Squared Away Blog

At tax time, many Americans think, often fleetingly, about spending less and socking away more for retirement. Until April 15, the IRS permits people who do not have a pension plan at work to deduct up to $6,000 for money placed in an IRA; taxpayers who do have an employer pension can also receive the IRA deduction if their earnings fall under the IRS’ income limits. The tough question that trips people up is: How much will I need? The easy way to think about this is in terms of the income necessary to maintain your current standard of living after the paychecks stop coming in.  Click here for a tool that estimates both how much you’ll need and how…

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…

If other baby boomers and members of Gen-X are like me, they have taken a second, third or even a fifth look at their finances and asked: Will I really be able to retire? The impulse to ruminate over this major decision may be driving the strong interest in recent Squared Away articles on financial topics ranging from whether retirees should continue to be homeowners – not always – to why people sign up for Social Security at age 62 and lock in the smallest monthly check possible under the program’s rules. In “Homeownership in Retirement: an Asset or a Burden?,” researchers found that many retirees carry mortgages they can’t really afford. Having saved so little for their retirement years,…

The state of our retirement preparedness is captured in this fact: about half of U.S. private sector workers at any given time are not enrolled in an employer retirement plan. To be clear, they are not currently enrolled. Some of them have participated in a plan in the past or will in the future. But this inconsistency is the problem, largely because so many employers still don’t offer 401(k) savings plans to their employees. The financial toll of not saving consistently is modest retirement account balances. Yet saving has become increasingly urgent as traditional pensions have virtually disappeared from the private sector and Social Security is replacing less of workers’ incomes over time. In 2019 – after several years of…

Seven states now require employers that don’t have retirement plans to automatically enroll their workers in an IRA, and others have passed legislation to create similar programs. The goal is to get more people to save for retirement at a time financial security in old age increasingly depends on it. Pensions are rapidly disappearing. But only about half of working people are currently saving enough to maintain their standard of living when they retire. A major culprit in the savings shortfall is that workers do not consistently have access to a retirement plan through their jobs. The share of workers with employer plans has barely budged in decades. Information about how employers might react to the state IRA mandates is…

The stark difference in Black and White workers’ wealth is old news. But now we have some fresh information about the wealth gap: it grows as people age and move through their retirement years. The most striking deterioration in Blacks’ relative standing can be seen in non-housing wealth. This mainly consists of 401(k)-style plans and savings and investment accounts and does not include the wealth inherent in retirees’ Social Security or employer pensions. In the final years before retirement, the typical White household between ages 50 and 64 has accumulated six times more non-housing wealth than a Black household at that age, according to a new study. During retirement, that imbalance balloons to a tenfold difference – about $173,000 for…

New research shows the share of Americans who lack enough ready cash on hand for emergencies shot up in the aftermath of the Great Recession. These families do not have access to the liquid assets – cash or funds in their checking or savings account – to cover emergencies like layoffs, health crises, or even car repairs, according to an analysis of federal data by Caroline Ratcliffe of the Urban Institute, who presented the finding to the Congressional Savings and Ownership Caucus in late September. Ratcliffe’s measure of financial fragility was families who did not have enough liquid assets to subsist at federal poverty levels for three months. That amounts to $2,873 for a single person, $4,883 for a family…

For the average older worker who loses his job, his income a decade later is 15 percent lower than if he had escaped the layoff. It gets worse: His pension wealth is worth 20 percent less, and his financial assets are 30 percent smaller. The enormous financial hit delivered to older workers who experienced a layoff sometime during the 1990s was reported recently by researchers at the Center for Retirement Research, which supports this blog. First, the researchers pinpointed all workers in the data set who were over age 50 and lost a job between 1992 and 2000. They then examined their financial outcomes – earnings and assets – a decade later and compared them with outcomes for those who…

The best reason to set up a power of attorney for yourself or an elderly family member is to avoid a far more contentious and expensive alternative later: guardianship. A power of attorney becomes urgent if an elderly family member is showing early signs of dementia. “You want to run, not walk, to get that done because capacity tends not to get better,” said Jonathan Williams, an attorney with the Clarity Legal Group in the Raleigh-Durham, N.C., area. “Having good legal documents in place, if the person has the ability to execute them, can be helpful later on,” he said. In a power of attorney, the person signing the document agrees to name an agent, usually a trusted family member…

The baby boomers born in the early 1960s, at the tail end of the demographic wave, had about $280,000 in retirement wealth when they reached their early 50s. That’s significantly less – about $50,000 less – than the late-1950s boomers had at the same age. Some of this shortfall might’ve been anticipated for the youngest boomers. Each new crop of boomers has taken a bigger hit in their Social Security checks because the statutory age for collecting the full monthly benefit has been creeping up. The shrinking checks are against the backdrop of dwindling pensions. (Retirement wealth includes the current value of worker’s future Social Security and traditional pension benefits, as well as retirement savings.) But, while Social Security and…

Resourceful retirees usually weather the financial surprises that come their way. But a handful of unexpected health events can really hurt. The death of a spouse is at the top of the list. Net worth drops by more than $30,000 over a couple of years as retirees pay for the extraordinary medical and other expenses surrounding a spouse’s death. Two serious health conditions also deplete retirees’ assets: strokes and lung disease, which strike about one in five older Americans during their lifetimes, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study funded by the U.S. Social Security Administration that tracked changes in the finances of people 65 and over. Despite the presence of Medicare, a first-time stroke reduces a retired…

Retirees who postpone collecting Social Security from age 62 to 66 – the full retirement age for most baby boomers – get around a third more in their monthly checks. Delaying to 70 increases it even more. There’s one problem with this strategy. Many people want to retire well before they turn 66. But there is an alternative for people with 401(k) savings: retire but don’t sign up for Social Security and withdraw an amount from the 401(k) equivalent to the Social Security check. Then delay Social Security for a few years. The start date will, of course, depend on how much money is in savings and how much of it the retiree can spend comfortably. In a recent experiment,…