Squared Away Blog

My husband has taught high school biology for 30 years in Boston and works hard for his students. But he’s nearly 64 and it’s time to think about retiring. Can we afford it? When we retire, will we eventually run through our savings? Is retirement scary – or what? Questions like these are also probably haunting millions of baby boomers in the middle of the night. One out of three boomers in a recent Transamerica survey said they are not confident they will have enough income to retire “comfortably” and another third concede that they are only “somewhat confident.” To find the answer for ourselves, my husband and I hired a financial adviser. It was the best thing we could’ve done. T…

When David Marotta is investing his clients’ money in mutual funds, he scrutinizes the fees. To demonstrate why fees are so important, Marotta charted the fees and 10-year returns for dozens of index funds in the Standard & Poor’s 500 family. Since these funds all track the same index and their performance is roughly the same, the fees will largely determine how much of the return the investor keeps and how much goes to the mutual fund company. “The larger the fee the less that it performs. It’s kind of a straight line,” said the Charlottesville, Virginia investment manager. “Anytime we’re picking a fund” for a client, “we’re trying to find the lowest-cost fund that we can find in that…

The American psyche gets a lot of credit for fueling the boom in U.S. home prices, which ended in 2006. As houses increased in value, homeowners felt richer, and they spent more. Similarly, falling house prices led to declines in consumer spending as households found themselves poorer and less able to access credit, according to a new paper, “Wealth Effects Revisited: 1975-2012,” by economists Karl Case, the late John Quigley and Robert Shiller. In this interview, Case explains this “wealth effect.” Q: Why were our spending decisions influenced by our psychology during the housing boom? Case: The increase in house prices was like magic. They went from the 1950s until 2006 without ever falling nationally. The numbers are astonishing. If…

Amid a growing awareness that many Americans aren’t properly prepared for retirement, various efforts have ramped up to push the non-savers to save. A notable initiative is occurring in state government. California, Illinois, and Oregon have started IRA savings programs that require private employers to offer the state-sponsored IRAs to workers if the company doesn’t already have a 401(k). Cell phone apps are also popping up to make saving easier. One such app – Finhabits – is being marketed directly to Latinos, who financial experts say are particularly unprepared for retirement. Two out of three Latino workers aren’t saving in a retirement plan, often because they work in low-wage restaurant and hotel jobs that don’t offer one. The Finhabits a…

Social Security Administration poster, 1956 Many women are fuzzy on how Social Security benefits for widows work and even more unclear about the program’s spousal benefits. I know two of these women. Their situations nicely illustrate how this federal program promotes the well-being of older women and families. One is my divorced aunt. She was surprised to learn, after my uncle died a few years ago, that her widow’s – or survivor’s – benefit, based on his decades of work as a housing developer, would be double the spousal benefit she’d received while he was alive. Divorced spouses are eligible for the same spousal and survivor’s benefits as still-married spouses, though only if the marriage lasted more than 10 years…

Mary Roby The stress of living with her son and daughter-in-law made Mary Roby’s blood sugar spike. But when she began her search for an independent senior housing community, affordable and nice never seemed to come in the same package. Roby, who is 80, said she looked around quite a bit. A one-room place in the Boston area for $4,500 a month had no senior services, a limited kitchen, and was housed in a poorly maintained building. She also knew, through her son’s in-laws, about a high-end assisted living community with extensive services, but it charged more than $6,000. Then she found Shillman House, which was both affordable and nice. “I love it here,” Roby said about the independent senior housing community…

Four out of five retired households will pay little or no income taxes. But the tax rates at the highest income levels are meaningful, averaging 11 percent of household income and as much as 23 percent at the very top. These estimates come from a new analysis by the Center for Retirement Research that sheds light on a potentially important consideration that is often overlooked by people approaching retirement age. The highest tax rates are paid by the highest-income households because they often withdraw money from 401(k)s and IRAs to supplement their Social Security benefits. They must also pay capital gains taxes when they sell stocks and bonds for a profit from their regular financial accounts. Households with income in…

The number of U.S. households ages 70 and over who have written a will has been dropping for at least 20 years, to about two-thirds today. But a new study that looks under the hood of estate planning in this country shows that the matter of whether someone has a will often comes down to race: older Black and Hispanic households are much less likely to have them than non-Hispanic Whites. The researchers also confirm that having a will is crucial to the successful transfer of a meaningful amount of wealth to one’s intended heir or heirs. In this way, wills can be an effective way to ensure that intergenerational wealth is being preserved and passed on within Black and…

When a spouse or parent requires long-term care, quality is the top priority. But a report last year by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) cited concerns about the quality of the federal data essential for monitoring the quality of care.  For example, three key indicators point to improvements: better nursing staff levels and clinical quality and fewer deficiencies in care that harm residents. Yet consumer complaints jumped 21 percent between 2005 and 2014, even though the number of nursing home beds has remained roughly flat in recent years. Anthony Chicotel, an attorney with the San Francisco non-profit California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, said care quality is intertwined with affordability, payment sources, and dramatic changes under way in nursing…

Two times more widows than widowers say their spouse’s death carried significant negative financial consequences during the first year after their loss. This sharp contrast recurred in numerous financial questions recently posed to widows and widowers by New York Life.  The contrast also seemed to persist across various income levels, in questions revolving around both essential needs and luxuries.  Here’s a sampling of answers given by nearly 900 Americans whose spouses have died sometime in the past decade: Their answers beg the question: Why the divergence? One reason is certainly that two-thirds of the widows surveyed reported their income was under $35,000, while a majority of the widowers earned more than that. Adults over age 18 were canvassed, so working…

Social Security is a major source of income for most retirees. It is even more important to blacks and Hispanics in a nation that is becoming increasingly diverse. Social Security is helping to even out the racial and ethnic inequities in income and wealth that exist in the working population and continue in old age, according to a study by the Center for Retirement Research for the Retirement and Disability Research Consortium. The researchers estimate how much Social Security reduces this inequality by comparing retirement wealth for white, black, and Hispanic-Americans. Wealth is defined broadly to include obvious things like home equity and financial assets such as 401(k) retirement accounts, certificates of deposit, and money market accounts. In addition, t…

The more the Great Recession recedes in the rearview mirror, the clearer is the damage sustained by the workers born in the final years of the baby boom. These so-called late boomers were between 42- and 47-years-old when the recession hit. Their careers were just hitting their stride when they were slammed by the downturn. The 50 percent stock market plunge and spike in unemployment did particular damage to their 401(k)s and their retirement prospects generally. A study totaling up the damage was the subject of one blog of particular interest to our readers last year.   By the time they reached their early 50s, late boomers had accumulated only about $280,000 in retirement wealth in the form of 401(k)…