Squared Away Blog

Chris Vickery, director of cyber-risk research for UpGuard in California, warned NPR listeners recently about a situation in which another high-technology company allowed 198 million voters’ personal information to become publicly accessible online. When our non-financial information gets loose on the Internet, it can cause financial damage: “If a bad guy has your phone number and can get your PIN, they can, at 3 in the morning, get a code sent to your phone, listen to your voicemails, log in to your bank account and drain all your money,” Vickery said. “Phone numbers are more important than people realize.”   Squared Away asked him to expand on what occurs when we freely hand over our personal data to retailers, financial institutions, and credit…

On August 3 and 4, the Retirement Research Consortium will hold its annual meeting in which retirement researchers from around the country will converge on Washington to present their latest findings. The papers being presented next week will explore the impact on retirement from our health, work-life balance, and family ties, as well the millennial generation’s prospects for retirement. These are just some of the research topics. Click here for the full agenda. For those who can’t attend, the CRR will provide live streaming of the presentations as they occur. In late August, they will be archived on the CRR’s website. The Retirement Research Consortium includes the Center for Retirement Research (CRR) at Boston College, which sponsors this blog, as w…

Brickhouse Design Group Ltd. Big advances in the construction industry are helping the elderly better maneuver around their homes, and they’re doing it in style. Ramps no longer look like ramps; they are pleasantly lit walkways with stone paving. Compact pneumatic elevators squeeze into tight spaces.  The lip at the entrance to the shower – the one an elderly person can trip over or that blocks a wheelchair – has cleverly been eliminated. Watch this recent webinar to find out how. And here’s an interesting idea: a reverse mortgage is one way to pay for the upgrades required for seniors who want to remain in their homes as they age. That is the punch line in the webinar, which is sponsored (not…

Thomas Automotive Family’s service department in Bedford, Pennsylvania. When Peggy Zembower became the human resources director for Thomas Automotive Family about four years ago, she was dismayed that some long-time employees had never increased their retirement saving above the measly 1 percent of pay they’d started at. One big issue was that the lowest-paid workers at the auto dealership – like low-wage workers everywhere – felt they couldn’t afford to save in the 401(k). A lack of knowledge about investing and a reluctance to give up control of their money seemed to frighten others out of saving, which meant forfeiting their employer’s matching contribution. “It bothered me when I saw employees who’d been here five years and up and saw what…

Medicaid serves millions of low-income Americans, many of them elderly. Federal spending on this program now approaches the dollars spent on Medicare, the primary health care program covering virtually all Americans over 65.  Many people confuse the two programs, or cast Medicaid as a program strictly for the poor.  Many are unaware of the financial support that it provides to seniors. With major changes to Medicaid now being debated, Squared Away interviewed Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, to learn just what Medicaid does. Q. Describe Medicaid’s broad mission and how older Americans fit into that mission. A. Medicaid’s basic mission has been to provide support from the federal government to the states to…

The Internet offers many free calculators to baby boomers wanting to get a better handle on whether their retirement finances are on track. The operative words here are “on track,” because each calculator has strengths and weaknesses.  Calculators aren’t capable of providing a bullet-proof analysis of the complex factors and future unknowns that will determine whether someone has done the planning and saving required to ensure a financially secure retirement. With that caveat, Squared Away found three calculators, listed below, that do a good job. They met our criteria of being reliable, free, and easy to use.  Many other calculators were quickly eliminated, because they were indecipherable or created issues on the first try. Most important, each calculator selected covered…

Nearly 8 trillion dollars sits in Individual Retirement Accounts, or IRAs. This is nearly half of all the value held in the U.S. retirement system, which also includes employer pension funds and 401(k)s. A big reason IRAs were created in 1974 under the Employer Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) was to give individuals not covered by retirement plans at work an opportunity to save in their own tax-deferred accounts. So, are IRAs helping these workers? IRAs “have drifted very far from their original intent” of helping those who need them most, researchers for the Center for Retirement Research conclude in a new study. Who is eligible to receive tax benefits for saving in an IRA has morphed over the years…

Many of you are enjoying a long weekend or taking the entire week off. Enjoy your vacations and drive safely. As the summer kicks into high gear, we’ll continue blogging twice a week about retirement and related personal financial issues…

Investors will probably see good news in Morningstar Inc.’s annual report showing that the fees charged by actively managed mutual funds continue to come down. The truth is that focusing on fees alone misses the point. What matters is a fund’s after-fee return. There are always fund managers who excel at picking stocks and can deliver strong after-fee returns to investors year after year, justifying the high fees required to pay them. The early years of Fidelity’s Magellan fund is the classic example. The trick is finding that clever manager, which requires a combination of luck and the skill and inclination to compare numerous investment options. One thing making this task a little easier is the mutual fund industry practic…

Millennials’ reliance on their parents, retirement finances, and long-term care – Squared Away readers had some serious topics on their minds during the first half of the year. Here are the 10 most popular blogs, ranked by the number of page views each received between January and June: Retiree Benefits: Tale of 2 Cities (and States) Get Dental Work Before You Retire Long-Term Care Insurance Goes Uptown Long-Term Care on a Boxed Wine Budget The Benefits of Late-Career Job Changes Retirees Don’t Touch Home Equity People Lack Emergency Funds, Tap 401(k)s Managing Money with Cognitive Decline Why Parents’ Home is the Millennial Crib Our Stubborn State of Financial Illiteracy ……

The first study known to look at changes over several decades in lifetime earnings for the nation’s workers shows a dramatic trend: women are up and men are down. The oldest people studied, mostly men, began working in the 1950s, when the post-war U.S. economy was going full throttle, and they started retiring in the 1980s when the industrial economy was only in the early stages of a protracted decline. The youngest workers studied are “middle” baby boomers, who came of age during the twin 1980s recessions in heavy industry and experienced the rise of the service economy and two high-tech booms and busts. Over this time period, men’s earnings went through two distinct phases.  In the first phase –…

Credit card companies usually set small-dollar minimum payments, so there’s really no excuse for incurring fees for late card payments. Yet many consumers fail to pay on time. In a new study, British researchers found a no-brainer solution that is highly effective: setting up automatic payments of our credit cards. The researchers started out with a different premise: that customers might learn, over time, to prevent maddening late fees after having to pay them numerous times. The researchers roundly rejected this after following nearly 250,000 U.K. credit card holders over two years.  When it comes to late fees, we do not learn from our mistakes. What they noticed, however, was a clear distinction between card holders who incur late fees…