Squared Away Blog

Financial advisers and retirement experts say the best advice they can give workers to prepare for old age is to save, save, save. But two young researchers might argue this advice isn’t sensitive to the hurdles that Black and Hispanic workers face when they try to save. At a recent panel discussion, the researchers presented a laundry list of the hurdles, which are harder for minority workers to clear and can be insurmountable. One disadvantage is widely understood: people of color tend to be in lower-paying jobs overall and disproportionately work in the retail or the food service industries, which have irregular hours, high turnover, and wages that often depend on tips. Many of these jobs do not include employ…

The annual pay for a plumber in Omaha, Nebraska, with three years of experience is around $55,000 a year, while a certified nursing assistant there earns $30,000. Or compare an electrician in the Phoenix area making $62,000 to $39,000 for a dental assistant. Recognizing that many of the occupations dominated by women don’t pay well, young women of color are increasingly moving into the construction trades. Black, Latina, and Asian women and women of mixed race account for 45 percent of the 308,000 women working in the trades…

Public housing agencies frequently prioritize people with disabilities on their waiting lists for subsidized apartments and federal rent vouchers. But agency budgets are tight, often requiring state and local governments to stretch a single housing office to serve multiple counties. Many of the people on the waiting lists are also receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a federal program that makes monthly cash payments to low-income people with disabilities and is one way to verify they qualify for the housing preference. A new study substantiates this connection: SSI applications are 11 percent higher in counties with housing offices than in counties that lack an office and are being served by a nearby county. The housing agencies also tend to be concentrated…

The Age Discrimination and Employment Act states that job ads “may not contain terms and phrases that limit or deter the employment of older individuals.” Yet some job ads do just that. One ad posted in 2014 sought applicants with “3 to 7 years (no more than 7 years) of relevant legal experience.” More often, employers use subtle language in their ads, asking, for example, that the applicants be “energetic.” This subtle strategy is highly effective, according to researchers at the University of Liverpool and the University of California at Irvine. In their field experiment using fake job ads that contained subtly discriminatory language, older workers submitted applications at significantly lower rates than younger workers. Job ads designed to deter…

Having a physical or mental disability can make it impossible to work. But for people with disabilities who are able, it’s crucial they get the support they need so they can work and feel productive, self-sufficient, and part of a larger community. So who are they? A new study identifies a small but promising group who are initially awarded monthly cash assistance from the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program and eventually qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). The researchers call them SSI-first beneficiaries because the SSI payments come first and then the workers migrate over to SSDI and sometimes quit their jobs. If identified early, these individuals could be encouraged to remain in the labor force after their SSDI…

The old and the young are most susceptible to scammers using fake identities to extract money from their victims. People in their 50s who went to college are in the sweet spot and are much better at resisting them. The question is how to prevent the vulnerable from falling prey to imposter scams, which account for a third of the dollars Americans report to the FTC they’ve lost in frauds every year. A new study finds that exposing people to a watered-down version of a scam they might see in the real world teaches them to recognize an actual scam that comes across the transom. In the imposter scams that are the focus of this study, someone pretends to represent…

It looks like some 13 million people who buy their health insurance on the state and federal exchanges may not see large hikes in their premiums next year after all. The more generous premium subsidies for Affordable Care Act (ACA) policyholders approved in 2021 under the American Rescue Plan for COVID relief are set to expire at the end of this year. There have been months of uncertainty over whether Congress could pass a bill to continue the subsidies. But The Washington Post reports that the House and Senate are on a path to agreeing to extend them for three more years, along with allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices of some prescription drugs. Last year, the American Rescue Plan…

In 2000, Social Security launched a website allowing retirees to sign up for their benefits online without having to call or visit the agency. By 2013, about half of new retirees were using this feature to file their claims. However, progress stalled after that, despite continued growth in the number of baby boomers who were retiring. A new survey of 2,600 people between ages 57 and 70 finds that even the people who sign up for their benefits online often wind up contacting Social Security for assistance. In the end, only 37 percent of all retirees claim completely online and never visit a field office or call the agency’s 800 number at some point during that process, suggests research by…

 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’…