Squared Away Blog

 Soaring apartment rents and widowed or divorced baby boomers with spare bedrooms and inadequate retirement income – these two trends have conspired to drive up the number of boomers seeking roommates. New listings being posted by homeowners between January and June on Silvernest, a website where boomers can search for potential roommates, doubled to 2,331 compared with the first six months of 2021, said Riley Gibson, president of Silvernest. Women account for two-thirds of the listings. The end of the crisis phase of the pandemic and the availability of protective vaccines may have something to do with the recent surge in people being willing to share housing. And with rents up 14 percent in a year, renters – whether…

The racial disparities embedded in our work, retirement, and government systems will be front and center at the annual meeting of a national research consortium. One of the presentations at the online meeting on Aug. 4 and 5 will explore the impact of wealth and income inequality on Black and Latinx workers at a time these populations are rapidly aging. The researchers are concerned with how their decisions about when to retire will impact their economic security. Growing inequality “point[s] to greater risks of financial insecurity” for future Black and Latinx retirees, the researchers said. Another paper will address a related topic: the differences, by race and ethnicity, in workers’ levels of knowledge about how Social Security benefits work. Understanding…

Caregiving often wins out in the struggle between work and fulfilling one’s obligation to a family member or friend who needs help. Researchers have documented the phenomenon of workers being forced to eventually leave their jobs so they can devote more time to the person in their care. But the impact on the work lives of the people who are new to their caregiving duties is often dramatic and happens very quickly, a new study finds. Employment levels for workers who become caregivers declined by 6 percent within a year after they started, and most of the drop occurred because they left the labor force entirely, according to the analysis linking Census Bureau surveys on informal care with the Socia…

The headline on a January blog asked, “How Long Can Wages Outrun Inflation?” Now we have our answer. Inflation is increasing two times faster than private-sector wages, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s handy website. As of June 1, the Consumer Price Index had surged by 9.1 percent compared with the index at the same time last year. Average wages have risen 4.2 percent over the year. To slow the economy and bring down inflation, the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates. The silver lining is that Americans are still fully employed – the 3.6 percent jobless rate is back to pre-COVID levels – and have used this leverage to secure the hefty wage hikes. But workers’…

The economic turmoil in the early months of the pandemic – a plunging stock market and soaring unemployment – posed a real threat to state and local government pension funds and the workers who rely on them. One group was particularly vulnerable: public-sector workers who aren’t covered by Social Security and lack the backstop of the federal government if their employer pension plans get into trouble. The Center for Retirement Research has some good news for these 5 million noncovered workers living in 20 states. Their pension plans got through the first two years of the pandemic unscathed. In dollar terms, government contributions to these defined benefit pension plans actually increased during COVID. That and a roaring stock market in…

The tension between technology and work is at least as old as the economics profession itself. A question some people are asking now is: if computers run by artificial intelligence can do the job of humans, will work disappear someday? Two economists are proposing a couple different scenarios in a new paper that is part science fiction and part mathematical models. In one scenario, lower-paid workers who are not highly valued by society – say, McDonald’s hamburger flippers – are more readily replaced by computers than a scientist searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. This will drive down wages for a larger and larger segment of the lower-paid labor force. In a second sci-fi scenario, machines run by artificia…

COVID has created perils that go beyond just the threats to our health. Reports to the FTC of financial fraud and identity theft shot up 68 percent in the first two years of the pandemic – double the pace during the previous five years combined. Older adults with fading memories and declining cognition have always been especially susceptible to fraud. But the pandemic, by forcing them into isolation, may have worsened their vulnerabilities. That’s one takeaway from a new study showing that older Americans who report feeling lonely or suffering a loss of well-being are more susceptible to fraud. The study, based on pre-pandemic surveys of people over 65, is also highly relevant post-pandemic and indicates that interventions to reduc…

Retirement inequality is a thread running through several articles that have appeared here this year. One blog that was particularly popular with our readers distinguishes retirees who have enough wealth to maintain the same spending levels throughout retirement from those who will, over time, have to cut back and reduce their standard of living. The research behind the article – “Health and Wealth Drive Retirees’ Spending” – makes clear that wealth is just one component of a satisfying lifestyle. Even retirees who can afford to maintain their living standard may not be healthy enough to enjoy their money to the fullest. The retirees who have both – health and wealth – are best equipped to maintain their pre-retirement lifestyle. Homeowners…

Lawmakers in Maryland, California and Maine have made the most effort to prevent residents from drowning in medical debt. Texas, South Carolina and Tennessee do the least. This is the assessment of an organization known as Innovation for Justice, a team of researchers at the University of Arizona and the University of Utah. They ranked the 50 states on whether they have taken myriad steps to minimize medical debt. These legislative measures range from restrictions on the healthcare industry’s billing and collection practices to how debt claims are handled in the courts. Medical debt is the single largest category of consumer debt, and the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that 100 million Americans are behind on paying their medical or denta…

He is a one-time heart surgery patient and vulnerable to COVID. She has to take her medication religiously twice a day to prevent a blood pressure spike. Mr. and Mrs. Quader. Source: Medicare Rights Center. During the pandemic, Mr. and Mrs. Quader of Brooklyn, New York, got a notice that the health care subsidy they had been receiving through the Medicare Savings Program for low-income retirees had been terminated. Luckily, counselors on the Medicare Rights Center’s telephone hotline solved the couple’s problem – just like they have helped tens of thousands of retirees nationwide every year that the center’s New York City helpline has been operating. “They knew where to go. They knew what to do,” Mrs. Quader said in…

Mental illness, obesity, smoking, chronic disease – researchers have been able to connect the dots between an array of stresses early in life and how people will fare as they age. New research zeroes in on the adversities experienced by children and young adults that ultimately contribute to a premature retirement due to a disability. The basic finding is not terribly surprising – that life’s financial and social circumstances can lead to disabling conditions that will either nudge, or force, older workers to leave the labor force early. More remarkable is the exhaustive list of past experiences that can increase that risk. For example, childhood financial adversity in this study took many forms – an unemployed father, family relocations for…

Conversations about the vast White-Black disparity in U.S. wealth may acknowledge its roots in slavery. But four economists have now made the case quantitatively by charting changes in the wealth gap since the Civil War. The political and societal influences on wealth accumulation between 1860 and today are multifaceted but the basic trajectory is this: The wealth gap shrank by roughly half during the Civil War era from 1860 to 1870 and dropped in half again between 1870 and 1920, the researchers said in their recent paper. The decades of improvements in Blacks’ per capita wealth, compared with Whites’, occurred despite a quick end to Reconstruction after the Civil War and the rise of Jim Crow laws around 1890 that…