Squared Away Blog

The value of the informal care provided to the nation’s elderly, often by adult children, exceeds $500 billion a year – more than double the price tag for the formal care of nursing homes and home health aides. Only 6 percent of Americans are, at any given time, regularly helping parents who have deteriorating health or disabilities to perform their routine daily activities (and 17 percent will provide this care sometime during their lifetime). But a sliver of the population shoulders an inordinate amount of responsibility. A study by Gal Wettstein and Alice Zulkarnain of the Center for Retirement Research finds that the 6 percent of adults providing parental care devote an average 77 hours to their duties each month,…

The superlatives come fast and furious in the spate of reports coming out on the dwindling participation in the labor force by Americans still in their prime working years. The fall in men’s participation in the United States has been going on for decades but has been steeper here than in all but two advanced economies (Israel and Italy) in recent years. “We have won the race to the bottom,” says Nicholas Eberstadt, an American Enterprise Institute scholar and author of “Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis.” A more recent drop in labor force participation for American women is “unique” – in the rest of the developed world, women’s participation continues to rise, according to a Brookings Institution report. Men…

When it comes to wealth, Asian-Americans aren’t much different than whites. The typical household’s net worth is around $133,000 in each group, and about 10 percent have no wealth at all. And like white America, Asian-American inequality is high and rising. Asian-Americans ranking in the top 10 percent (in terms of their wealth levels) have $1.45 million in savings and home equity – about 170 times more than those in the bottom 20 percent.  In the 1990s, the top 10 percent had 75 times more wealth. Given this high concentration of wealth, “many Asian Americans, especially Asian American seniors who need to live off of their savings, live in an economically precarious situation,” according to a Center for American Progress…

It took months for one girlfriend’s suitor to persuade her to get married. Another of my friends skipped marriage entirely and had two children on her own. Others married, had kids, and divorced, a status that seems unlikely to change for some as they age.  I married for the first time at 56. These anecdotes, about a random group of baby boomer women in the Boston area, illustrate some of the ways that women over the past half century have dramatically reduced the time they spend as part of a married couple. A new study being released today by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College finds that “middle boomer” women born in the late 1950s can expect to…

                Who wants to spend their beach vacation reading about growing older? These recommendations just might surprise you. “The Accomplished Guest” by Ann Beattie Ann Beattie’s 1983 book of short stories, “The Burning House,” explored the drift, emotional detachment, and cynicism of boomers, whose worldview was darkened by Watergate. That book made Beattie’s reputation, and she has been prolific ever since, including regular appearances in The New Yorker.  Her 2017 short story volume, “The Accomplished Guest,” is, for now, a bookend to “The Burning House” (Beattie is only 69 and no doubt has more books in her). While baby boom skepticism remains a central theme, her characters have developed a little heart and…

Our 401(k) retirement system doesn’t work as well for lower- and middle-income workers as it does for those at the top. That’s because they face more severe headwinds in pursuit of their retirement goals, concludes a new study. Consider what happens when a worker’s earnings drop 10 percent or he experiences a bout of unemployment. These episodes are more common among lower-paid workers, and when they hit, they hit their 401(k)s harder than the 401(k)s of people who earn more, according to the study, “Defined Contribution Wealth Inequality.” In theory, 401(k)s could work for everyone – if everyone had access to an employer savings plan (which they don’t).  And while people who earn more money obviously have more to sock…

The older people who either consider a reverse mortgage or actually get one don’t have much else to fall back on.  Their primary assets – outside of their homes – are a car worth no more than $7,000 and about $2,000 in a checking account. This was one salient fact unearthed about reverse mortgage users – or people who’ve looked into them – in a 2014-2015 survey led by Stephanie Moulton at Ohio State University. This supports a later study by Moulton that found that people who take out the loans tend to be in worse shape financially than other homeowners. The survey provides a more complete picture of who is turning to reverse mortgages – and why other people find…

Chung-Au Loi Tai Boston – Four mornings a week, a van scoops up Chung-Au Loi Tai and delivers her to the senior center for a full schedule of activities. The 1:30 bingo game is her favorite. She giggles when she explains why: she likes the Chinese Rice Biscuits that are handed out as prizes. She is one of 350 mostly low-income clients of the Greater Boston Golden Age Center’s three locations around Boston. Most came to this country from China decades ago and raised families while working in Chinatown or the suburbs. Chung-Au, for example, worked in a shoe factory for nine years, and her late husband cooked in restaurants all over the city. Now in old age, the Golden…

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…