Squared Away Blog

Decisions about which college to attend or degree to pursue are increasingly driven at least in part by this consideration: will I be able to pay back my student loans? Countless things determine how much someone earns – smarts, rich or poor parents, high school or graduate degree, being in the right place at the right time. But LendEdu’s new ranking of starting salaries for graduates with bachelor’s degrees from some 1,650 U.S. colleges is essential information, especially when debt is the only option to finance college. A degree is almost always worth the investment. Georgetown University estimates workers with a bachelor’s degree earn $1 million more over their lifetime than high school graduates. Post-secondary degrees have even bigger payoffs…

Aging is not, as the cliché goes, for the faint of heart. If a woman makes it to 65, she can expect to live at least 20 more years. Three new books written by or about the elderly provide a wonderful roadmap to aging with grace, introspection, gratitude, and humor. “Coming of Age: My Journey to the Eighties” by Madeleine May Kunin The former Vermont governor and ambassador to Switzerland has authored books about politics, feminism, and women as leaders. In her new memoir, she has blossomed into an essayist and poet. Kunin, who is 85, muses about defying “death’s black raven” on her shoulder. The color red is one way to achieve this. She bought a Barcelona Red Prius…

Motherhood, career anxiety, menopause – women, throughout their lives, move from one psychological stressor to the next. Well, ladies, there’s hope: your stress should start to ease around age 60. With the #MeToo movement against workplace abuse of young adult women dominating the headlines, there’s a quieter movement of baby boomer women exploring what it means to get old. Book publishers are flocking to writers of self-actualization books like “Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing as We Age” and “50 After 50: Reframing the Next Chapter of Your Life.” Perhaps publishers sense a market for these books because women of all ages suffer depression at rates two to four times higher than men. But a study in t…

One way baby boomers adjust to longer lifespans and inadequate retirement savings is to continue working. There’s just one problem: it can be more difficult for some people in their 50s and 60s to get or hold on to a job. But things are improving. The job market is on a tear – 300,000 people were hired in January alone – and baby boomers are jumping back in. A single statistic illustrates this: a bump up in their labor force participation that resumes a long-term trend of rising participation since the 1980s. In January, 65.1 percent of Americans between ages 55 and 64 were in the labor force, up smartly from 63.9 percent in 2015. This has put a halt…

Medicare Part D, passed in 2003, has significantly reduced seniors’ spending on prescription drugs. But the coverage hasn’t protected Leslie Ross from near calamity. The 72-year-old diabetic needs insulin to stay alive. The prices of these drugs have skyrocketed, forcing her to supplement her long-lasting insulin, Lantus, with more frequent use of a less-expensive insulin. This one remains in her body only four hours, requiring more vigilance to control her blood sugar. To cut her Lantus bills – nearly $1,700 this year – she has sometimes resorted to buying unused supplies from other diabetics on eBay. “You take your chances when you do stuff like that,” she said. “I checked that the vial hasn’t been opened. It still had t…

A new study lays out all the difficulties older workers have holding onto a job so they can retire on their own terms – even when the economy is doing well. Over the past quarter of a century, more than half of the older Americans who had been employed in stable jobs have been pushed or nudged out of employment at some point late in their careers. This could’ve happened due to a layoff, a bad supervisor, difficult or dangerous working conditions, inadequate pay or a missed promotion. This finding from a Urban Institute study throws into question “the notion that most seasoned workers who are strongly attached to the labor force can remain at work and earn a stab…

Thousands of baby boomers retire every day and sign up for Social Security. Yet the payroll tax that funds their benefits is being levied on a shrinking share of workers’ aggregate earnings. You might not know this but inequality and growing U.S. trade with China are among the forces that are behind this trend, Gal Wettstein explains in a new podcast about his research for the Center for Retirement Research (CRR). This is the latest in a series of podcast interviews in which CRR researchers talk about their work on issues related to work, aging, and retirement. The podcasts are hosted by yours truly. Others explore how motherhood reduces women’s Social Security benefits, the limited impact of cognitive decline on…

If the difference in men and women’s pay is a gap, then the wealth difference can only be described as a chasm. Women earn 80 cents for each dollar a man earns. But a woman has 32 cents of net worth to a man’s dollar. One byproduct of the #MeToo movement is the fresh light it has put on the age-old women’s issues of unequal professional status and pay.  But Elena Chavez Quezada, senior director of the San Francisco Foundation, explains in this video that wealth – home equity and financial assets minus debts – provides a more accurate picture of financial stability over the long-term. A 2018 report found that net worth for older women, adjusted for inflation, has…

Luke Huffstutter Luke Huffstutter felt a great sense of relief when the employees of his Portland hair salon started putting money into a state retirement program designed to make saving easy. This is much better than the “guilt” he felt over many years of desperate attempts – and not much luck – to convince his stylists and other employees to save on their own. He even brought in a financial adviser once to nudge them. “I have a responsibility to provide them a path to retirement,” Huffstutter said. Today, 39 of the Annastasia Salon’s 45 employees have joined some 22,000 others across the state of Oregon who’ve accumulated a total of $10 million for retirement through OregonSaves, a state government…

It might be the most consequential issue baby boomers will deal with when they retire: did I save enough? Vanguard’s free online calculator will estimate that for you, using the same sophisticated technique financial advisers charge hundreds of dollars to provide. The user-friendly calculator uses 100,000 of what are called Monte Carlo simulations of potential future returns to the financial markets to arrive at the probability that a household’s invested savings will last through the end of retirement. To get to this number, older workers enter their information into the calculator – 401(k) account balance, asset allocation, estimated years in retirement, and annual withdrawals – by moving around a sliding scale for each input. The financial industry recommends aiming for a…

Let’s get this out of the way first: the vast majority of financial advisers would not take advantage of you. But that doesn’t eliminate the problem of discerning whether an individual adviser can be trusted. About 7 percent of U.S. advisers have misconduct records in civil or regulatory proceedings.  If someone draws an unlucky card and picks a bad one, how would they know? In certain situations, they might not. A new study finds that various things can trip people up and make them trust an adviser who is giving out bad advice. These influences included a good first impression of the adviser. And one way for an adviser to make a good first impression is by initially confirming t…

One thing really stood out in a recent study: the deterioration in Hispanics’ retirement prospects since the 2008-2009 recession. Workers’ success at saving for retirement is becoming increasingly important to their financial security in old age. This puts Hispanic households at a clear disadvantage: they earn half as much as white households, which makes it that much more challenging to build retirement wealth by buying a house or saving more in their 401(k)s – two-thirds of Hispanic workers don’t even participate in an employer 401(k). White Americans aren’t exactly in great shape either. Today, 48 percent of them are at risk of experiencing a drop in their standard of living after they retire – this is 6 percentage points higher…