Squared Away Blog

Three out of four members of Generation X wish they could turn back the clock and get another shot at planning for retirement. One in three baby boomers say don’t think they’ll ever be able to retire. “Overwhelmingly, Americans are stressed about their current – and future – financial situation,” the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors said about these new survey results. Regrets about not planning and saving enough are enmeshed in our thinking about retirement. But it is really all your fault that you’re not getting it done? The honest answer to that question is “no.” There are big gaps in the U.S. retirement system that make it very difficult for many to carry the responsibility it places…

It is one of “the most significant labor market trends” in the United States, says Wellesley College researcher Courtney Coile. She’s referring to big increases since the 1980s and 1990s in the share of older Americans in the labor force, including one in three men in their late 60s. As for women, the baby boomers were really the first generation to thoroughly embrace full-time employment. Older women’s participation in the labor force hasn’t quite caught up with their male coworkers, but they’ve made impressive strides since the 1980s and have rapidly closed the retirement-age gap. Given the implications of this trend for retirement security – the longer people work, the better off they’ll be – Coile and many other researchers hav…

Watch these six videos and walk in the shoes of low-income older Americans. It’s an arduous journey. Social Security is the primary or only source of income for the retirees who agreed to be interviewed for the videos. Since their income doesn’t cover their expenses, they live with family, frequent the Salvation Army, and continually stress about money. “You’re lucky if you come out even or a little behind” at the end of the month, said Howard Sockel. The 81-year-old resident of Skokie, Illinois, supports two sons – one with autism and one unemployed – on his Social Security, a small Post Office pension, and credit cards. The older workers who were interviewed are on the same road to a…

Every year, older homeowners leave billions of dollars worth of the wealth locked up in their houses to their adult children. This is a paradox if one considers that home equity is one of retirees’ primary assets and could be a crucial source of income for people who are “house rich and income poor.” Retirement experts searching for an explanation have long wondered whether the deceased had intended to leave the house to family or simply died before they were able to cash in on the equity and spend it. A new study has an answer: retirees have every intention of letting family members inherit their homes. The people in the study who expressed a stronger desire to leave an…

U.S. stock market performance has implications for our entire retirement system – not just your 401(k). Three studies addressing the big-picture relationships between the market and retirees’ financial security were produced in 2017 by the Center for Retirement Research, which sponsors this blog. Here are summaries of each one: State and Local Pension Plan Funding Sputters in FY2016 – Public pension plan returns were very weak in fiscal year 2016. But even though stock market performance improved in 2017, it will be difficult to compensate for the plans’ funding shortfalls over the long-term: “To achieve more meaningful progress,” the researchers concluded, state and local governments “need to establish contribution levels that will actually reduce unfunded liabilities.” How Will More Retirees Affect…

When nursing home care uses up a widow’s savings, the federal Medicaid program will kick in and cover her bills for care. But it’s more complicated for couples. If one spouse moves into a nursing home and the bills start piling up, the person who is still living in their home can face serious financial hardship and even poverty. This is a significant risk facing the one in three married people in their early 70s whose spouse will eventually wind up in a nursing home, researchers at RAND found in a study on the financial impact on couples rather than individuals. It’s not unusual to pay roughly $90,000 for a year for a semi-private in a nursing home, though many people have relatively short stays…

State and local government workers have long felt their pensions were more secure than the vanishing pension coverage in the private sector.  But a spate of changes to cost-of-living protections should give them pause. In the wake of the Great Recession, 17 states reduced, suspended, or eliminated cost-of-living increases (COLAs) in their defined benefit pensions for state and local workers, according to a recent summary of legislative actions around the country by the Center for Retirement Research, which sponsors this blog.  And the courts are backing them up, deciding that the inflation protections – a fixture of the majority of public pensions – do not have the same constitutional or other legal protections that apply to core benefits. The COLA…

The cost of employer health insurance has skyrocketed, and workers are picking up some of that growing tab. Amid employees’ grumbling, employers are loath to push more of the cost onto their workers. That’s why the consensus view among major employers, expressed in a recent survey, sounded like a cry for help. Calling rising insurance costs “unsustainable,” the vast majority said they need help from the government either to provide alternative forms of coverage or control health care and prescription costs. Employers “have reached their limit,” said Elizabeth Mitchell, chief executive of the Purchaser Business Group on Health, an employer advocacy organization that collaborated with the Kaiser Family Foundation on the survey. Employers, she said, “are tired of pouring tons…

A new study finds that debt burdens have grown for older workers and retirees in recent decades. But this isn’t the first research to reach that conclusion. What is new is whose debt burden is increasing the most: the people who score higher on simple memory and math tests. Across the three age groups the researchers examined – 56-61, 62-67, and 68-73 – the high scorers on the cognitive tests were more likely to have debts exceeding half of their assets in 2014 than the high scorers who were the same ages back in 1998. They also added disproportionately more mortgage debt than people with lower cognition during the study’s time frame, a period when house prices were rising. T…

The fortunes of Americans whose wealth is in the top 10 percent have soared, leaving the rest of the country trailing in their wake. But let’s focus instead on the unsettling trends that have developed within the middle class. Both the health and finances of older workers have deteriorated in the bottom half of “the forgotten middle” over the past two decades, according to researchers at the University of Southern California and Columbia University. Take one important indication of this. Home equity is typically an older worker’s largest single asset. But homeownership has fallen sharply in the bottom half of what the researchers define as the 60 percent of older Americans in the middle class. The homeownership rate in t…

Not all borrowing is bad. Someone with a low-rate mortgage of modest size on an appreciating house has a very valuable asset. And some retirees pay off their credit cards every month without breaking a sweat. But about four out of every 10 older U.S. households are falling into the trap of having too much debt, a new study finds. These high-risk households, mostly retirees, tend to be burdened by low incomes or large balances on unsecured debt like credit cards, which accumulate interest at a rapid pace. Some are overleveraged and may be unable to afford their homes. The low-risk borrowers are their mirror image: no unsecured debt and relatively low debt payments and debt-to-asset ratios. The share of…

The value that annuities can provide to retirees may not be obvious, but it is real. Annuities are also becoming increasingly valuable as fewer people have that traditional source of reliable retirement income: an employer pension. Insurance company annuities, like pensions, pay out a monthly income no matter how long you live. These payments come from three sources: 1) the initial amount invested to purchase the policy; 2) the interest earned on the amount that’s invested before it is paid out; and 3) “mortality credits.” These mortality credits are the essential element that protects retirees from outliving their savings.  As a retiree moves through her 80s, a growing share of the other people in the annuity pool die.  The funds…