Squared Away Blog

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) will host a series of webinars next month for professionals and volunteers who regularly work with low-income clients and want guidance on how to help them with their finances. People who serve this vulnerable population may want to help but don’t always feel comfortable giving advice. CFPB has assembled an online toolkit – a companion to the webinars – filled with simple, practical solutions and suggestions about how to get clients to open up about their finances or overcome the emotional obstacles to change. The agency also supplies professionals with thought-provoking questions for their clients about a range of financial issues. “There are no right or wrong answers,” CFPB explains. The webinars, scheduled for…

One in five babies born in U.S. cities is in poor health, with profound and lasting impacts on their own and their mother’s lives. Researchers reached this conclusion after following nearly 3,700 infants and their mothers through Princeton’s Fragile Families Survey, which checked in on the families six times between the child’s birth and age 15. The survey was fielded in cities with a 200,000-plus population, and the babies’ most common medical conditions were low birth weight, premature birth, and genetic or other abnormalities, such as difficulty breathing. A body of research on the long-run prospects for children with disadvantages – whether medical or socioeconomic – has established that they have far more problems as adults. Consistent with other prior…

Caregivers for loved ones with dementia experience their duties in ways that are unique to the individuals they’re caring for. Some wrestle with the behavioral issues of the people in their care, while others must balance caregiving and work or struggle to navigate the Medicaid system, line up day care, or track down a reliable in-home professional. “There is no one way to care for a loved one who has dementia,” says Amy Goyer, caregiver and author of “Juggling Life, Work and Caregiving.” Goyer feels that every caregiver’s perspective could be useful to someone else going through the same thing. She recently hosted a webinar that opened a window on the lives of three Pennsylvania caregivers – one for a…

For a whole host of pandemic-related reasons, rents dipped in 2020 as millions of Americans lost jobs, stayed home from college, left the cities, or arranged for aging parents to live with them. But the economy has bounced back, and an additional 900,000 households entered the rental market in the first nine months last year. This unusually large surge in demand drove up rents and raised new concerns about housing affordability for the low- and middle-income workers who were already struggling to pay the rent. The market for professionally managed apartments saw an unprecedented rent spike of 11 percent in the third quarter of 2021 compared with a year earlier. Prior to the pandemic, annual rent increases had averaged 2…

Retirement for workers in state, county and municipal government fits a certain picture: a regular monthly pension payment awaits them. But there are important exceptions, which a recent study has filled in. A small minority of public sector workers get some or all of their retirement benefits in the form of a one-time cash payment. Doing so potentially comes at a cost: less financial security in old age. Of particular concern are the 5 million people working in state and local government jobs that are not covered by Social Security. Social Security – like a pension – is a monthly annuity that provides some certainty about retirement income. Still, in the larger scheme of things, the vast majority of stat…

Howard Gantman didn’t exactly have a plan for retirement. Rather, he wandered into it during the early months of COVID chaos. Nevertheless, retirement is going better than he’d expected. Gantman, who read comic books and science fiction voraciously as a child, has rediscovered his passion. He joined a writing group on Zoom and is working on a science fiction novel of his own. (And no, he’s not disclosing the plot yet.) “I’m happier doing this than I would’ve been if I’d continued to work. I really was ready for a change,” the Washington, D.C., resident said in a recent interview. “Aside from a gruesome virus that keeps on whacking us on the head, I feel more in control of my…

A theory – untested until now – about why more people apply for federal disability during recessions is that the depression, stress, or unhealthy behaviors caused by unemployment worsen their health and spur them to apply. This explanation is largely ruled out in a new study out of Cornell University and the University of Illinois. For each percentage point increase in local unemployment rates, more people with disabilities join the roles – about 45,000 more across the country. This finding, covering a period of 25 years, confirms what the existing research says about the connection between the economy and disability. Disability benefits, which average just under $1,300 per month, look more appealing when employment opportunities are scarcer. When the researchers…

The pandemic was a crash course in the importance of having some money in the bank for an emergency. When COVID started to spread, jobs vanished, mothers abruptly stopped working to care for children who weren’t in school, and, for the unlucky people who became ill, the medical bills rolled in. Congress took extraordinary measures during these extraordinary times and approved three rounds of relief payments totaling several thousand dollars per household in 2020 and 2021. But the federal payments, along with extra unemployment benefits and an increase in the child tax credit, weren’t enough to keep everyone afloat. That left the people who didn’t have any savings with one other fallback option to get them through the tough times:…

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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