash from federal relief checks and more generous benefits for laid-off workers that included an extra $600 per month and – for people with assets – soaring house and stock prices. When working-age adults were asked in 2021 how they perceived their finances, 36 percent said they would have troub…

Telephone customer service has become so automated that it can be extremely frustrating to resolve a problem. When it comes to bill collectors, the stakes are high. If the matter isn’t resolved, it can ruin your credit.  In this video, Ana, a Cuban immigrant to Miami in the 1970s, hit a wall of silence after responding to a collection agency that claimed she owed $34,000 for a debt. (The video didn’t describe the nature of the debt.) If she didn’t pay, the agency threatened, it would put a lien on her property. But when Ana provided the debt collector with the documents to prove she’d already paid the debt, she got no response. The problem was finally resolved after s…

In the absence of a national paid family leave policy, 13 states have filled the breach with their own programs to partially compensate workers who take time off to care for an ill family member. In a new study examining the laws in three of these states – California, New Jersey, and New York – women are big beneficiaries of being able to take time off with financial support while they care for a spouse who has fallen ill.   Nationwide, about 8 percent of working wives whose husbands develop a medical problem quit their jobs in response to the stress and strain of intensive caregiving duties. But in the researchers’ comparison of California, New Jersey and New York wit…

Social Security reduces poverty, stabilizes household finances, and can even support a beneficiary’s extended family. But drill down to a single month in the life of a low-income retiree or someone on Social Security disability, and a picture of hardship comes through. Researcher Madelaine L’Esperance at the University of Alabama found that financial problems build as the days pass since the last Social Security check. Over the course of a month, she said, recipients “were more likely to experience a financial shortfall as the pay cycle progressed.” The shortfalls occurred on the days when their spending, as reported in a daily diary, sharply reduced or depleted their cash on hand. Making ends meet can be very challenging for low-income peo…

It’s happening all over the developed world. Birth rates are falling in China, South Korea, Japan, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Greece. Things have played out more slowly in the United States, but we seem to continue moving in the same direction. The U.S. fertility rate has been in decline since just before the Great Recession and plummeted in 2020 as COVID wreaked havoc on the economy and created uncertainty for aspiring parents. But in 2021, the birth rate turned positive for the first time since 2014. New research by the Center for Retirement Research looks past these conflicting signals and finds that, according to early survey data, many younger women lowered their expectations during COVID about how many children…

Social networks dwindle naturally over the years as spouses die and friends lose touch. Nearly half of 75-year-olds are widowed or single. Disabilities like diminished hearing or a bum knee also interfere with an older person’s ability to socialize. But maintaining a robust network is crucial, because a substantial body of research shows that retirees with a vigorous social life are healthier and happier. Now there’s hope even for people who live alone or have lost their connections to friends during COVID’s enforced isolation. According to research, weak social ties – the person you chat with at the grocery store, a fellow dog walker, or the waiter at a neighborhood restaurant – may actually be more important to maintaining a…

Mary O’Connor has been retired for about 14 years and works hard to cultivate her social life. The 74-year-old has made many friends during organized activities, including a trip to Norway, excursions to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, walking tours around Boston, and a course in the classics to prepare for traveling to Rome and Florence. “It’s important to make new connections and friends as you get older,” the retired Boston public school teacher, who is single, said during a recent webinar on “productive aging” organized by the University of Massachusetts, Boston.  Even if O’Connor goes to one of the organized events by herself, she said she doesn’t feel like she’s alone. “Because you’re sitting together,” she said, “you…

The Affordable Care Act has helped significant numbers of people with disabilities pay for the medical care their serious conditions require by adding Medicaid as a second layer of insurance to their standard Medicare coverage. Dual eligibility for Medicare and Medicaid increased from 38 percent of people receiving disability benefits to between 42 percent and 44 percent in the 14 states that accepted the federal option to expand their Medicaid programs immediately after legislation started subsidizing these expansions in 2014, according to RAND researchers. Medicare isn’t just for retirees, and the researchers were curious about how broader Medicaid coverage has affected people under 65 who receive Social Security’s disability insurance. They automatically go on Medicare two years after becoming eligib…