Squared Away Blog

Federal labor officials are giving Amazon employees in Alabama a second shot at forming a union, and their coworkers in Staten Island are seeking clearance to hold a vote. Americans, more confident of their employment prospects, are leaving their jobs in record numbers, with much of the activity in low-wage industries like hospitality. Employers, having taken note, are combatting high quit rates and staff shortages by raising pay at the bottom of the wage scale. Also fueling the hikes has been a series of increases in state minimum wages, including automatic annual cost-of-living increases in a growing number of states. Various economists, using different data sources, have reached a similar conclusion about these recent developments: pay for low-income workers –…

Opioids fueled a record of nearly 100,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States last year. The biggest cause of overdose deaths was dangerous synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl. But the epidemic involving illegal chemicals grew out of the abuse of highly addictive prescription opioids. A spate of new research reveals that the use and abuse of these prescription drugs have plagued people with disabilities, who often start taking them to treat painful musculoskeletal conditions such as arthritis or a bad back. A 2017 analysis featured in this blog provided the first estimate of opioid use among people who have disabilities that limit their ability to work. The researchers found that about one in four people applying for federal disability…

For the baby boomers who are looking down the road to retirement, generalities will no longer suffice. They are diving into the nitty gritty. Their keen interest in retirement issues, based on reader traffic last year, range from why the adjustments to Social Security’s monthly benefits are outdated to how it’s still possible for boomers, even at this late hour, to rescue their retirement. First, and most important, there is hope for the unprepared. In “No-benefit Jobs Better than Retiring Early,” readers who want to retire but can’t afford it learned that they can dramatically improve their finances by finding a new job – ideally a less stressful or physically demanding one. Even if the job doesn’t have employee benefits,…

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Three months into the pandemic, a few million older workers had been laid off or quit. But what happened next? The rapid drop in employment due to COVID gave the Center for Retirement Research an unusual opportunity to study the labor force decisions of baby boomers, who are within striking distance of retirement age but may or may not be ready to take the leap. Traditionally, older workers who left a job tended to retire. But there was little indication that the people who stopped working during the pandemic saw retirement as their best fallback option. This conclusion by the researchers is consistent with the pre-COVID trend of boomers working longer to put themselves in a better financial position when…

Two previous studies on long-term care reported in this blog estimated how many of today’s 65-year-olds today will require care for minimal, moderate, or severe levels of need as they age and how many have the financial resources to cover each level of care that might be required. In the third and final study in this series, the Center for Retirement Research matched the specific levels of need each retiree is projected to have in the future with their resources to determine how many of them will fall short. Among all retirees, 22 percent are expected to have minimal needs for care and 9 percent will lack the family and financial resources to cover it – in other words, just…

COVID has worn Americans down emotionally. But it might be eating away at their financial reserves too – at least for some people. As the pandemic has dragged on, many people said in newly released surveys that they are more anxious about their finances and feel that their savings are wearing thin. We won’t get a true picture of the pandemic’s impact until it is far away in the rear-view mirror. For one thing, Congress’ intent when it doled out historic amounts of cash assistance to workers was to carry them through the COVID lockdowns and resulting unemployment. And it worked. After federal relief checks were deposited into bank accounts, the saving rate shot up to about 34 percent in…

Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. That continues to hold true in retirement. A new study that examines two aspects of this major life change – personal and financial relationships – finds that men and women use their newfound freedom in different ways. The change in men’s social lives after they retire is more dramatic because they greatly expand their network of friends, adult children, and extended family, and they have more conversations with them about personal matters. Men “become more dependent on family,” concludes research by two University of Wisconsin sociologists. Retirement doesn’t mark the same type of social shift for women, however. They already had a larger network and always took more responsibility for maintaining relationships,…

The pandemic exposed inequities in the U.S. healthcare system. It also revealed a related shortcoming in our workplaces: the lack of mandated paid family and medical leave for most Americans – and especially lower-paid workers. The United States is the only developed country that does not have a national policy of paid time off for an extended period for illness or maternity leave. In that way, we are keeping company with places like Micronesia and Tonga. Many major employers do offer sick time and paid or unpaid maternity leave. Even so, 60 percent of the highest-paid workers, who tend to work in larger companies, don’t have access to paid leave for themselves or a family member for extended periods for…

About one in five people on federal disability has some type of job, but the government limits how much they can earn without jeopardizing their cash benefits. The Social Security Administration wants disability beneficiaries to hold down a job if they can. But when they earn more than the allowed limit in a given month – $1,310 in 2021 – the government sometimes ends up overpaying them for benefits that should’ve been withheld that month. This usually occurs because workers forget to notify the agency they had started a job or fail to provide their earnings information in a timely way. When the mistake is discovered, Social Security sends a notice asking that the overpaid benefits be returned in t…

Texas Securities Commissioner Travis Iles says we’re living in a perfect storm – for financial fraud. Isolated at home to avoid COVID, people are spending more time online, and he suspects that some have become more susceptible to fraud because they think a big win would take the edge off of the financial uncertainties of the pandemic. And social media only feeds the frenzy, giving scam artists a natural audience for selling their “investments” – and for recruiting others on social media to help them. “People look for follows and likes and they’re dialed in on a lot of social media platforms that three to four years ago were very foreign,” Iles said in a recent interview. “It’s actually influencing…

Last Thanksgiving, my husband and I made two Cornish game hens and zoomed dinner with his two sons and extended family. What a different world we are living in this year. Vaccinated people will be able to gather for Thanksgiving or go Christmas shopping without fearing for their lives. But I also wonder whether we will be a little too eager to throw caution to the wind. It would be wise to keep following the Centers for Disease Control’s guidance for the holidays – masks in public, outdoor activities, air circulation indoors, and testing before gathering with family from multiple households. Caution is still in order. But so is celebrating a return to something closer to normal. Read more blog…