Squared Away Blog

As more baby boomers retire, Social Security’s impending financial shortfall will become more pressing. To restore solvency, Congress can either cut Social Security’s pension benefits or increase the payroll taxes deducted from workers’ pay. Both policies would impact how much is available for households to spend. Researchers at the Center for Retirement Research find that the benefit reductions would have an appreciably larger annual impact on retirees than would the higher taxes on workers. But the taxes would be spread over a longer time period. The new study looks at four specific policies, two that cut retirement benefits and two that raise taxes.  Each policy analyzed would equally benefit Social Security’s finances. Gauging their separate effects required using a model to…

In the 1960s, half of all wives were housewives, and their husbands often earned enough money to support a family. Today, these traditional families are a rarity and two incomes have become essential to surviving economically. A new joint report by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution argues that poor and working-class families’ increasingly fragile family structure – despite the rise of dual-income spouses – often leaves them “doubly disadvantaged.” And lower marriage rates among poor and low-income couples help to explain why “America is increasingly divided by class,” write the authors, W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, and Wendy Wang, research director for the Institute for Family Studies. They explain…

You’re not going to like this, baby boomers. You have more debt than the two generations born during the early Depression and World War II, much of it compliments of the mortgage bubble that financed your larger, more expensive houses. The housing bubble popped in 2008, but the mortgage on the new house or perhaps a second mortgage continues to plague many. It should be no big surprise that a new study finds the “substantial” debts taken on specifically by those born in the late 1940s and early 1950s will gobble up more of their not-always plentiful retirement income. “The evidence clearly shows that many Americans” on the cusp of retiring “continue to be burdened by debt and to be financially vulnerable,”…

Federal Medicare spending will increase sharply as baby boomers, with their longer life spans than previous generations, sign up in droves. The Social Security Trust Fund also reports that its reserves will be depleted in 2034, requiring either benefit cuts or new revenues to replenish a program that keeps millions of older Americans either out of poverty or just above water. These two programs currently account for about 40 percent of the federal government’s $3.7 trillion budget. Most people agree that we need to deal with the financial shortfalls in Medicare and Social Security. And there is precedent. Remember the bipartisan 1983 reform that put Social Security on firmer footing by increasing the program’s revenues and gradually raising its Fu…

Thank you for continuing to read and support Squared Away! Our goal is to provide reliable information that is not influenced by the desire to sell a product or service, which we hope is a valuable service to you. And as a blog based at the Center for Retirement Research, we are particularly interested in covering what the current research (ours and many others’) can tell us about retirement, personal finance and the economic challenges that people face. What could be better than a big turkey in the oven and family and friends all around?  Happy Thanksgiving to all. To stay current on our blog, please join our free email list. You’ll receive just one email each week – with links to t…

In terms of popularity, reviewing Medicare plans during the open enrollment, going on now, ranks right up there with doing taxes. Retirees on Medicare view healthcare as their most burdensome expense.  But they are less likely to comparison shop for Medicare plans than for their groceries and gas, even though plan shopping would probably save more money. Deciding on a Medicare Advantage plan or deciding to switch to traditional Medicare, with or without a Medigap supplement, is “overwhelming, scary, and has consequences, so we put it off,” said Bart Astor, a spokesman for the insurer WellCare Health Plans, whose nationally representative survey quantified just how much retirees dread Medicare enrollment. Selecting one path over another also necessitates predicting the impossible:…

Around age 58, people start getting happier. That’s what the research shows, and this blogger can attest to it. In the new video displayed below, Rocio Calvo, a Boston College professor of social work, offers up theories for the happiness phenomenon – financial security is one. She also has some particularly striking “happiness statistics” on Hispanics and immigrants. All over Boston College, academics are studying aging issues, which complement the financial and economic research turned out by the Center for Retirement Research, which sponsors this blog.   Calvo’s video is part of a series of videos by the multidisciplinary Institute on Aging at Boston College. It’s interesting viewing for older people and their families, with apologies for the regression table (t…

Edward, Ashley, and Kirby Cash Edward Cash would really rather spend his hard-earned paychecks from the Memphis Police Department on his daughter than on humdrum necessities like student loans, replacing a broken-down car, or saving. “I need money, as much money as I can to take care of this new human in my life,” Cash said about 4-year-old Kirby. Of course, he and his wife, Ashley Cash, a Memphis city planner, pay their bills, in between doting on Kirby.  But college loans are different: they get help.  The city government pays down $50 a month on each of their loan balances – as it does for some 600 employees. In May, Memphis joined Fortune 500 companies in the vanguard of employers…

Driving around major U.S. cities, it seems like every other car has a Lyft or Uber logo in the back windshield. These ride-sharing apps are prominent players in the increasingly popular “platform economy,” which links sellers with buyers of their goods and services, from used couches and basement junk to handymen and car rides. This is one corner of the fast-growing gig economy, which also includes freelancers and the self-employed. But who takes on these jobs, are they long-term or short-term endeavors, and how reliant are participants on the income they generate through online platforms or apps? Scouring its database of transactions in the bank accounts of 240,000 bank customers who participate in the platform economy, the JP Morgan Chase & Co…

Hilarious examples of “instant garbage” are offered up in this Portlandia clip by the show’s characters, Bryce Shivers and Lisa Eversman (played by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein). The price point for an unwanted consumer product that becomes instant garbage is $4.99.  “We found the exact point between price and hassle that guarantees you won’t bother returning” the product, Eversman explains in the video below. Is the following theory a stretch? There seems to be a direct line between Americans’ relentless buying of stuff we do not need and our inadequate attempts at saving money. Try walking into a craft superstore or browsing Target’s $1 shelf and suddenly imagining the stuff all piled up at its ultimate destination, the loca…

The state of the nation’s health care system includes these incredible facts: Americans with health insurance who are “under-insured” have more than doubled to 41 million since 2013. They now make up 28 percent of adults. Geographic disparities can be stark. Nearly one in three Floridians and Texans is under-insured, compared with one in five in California and New York. Not surprisingly, insurance deductibles are higher in Florida and Texas. Much has been made of the fact that many Americans can’t afford their deductibles and out-of-pocket costs when purchasing polices under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  The new report by the healthcare advocacy organization, The Commonwealth Fund, indicates that both ACA-insured and employer-insured Americans are frequently stretched to the limit…

The typical baby boomer couple had $135,000 in retirement savings last year, up from $111,000 in 2013 amid a rising stock market and a strong job market that has kept them employed, according to a report on the new Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) by the Federal Reserve. Yet $135,000 – the balance for working couples who have a 401(k) – won’t go very far. This amount, held in both their 401(k)s and IRAs, will generate about $600 per month, said the SCF analysis by the Center for Retirement Research, which supports this blog.  That’s obviously not enough to supplement most retirees’ primary source of income: their Social Security benefits, which are slowly eroding for various reasons.  The purchasing power…