Squared Away Blog

This blog is for the procrastinators. The last day of Medicare open enrollment for people who want to switch their Medicare Advantage or Part D insurance plans is Dec. 7. The hoopla around this open enrollment period can be confusing, because Medigap supplemental plans are on a different schedule. The optimal time to buy a Medigap plan is during a six-month window after your 65th birthday, which is the only time insurers are required under federal law to sell you a Medigap policy. Switching to a different Medigap plan during the current open enrollment is trickier, because you can be denied coverage, though several states have made it easier to enroll or switch from Medigap or Advantage to a new…

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…

Prior research has established that agents tend to sell the financial product that will pay them the highest commission. A new study on India’s life insurance market advances the ball by focusing on the quality of one high-commission product agents recommend and concludes that it’s wrong for the client. The researchers sent trained auditors into the field posing as customers seeking insurance and then analyzed the advice they received. The auditors’ meetings with agents revolved around life insurance, specifically two types of policies: term and whole life. In a term policy, the individual pays a premium to ensure a set dollar amount goes to a surviving wife or children if the customer dies. Like term policies, whole life policies also…

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…

During the pandemic, the U.S. Social Security Administration leaned into providing more services and processing applications online. But that has furthered the agency’s disconnect with Native Americans living miles from its field offices in rural areas with poor internet access. That’s one conclusion from a new study of the agency’s effectiveness in reaching Native American and Alaskan Native populations. The study included some analysis of data on these communities but was based largely on interviews with tribal leaders, community members, advocates, and the government staff who assist people applying for Social Security and other government benefits. Although tribal communities have a higher poverty rate than non-Native populations, their members are somewhat less likely to be receiving Social Security’s various benefits,…

Many unemployed and underemployed workers have run out of options for paying the rent. The National Low Income Housing Coalition, the Aspen Institute, and other organizations estimate that up to 40 million renters risk being evicted this winter. Congress is currently negotiating a new COVID-19 relief package but it’s not yet known whether it will extend a CDC moratorium on evictions or go beyond the Cares Act last spring and provide rental assistance to help renters and, by extension, their landlords. Squared Away spoke with Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy for the National Low Income Housing Coalition, about what she describes as an impending calamity. Q: How bad is the current situation? Saadian: It’s really hard to get…

Women attend college at higher rates than men. Women’s labor force participation was also fairly steady prior to COVID, while men’s declined, and women continue to move into fields traditionally held by men. Despite all this progress, women still earn much less than men. Discrimination partly explains the pay gap, as does motherhood, which can interrupt the smooth progression in women’s careers at a critical time. But another explanation doesn’t get as much attention: women earn less because they’re not as confident as men about how much they can get and are more afraid of taking some risks in negotiations with employers. In the 2018 and 2019 graduating classes at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, women started their job…

Janet Mills is a veteran in the Medicare Advantage marketplace. At Florida’s SHINE program for 13 years, Mills has provided unbiased counseling to thousands of seniors trying to make difficult choices about their Medicare coverage.  Now an area coordinator, she also fields questions from volunteer counselors at SHINE – the Serving the Health Insurance Needs of Elders program – in Pinellas and Pasco counties, which include St. Petersburg and Clearwater. It can be difficult for retirees with multiple Medicare Advantage options to distinguish one plan’s benefits from another plan’s and pull the right one off the shelf. But based on her experience, Mills said, the decision retirees make during open enrollment for Medicare Advantage plans is crucial to controlling their healt…

It’s the employer’s responsibility to find former employees and keep them apprised of any retirement benefits they left behind. But that hasn’t always worked out. Some employers don’t have former workers’ current contact information, and others don’t bother to track them down. Worst-case scenarios are often fallout from a merger: the company being acquired has kept shoddy pension plan records and the acquirer doesn’t update them.  Some companies have even deleted a participant’s name from the records. Tyler Compton, an attorney with the Pension Action Center, which connects workers with lost pensions and 401(k) savings plans, said people frequently contact a former employer because they think they might have a plan. But if the worker is told he’s not in…

An unfortunate misperception about people on federal disability is that they’re not interested in working. In fact, nearly half of them want to work or expect to go back to work, and that share has been rising. But getting or keeping a job has proved difficult, and the employment rate is very low for people who get Social Security disability benefits – or cash assistance from a companion program, Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Yet the vast majority of beneficiaries have past work experience that should help them in the job market. Researchers at Mathematica mined a survey of people on disability for clues about how to help them find a job or promotion or learn a new skill. Many of…

The remote work necessitated by COVID may be here to stay in five English-speaking countries from Australia to the United States. The countries in the study are: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The United Kingdom has the largest share of positions advertising remote work – 18 percent. The United States and Australia each have 12 percent. During the first two months of the pandemic, as businesses around the world shut down, remote work soared. That initial spike was followed by sustained growth throughout the pandemic. “It has become clear that this shift will endure long after the initial forcing event,” the researchers said. They identified fully or partially remote positions by working with a…

Left to their own devices, Americans who lack a retirement savings plan at work do not usually take the initiative to set up an IRA and save on their own. Oregon lawmakers decided to do something about that, and a new study finds that their approach of requiring employers without a plan to automatically enroll their workers in a state-sponsored IRA is reaching the right people. Nationwide, lower-income workers are much less likely to have a retirement plan, and the typical employee enrolled in the program, OregonSaves, earns only $22,600. They also tend to work in high-turnover industries like food service and healthcare where constant job changes make it difficult to save consistently. When an Oregon worker finds another job…