Squared Away Blog

Scores on 8th grade standardized math tests dropped during the pandemic, reversing a large part of the gains students had made since the 1990s. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona called the news last October “appalling.” But declining scores only confirmed for many parents what they had witnessed as their children struggled to engage in classes conducted over Zoom when the schools were closed down. Now comes some of the fallout. The decline in math scores between 2019 and 2022 is expected to reduce the lifetime earnings for the average student by nearly 2 percent, or $19,400 in today’s dollars, according to a new study. This may not sound like a lot spread out over a decades-long career. But think about…

Applying for federal disability benefits is a precarious situation for workers who were either forced, or have chosen, to quit their jobs due to an injury or chronic medical condition. There are no guarantees an application will be approved, and it can be hard to find a job after waiting months for a decision on whether they qualify for the benefits. In new research documenting how long individuals wait for a decision on their initial disability applications to a Social Security Administration (SSA) field office, the average ranges from about seven to nine months. The entire process can take twice as long if SSA denies the request for benefits and the applicant appeals within the agency or to an administrative law judg…

As the lower-paid sex, women have no shortage of insecurities about their retirement finances. Only one in five working women feels “very confident” of being able to retire comfortably, the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies reports in its annual retirement survey. More than half say they don’t earn enough or have too much debt to leave a lot of room for saving. Four in 10 expect to retire after 70 or not at all. These insecurities probably reflect, to some extent, the poor retirement preparedness of Americans as a whole, not just women. In fact, women have made significant strides over the past half-century. A new study documenting their personal and economic progress since the 1970s finds that their financial standing, compared with men, has…

Older Americans who want to be smart about retirement finances are curious about the intricacies of Social Security. The blog that drew the most traffic from our readers last year – “The Bridge to a Larger Social Security Check” – suggested a strategy for getting more out of the program: delay signing up for Social Security by withdrawing savings from a 401(k) to pay the bills. Each year that Social Security is postponed adds 7 percent to 8 percent to a retiree’s monthly benefit check. A couple of years of delay, funded with savings, can provide significantly more money, month after month, to pay the bills. The researchers concluded from an experiment that asked older workers to consider the delay strategy…

Hannah Boulton defies the stereotype of the lonely retiree longing for companionship during the holidays. But after two-plus years of a pandemic, even this dynamic former nurse who’s lived on three continents started feeling a little isolated. Then she met Ally Brooks, a high school senior, through the Sages and Seekers program at the senior center in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in September. The program, modeled on a national nonprofit’s workshop, paired up seven retirees with seven high school seniors. It was such a success – the program was Boulton’s’ idea – that a second one is planned in January for a new crop of seniors. The 76-year-old Boulton and Brooks bonded immediately over their love of travel. Boulton shared her adventures, having…

Many retirees, freed from their work obligations and looking for adventure, dream of living overseas. Edward Kierklo and Joanna McIsaac-Kierklo don’t dream. They just do. In May 2021, the couple, feeling trapped by the pandemic in their sleepy town in the Sierra Foothills east of San Francisco, decided to break out and trade rural life for 11 months in London. Joanna’s always been a risk-taker, starting at 22, when she moved to Idaho to be a Vista volunteer. London was her idea. “Joanna says, ‘I’m tired of looking at these floors and cleaning an 1,800-square-foot home,’ ” Ed, 73, recalled. “She said, ‘Let’s sell the place and go to London.’ I said okay.” The pandemic played a starring role in…

During the long and tranquil period for inflation that ended with COVID, 18 states passed legislation requiring employers to pay a minimum wage that automatically increases every year to protect their lowest-income workers from inflation. With inflation surging to 7 percent in 2021 and running even higher this year, the cost-of-living increases are paying up. Many state minimum wages are now 1 1/2 to 2 times the federal minimum wage, with another round of increases coming in January 2023. Congress, on the other hand, hasn’t increased the $7.25 hourly federal wage since 2009, widening the disparities between the states that tie their minimum wages to the federal level and the states that routinely raise theirs to keep up with inflation…

Retirement can change everything. So can grandchildren. A new study that looks at the transitions made by older workers finds that the odds of relocating after they retire to be closer to their adult children increase from the pre-retirement years – 16 percent of recent retirees do so. Some people make these moves, to within 10 miles of family, right around the time of retirement, but the relocations are still happening at least four years afterward. A new grandchild provides an even more compelling reason to move at a time quality childcare is expensive and in short supply. In the study, the researchers found that one in 10 grandparents who, prior to retiring, already considered themselves caregivers for at least one child…

My husband likes to tell a story about his father, Joseph Virchick, who was a pipefitter for the Standard Oil refinery in Bayonne, New Jersey, starting in the 1950s. It was a union job – the Teamsters – paying solid middle-class wages that supported his family in an upscale Levitt development with its own swimming pool. The point here is that this pipefitter with a high school degree lived about as well as his college-educated neighbors who commuted into nearby Manhattan. Virchick and his wife, Henrietta, who also worked, sent all three kids to college. When he retired in the 1980s, they had a pipefitter’s pension to supplement their Social Security. Today, only 6 percent of private-sector workers are unionized…

The economy expanded smartly in the years before the Great Recession, just as it did before the COVID downturn. But the two recessions were markedly different, with opposite effects on when older workers signed up for Social Security, a new study finds. In 2008, the stock market slid nearly 40 percent. Older Americans with retirement accounts, wanting to recoup their losses, were more likely to keep working or looking for a new job during the protracted downturn. But skyrocketing unemployment pushed many older workers in the other direction. Social Security became an obvious fallback in the Great Recession for jobless workers who were at least 62 years old as the unemployment rate stagnated at around 10 percent for 1½ years. Not surprisingly,…

The most COVID deaths were among Americans over age 60, who accounted for 300,000 of the 500,000 U.S. deaths from the disease in its first year. A new study by the Center for Retirement Research finds, not surprisingly, that the oldest survivors of the early months of the pandemic were healthier than those who died from the virus. Taking this into account, the researchers estimated what mortality might look like in a “post-COVID” world in an analysis that was based on a big assumption – that COVID’s deaths were confined to a single year. Factoring in the early impact of the virus, the researchers found that, despite COVID’s tragic toll in the over-60 population, their future mortality would decline only slightly becaus…

In COVID’s early months, millions of workers’ incomes dried up as the unemployment rate skyrocketed. But older Americans were somewhat shielded from the downturn. That’s because they either are over 62 and on Social Security or receive federal disability benefits every month at higher rates than young adults. And just like everybody else, they got relief checks from Congress to soften the blow from the pandemic. Yet, despite the reliability of a government check, older Americans with disabilities suffered from “acute financial insecurity,” according to a new study that seeks to understand why. During the pandemic, people over the age of 50 with disabilities reported having much more difficulty paying for food than people without a disability. They also showed more signs…