Squared Away Blog

Americans once defined success mainly by whether they owned a house or were better off than their parents. Today, it’s a debt-free college education and a comfortable retirement. U.S. adults feel that their top indicator of financial success is having enough money in the bank to retire (28 percent of adults), followed by sending their kids to college without having to borrow to pay for it (23 percent), according to a telephone survey sponsored by the American Institute of CPAs. Homeownership and upward mobility each came in at a distant 11 percent of the adults, age 18 and up, randomly surveyed by Harris Poll. “No longer are homeownership and upward financial mobility the hallmarks of financial achievement,” said Ernie Almonte, chairman…

U.S. workers have a long list of reasons, many of them legitimate, for why they can’t come up with the money for a retirement savings plan. But here’s the rub: we live in a 401(k) world. Workers who aren’t convinced of the urgency of saving should listen to people who have already retired.  Even though many current retirees have defined-benefit pensions, they have become largely unavailable to most people still working today. And these retirees say they’ve learned the hard way that saving is key. Excuses now and regrets later – these two takeaways came out of a nationally representative survey of workers and retirees by HSBC, a global financial institution. Saving for retirement is not a major priority for…

Traditional 401(k) or Roth 401(k)? Workers usually don’t know the difference. Yet employers increasingly are asking them to choose. Nearly two-thirds of private-sector employers with Vanguard plans today offer both a traditional and a Roth 401(k) in their employee benefits. Just four years ago, fewer than half did. For tips on navigating the traditional-vs-Roth decision, we interviewed two members of the American Institute of CPAs: Monica Sonnier is an investment adviser in the Salt Lake City, Utah, area; and Sean Stein Smith is an assistant professor in the economics and business department at Lehman College in New York. The difference in the two types of plans is the timing of federal income taxes: In a traditional 401(k), a worker who contributes to his…

Years of confinement to a nursing home is everyone’s worst fear for old age. With a semi-private room now costing about $81,000 annually, the prospect of a lengthy stay is also a popular reason for buying a long-term care insurance policy to cover it. Undercutting this rationale is a new study led by senior economist Anthony Webb of the Center for Retirement Research, which sponsors this blog. He finds that U.S. nursing home stays are relatively short: 11 months for the typical single man and 17 months for a single woman.  There’s some unpleasant news in the study, too, because the risk that an older person may one day need nursing home care is 44 percent for men and 58…

The harsh reality is that you aren’t earning as much money as you think you are, and you don’t have as much to spend as you think you do – so it’s easy to let spending get out of control. Andrea Woroch, only 34 years old herself, delivers some tough love to those who’ve already developed poor spending habits. A personal finance expert for the Millennial generation, Woroch said a perilous time is between the cash-strapped period right after college and the time when the steady, but modest, paychecks start flowing. Early on, she explained, the attitude was “Okay, let me go to happy hour on this day because I can get $1 tacos and a beer. Now it’s okay to…

Remaining on the job for a few more years may not appeal to many older Americans who long to retire. But in the above video, a compelling case for working longer is made by Steven Sass, an economist with the Center for Retirement, who also edits this blog. Sass explains that delaying retirement improves a retiree’s financial security in three critical ways: The worker can continue to save money for a few more years and will have more time to earn investment income on his savings. ……

Maria Machado estimates that women over 50 make up about three out of four of the Dallasites seeking to cut their living expenses either by renting out a room in their home or by renting from a homeowner. Shared housing often isn’t their first choice. “We like our independence,” said Machado, head of the Shared Housing Center, a non-profit roommate matching service in Dallas. But “house rich and money poor” older women will turn to house-sharing when they become widowed or if Social Security is their sole source of retirement income, she said. Companionship is another benefit of match-ups, whether with another senior or a younger adult. The Shared Housing Center is part of a national network of programs matching…

The National Council on Aging (NCOA) has redesigned its website providing information for “house rich but cash poor” older people who want to think about tapping their home equity. Home equity – the house’s market value minus the amount owed on the mortgage – remains a largely unused source of income that many older Americans could be putting toward their medical care or to improve their lives. Home equity held by Americans age 62 and over reached $5.76 trillion last year – an increase of nearly 30 percent since 2013. A marker of how much of this retirement resource remains untapped is the small number of federally insured reverse mortgages – about 50,000 – that seniors take out every year against t…

One segment of the U.S. labor force sheds light on the continuing struggle to find work: part-time employees who want a full-time job but can’t find one. The U.S. unemployment rate has drifted down during the economic recovery. But the number of people the Department of Labor calls “involuntary part-time” roughly doubled during the recession to 8 million and still remains stuck at this much higher level. Millions of Americans work part-time because they want to, but this involuntary part-time workforce is one more gauge of the slack labor market and lingering pain three years after the Great Recession officially ended. The Labor Department counts part-timers as involuntary if they can’t find a full-time job or if they work part-tim…

Financial planner J. David Lewis can rattle off stories in his Tennessee drawl about trying to persuade clients to spend their retirement savings – now that they’re retired. One couple wouldn’t tap into a $100,000 account dedicated to the travel they always dreamed they’d do after they stopped working. It took another retired couple well into their 70s before they’d spend a bit of their ample savings on a car – their first new car ever, in fact. What are they afraid of? “That something is going to take it all away from you, or you’re going to run out,” said Lewis, president of Resource Advisory Services in Knoxville. Spending money “is a big bridge to cross” for retirees. But…

For a growing share of older Americans, housing expenses have become an increasingly large financial burden. One in three Americans over age 50 were carrying a severe or moderate housing cost burden in 2012, up from one in four in 2000, according to a new study by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and AARP. The Center defined a severe burden as housing costs that consume more than half of household income; a moderate housing burden takes between 30 percent and 50 percent of income. The Center’s report, “Housing America’s Older Adults – Meeting the Needs of An Aging Population,” warns that the nation is unprepared for both the financial and non-financial housing challenges that will accompany the coming explosion in…

This will not surprise you: men have more money saved for retirement than women. Men averaged $123,262 in their defined contribution plans, compared with $79,572 for women, according to a new report by Vanguard based on its 2014 recordkeeping data. But these figures hide a larger truth: women are actually better at saving for retirement. “Overall, women are better at this but men earn more money so they have higher wealth accumulation,” says Vanguard researcher Jean Young, author of the new report, “Women versus Men in DC Plans.” Young’s research found that women are 14 percent more likely to enroll in a voluntary workplace retirement savings plan. Women save 7 percent of pay, compared with 6.8 percent for men, controlling…