Squared Away Blog

Nearly 10 million seniors are having difficulty paying for housing – and the problem is growing. Housing experts typically recommend that people keep their housing costs below a third of their income. But one in three Americans over age 65 are spending more than that on their rent or  mortgage payment, utilities, property insurance, maintenance, and other housing costs, according to a new study, “Housing America’s Older Adults,” by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. If the senior housing problem hasn’t reached crisis proportions yet, Jennifer Molinsky, who wrote the center’s report, predicted that it will if nothing is done to increase the supply of housing structures that are both affordable and age-friendly to meet the needs of aging baby boomers…

The number of quality jobs held by workers with a two-year associate’s degree rocketed from 3.8 million in 1991 to 7 million in 2015.  Total employment over that time didn’t come close to that rate of growth. “There are still good jobs out there for workers who don’t have a four-year degree,” explains the above video by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. These jobs, which require a bit more education and training than high school, typically pay $55,000 per year. The video and accompanying report, released in late July, introduce a three-year project to document and analyze employment opportunities for people who do not want, or haven’t been able to obtain, a college degree. This blog will watch for…

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 –…

J.D. Vance’s rural Kentucky roots, described in his book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” differ from my father’s family in southern Indiana in one important way. Vance’s violent, angry mother was a substance abuser with a trail of failed relationships in her wake. Vance carries the childhood scars. My dad’s family was a bunch of kind, reticent, teetotaling farmers. Alvin and Lena Belle Blanton and sons Gerald and Leland, 1966. But the similarities between our families struck me too – Vance called his grandfather Blanton “Papaw,” which I’d always thought was unique to my own Papaw Blanton but, I now know, is an endearment. And believe me, the corn fields and hills of southern Indiana and contiguous Kentucky are more southern than Midwestern…

Many workers are poorly prepared for retirement. Inadequate savings is a primary culprit. But the question of why workers don’t save enough was debated by our readers in comments posted to a recent article. The article pertained to a new study showing that life gets in the way of saving, which is derailed by major disruptions such as unemployment or a large, unexpected medical bill. “This confirms my thinking that the major reason for not saving is spotty employment and a lack of money,” Chuck Miller wrote in his comment posted to “Here’s Why People Don’t Save.” Debi Street agreed: “It is also the quotidian reality of too many people in low-wage, precarious jobs with no surplus to save.” T…

It’s now a given that more people in their 60s and 70s are choosing to keep working. But a related trend rumbling beneath the surface isn’t so well-known: the share of working older people with full-time jobs has increased sharply – to almost 61 percent in 2016 from 40 percent in 1995 – as part-time work has become less popular. The majority of older Americans are retired. But among those who do work, the move from part-time to full-time is “a major shift” in work schedules, concluded the Brookings Institution’s Barry Bosworth and Gary Burtless and George Washington University’s Ken Zhang in a report last year.  This is one aspect of the broader trend of rising labor force participation for…

Americans are fighting back against soaring food prices by shopping at discount grocers, buying lower-cost store brands, or giving up their favorite gourmet items. Yet Medicare beneficiaries usually don’t shop around for a less expensive insurance policy or a higher quality one. It’s also advisable for retirees to review their current plans to make sure they still include the right doctors or prescription drugs for treating any new medical conditions. Open enrollment for Medicare Advantage and Part D plans started Oct. 15 and ends Dec. 7. Over their lifetimes, retirees will spend an average $67,000 out-of-pocket for medical care – and that does not include the monthly premiums. The least healthy retirees will pay twice that much. Yet only three in 10 peo…

When once-simple financial tasks become difficult or confusing, it can be the canary in the coal mine signaling that an elderly person is developing dementia. Financial problems will soon follow once people with cognitive impairment start miscalculating and missing payments, forgetting and misplacing accounts, or falling victim to fraud. But some good news has come out of a new study of Medicare recipients: the vast majority of the 5.5 million people over 65 with established dementia – usually, though not, always Alzheimer’s disease – are receiving help from family and other caregivers with balancing their checkbooks, depositing and withdrawing money, and conducting transactions. Even better, they are actually benefitting from it. The seniors who receive assistance are more likely to be ab…

When older workers change occupations, many of them move into a lower-status version of the work they’ve done for years, according to a new study by University of Michigan researchers who tracked the workers’ movements among some 200 different occupations. Aging computer scientists were likely to become programmers or computer support staff.  And veteran high school teachers started tutoring, financial managers transitioned to bookkeepers, and office supervisors became secretaries. Late-career transitions need to be put into some context: a majority of Americans who were still working in their 60s were in the same occupations they held at age 55, the study found.  And these occupations ran the gamut from clergy to life scientists to cooks. Interestingly, while teachers, thanks to…

Anyone who has lived paycheck to paycheck is familiar with the headache of overdraft charges. Due to a slight miscalculation at the end of a tough month, there isn’t enough money in the account to cover a check. The bank pays the check but charges an overdraft fee that drains money out of the account. A negative balance would trigger an overdraft fee on a different check or cause it to bounce. Of course people should manage their finances responsibly. But the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) argues that older people in particular are at a disadvantage, and perhaps banks should put practices in place that protect them from overdrafts, which the CFPB said produce billions in revenue every…

This is a fun TED talk on a topic all of us can relate to: procrastination. It is relevant to a central theme of this blog: retirement. Research shows that procrastination plays at least a small role in why so many U.S. workers haven’t saved enough to retire in the lifestyle they’re accustomed to. The urgency of saving early has never been truer than it is for Millennials and Gen-Z. More on that later. First, let Tim Urban explain his theory about procrastination. He is a master procrastinator, demonstrated by his handling of his senior college thesis, a year-long project jammed into three days that included two all-nighters. He argues that when a deadline is fast approaching, procrastinators panic and…

Behavioral economist Richard Thaler, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for economics, regards his field’s greatest contribution as showing that people are more likely to save if the saving happens automatically. “I’m all for empowerment and education, but the empirical evidence is that it doesn’t work,” he said in a 2015 Wall Street Journal interview. “That’s why I say make it easy.” To make saving for retirement easier, employers have increasingly turned to automated 401(k)s. Automation has taken two basic forms.  The first, automatically enrolling each employee, is pervasive and has had notable success in increasing participation in retirement savings plans.  The second form, automatically increasing the amount employees save – a concept originated by Thaler and economist Shlomo Benartzi – is…