Squared Away Blog

Boston’s years-long struggle to deal with the homeless encampment of tents and an open-air drug market near what city residents call “Mass and Cass” – the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard – is a testament to how intractable homelessness is. But on top of the difficulty of arranging housing in short supply in a high-cost city and addressing addiction, the problems facing the homelessness are compounded by age. One out of every three Americans nationwide who lacks housing is over 50. In Boston, the share of older homeless has been rising over the past decade as the baby boomer population gets older. Samara Scheckler, a researcher at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, said older peo…

In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act establishing the federal minimum wage. Yet Section 14(c) of the act allowed employers to pay people with disabilities less than the minimum wage. Under 14(c), these workers, who often have cognitive or intellectual disabilities, are earning as little as $4 or $5 per hour mainly through non-profit programs created to support them. This seems unfair from the perspective of the 23-year anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act giving people with disabilities the same rights as all other Americans. Advocates for the disabled like the Autistic Self Advocacy Network argue 14(c) should be repealed. This seems like the obvious solution until you consider what Laura Kovacovich’s mother has…

In December, North Carolina will become the 40th state to expand its Medicaid program, providing health insurance coverage to some 300,000 more low-income workers, many of them for the first time. It has taken the states a decade to reach that milestone, despite generous funding from the federal government under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to defray the cost of expanding Medicaid coverage. The states that agreed to expand their programs have added more than 22 million people to their Medicaid rolls. Most of the 10 states that are holdouts are in the South. They are not expanding their programs, despite Medicaid’s beneficial effects on Americans’ health, which have become widely recognized by politicians, policymakers and researchers. The Medicaid expansion provision…

Every year for 24 years straight, the number of people receiving federal disability benefits increased, nearly tripling to around 9 million. In 2015, that trend suddenly reversed. The reversal is due both to more people exiting the program as the population ages and to fewer new people joining the rolls. The drivers behind this latter trend are less clear, so they were the focus of a new study. Siyan Liu and Laura Quinby at the Center for Retirement Research find that two factors accounted for the bulk of the recent drop in the number of new recipients of disability benefits. One factor is already widely recognized: a strong economy, post-Great Recession, provided more job opportunities for workers who have disabilities…

Once a year, Social Security reports on the program’s financial outlook but the bottom line doesn’t change: the reserve in the trust fund is running out of money. Many workers and retirees go straight to the inaccurate worst-case scenario: retirement benefits will cease when the reserve is depleted. In fact, if Congress doesn’t address the looming shortfall – and there’s still time for that – the payroll taxes that fund benefits will keep flowing into the program. But the reserve is shrinking because it is being used to cover part of the benefits being paid to the growing ranks of retiring boomers. Once the reserve depletes, benefits will not be eliminated, though they will have to be reduced if Congress…

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…

Imagine a married couple. Both work, and their earnings are identical. But one spouse’s employer is matching every dollar of her 401(k) contributions up to a cap. The other spouse’s 401(k) match is only 50 percent. They could increase how much they are saving for retirement by contributing first to the 401(k) with the full match in this simple version of the myriad situations married couples face. But, according to a new study, one in four couples do not prioritize the more generous employer’s 401(k) matching funds. This lack of coordination may have a cost: the average couple who leaves match money on the table could give up nearly $700 in a year. That may not sound like a lot…

A recent blog about advertisements for Medicare Advantage policies brought a torrent of criticisms from our readers that…

There is no end to the websites and phone apps requiring your phone number, email and other personal information as the cost of passage into the products and services they provide. Even some financial companies sell your data to third parties for a profit. But it is virtually impossible to see what happens after the fresh information you’ve handed over is attached to your existing profile in the netherworld of the cloud. The complaints they analyzed focused on the types of fraud, such as identity theft, that specifically can occur as a result of tracking. Apple’s anti-tracking technology “had a substantial effect in reducing fraud,” they concluded. Apple, which has nearly half of the U.S. cell phone market, introduced its…

In our high-tech world, virtually any transaction or communication can be executed online. Yet, despite the range of services that Social Security offers on its website, two-thirds of older Americans thinking about retiring or planning to start up their benefits speak directly to someone at the agency, either by phone or at a field office, at some point during the process. For years, the agency has allowed workers to create an online my Social Security account, which helps with retirement planning by laying out their monthly benefit levels, depending on the age they start. This is very useful information when workers are trying to determine how long they might want to wait before claiming their benefits, which can also b…

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…

A third of the people who receive federal disability benefits have no income other than their benefit checks. And given their serious medical conditions, their death rate is much higher than that of the general population. In such a vulnerable group, small increases in their disability checks produce big results, finds a new study funded by Social Security, which administers the federal program. For individuals receiving about $10,400 a year in average benefits, for example, an additional $1,000 per year would cut their mortality rate by up to a third of a percentage point in the first four years after their benefits start. The researchers found similar, positive results for disabled workers with families. When the combined benefits paid to…