Squared Away Blog

Next Tuesday – New Year’s Eve – we’ll return with a list of some of our readers’ favorite blogs of 2019. Our regular featured articles will resume Thursday, Jan. 2. Thank you for reading and posting comments on our retirement and personal finance blog. We hope you’ll continue to be involved in the new year. ……

Joejuan Williams Photo courtesy of the New England Patriots. Joejuan Williams, a rookie defensive back for the New England Patriots, has received a lot of attention for his practice of saving 90 percent of his game-day paychecks. He credits his frugality to a personal finance class at his Nashville, Tenn., high school. “It completely changed my life,” Williams told The Boston Globe recently. “I’m going to sacrifice now for me to be happy later.” Williams, having signed a $6.6 million contract this season, isn’t exactly living on the edge. But keep in mind that these sky-high earnings are often temporary for football players. When one considers that the average NFL career lasts about three years, Williams is just playing it…

The computer revolution, unleashed in the 1970s, has not stopped. Minicomputers replaced mainframes, and IBM introduced its personal computer. Then came the Internet, laptops, robots, iPhones, and increasingly intelligent software that can drive cars and discern music preferences. Continual technological change has reshaped and regenerated the economy several times over, creating new types of jobs unimaginable a few years earlier. But the past four decades have also been tumultuous for the workers who were either replaced by machines or couldn’t keep up with the evolving demands of their jobs. This is a pressing issue for the older workers who would benefit from working longer to improve their retirement finances. An erosion in their physical stamina or mental agility conceivably makes…

What do groceries, GPS trackers, and prescription drug copayments have in common? They are some of the myriad items caregivers may end up paying for to help out an ailing parent or other family member. And these are just the incidentals. Three out of four caregivers have made changes to their jobs as a result of their caregiving responsibilities, whether going to flex time, working part-time, quitting altogether, or retiring early, according to a Transamerica Institute survey. To ease the financial toll, some caregivers dip into retirement savings or stop their 401(k) contributions. Not surprisingly, caregiving places the most strain on low-income families. People choose to be caregivers because they feel it’s critically important to help a loved one, said…

One of retirees’ biggest fears is that they will have to go into a nursing home. This fear isn’t just psychological – it’s also financial. Roughly half of older Americans will find themselves in a nursing home at some point, according to a 2015 estimate. These stays usually last months, but sometimes years, and the costs add up quickly for those who have to pay for them out of their own pockets. At an average price of at least $225 per day for a semi-private room, a nursing home stay can put a big dent in retirees’ savings. A new study in the journal Medical Care Research and Review on how much seniors pay out-of-pocket for facilities in eight states…

College upperclassmen and recent graduates have a lot on their minds. One thing they don’t always like to think too hard about is money. Maggie Germano But Maggie Germano, a financial coach, encourages them to get things out in the open and talk about it. At a recent personal finance session here at Boston College, she answered students’ questions about their credit ratings, student loans, and how to avoid spending money they do not have. Here are the five best tips from Germano, a 2009 graduate of the State University of New York in Fredonia. She now lives in Washington D.C. Pay attention. The first step to getting control of one’s finances is to pay attention to them, she said…

Anyone who drives on the nation’s toll roads has used a job-eliminating device: electronic tollgates. Unemployment due to new technologies – and workers’ resistance to them – are as old as the industrial revolution. In the early 1900s, glassblowers were replaced by mechanized bottle makers. Today, autoworkers are no longer necessary to bolt car parts to carriages – robots do it with speed and precision. Toll takers are the latest disappearing breed. Workers who lose their jobs to progress face painful transitions, and pessimists throughout history have warned about technologies increasingly rendering human effort obsolete. Indeed, jobs can seem to vanish overnight after an entire industry or occupation adopts a laborsaving machine, presenting displaced individuals with difficult choices. They must…

Whether you’re having Thanksgiving with family or your celebration will take the form of a Friendsgiving, the staff at Squared Away and the blog’s sponsor, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, wish you a wonderful holiday. ……

Retirees could get substantially more in their Social Security check if they would just wait longer – up to age 70 – to sign up. But only a tiny fraction of workers make it to 70, and more than a third get the minimum monthly benefits because they start them as soon as the program allows, at 62. A Bocconi University professor and three UCLA professors have set about trying to change minds by testing 13 ways of encouraging older workers to hold off and lock in a larger Social Security check. The techniques, which they tried on various groups of workers between ages 40 and 61, ranged widely in approach. But two of the most successful tests had on…

In this video, Elena Chavez Quezada introduces two working women in her family who didn’t get a fair shot at a comfortable retirement. Her mother-in-law, a single mother and immigrant from the Dominican Republic, pieced together a living for herself, her parents, and her children. She never had a 401(k) or owned a house. Each time she built up a little savings, an emergency depleted it. Now in her 70s, she is supported by her son and Quezada. Quezada’s aunt possessed the personality of a chief executive but worked as a housekeeper and sold snow cones and hot dogs at her husband’s stand in Albuquerque. After his death, she worked well into her 90s as a receptionist for a hair…

Social Security is a major source of income for most retirees. It is even more important to blacks and Hispanics in a nation that is becoming increasingly diverse. Social Security is helping to even out the racial and ethnic inequities in income and wealth that exist in the working population and continue in old age, according to a study by the Center for Retirement Research for the Retirement and Disability Research Consortium. The researchers estimate how much Social Security reduces this inequality by comparing retirement wealth for white, black, and Hispanic-Americans. Wealth is defined broadly to include obvious things like home equity and financial assets such as 401(k) retirement accounts, certificates of deposit, and money market accounts. In addition, t…

In one significant way, retirement is materially different than it used to be: far more retirees are still trying to pay off their houses. Thirty years ago, just one of every four homeowners in their late 60s to late 70s still had a mortgage – today, nearly half do. Once people hit 80, mortgages used to be extremely rare – only 3 percent had them. Today, it’s one in four, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies recently reported. Retiree’s financial condition depends on much more than how much they spend on housing – in particular the size of their retirement savings accounts and Social Security checks. But rent or a mortgage payment is typically the largest item in the monthly…