Squared Away Blog

Rob Peters during a trip East last summer. Rob Peters’ approach to retiring wasn’t much different from hitting the road in 1975 to help drive a college friend from New York to California. He didn’t really know where he was going. When he first laid eyes on California, he was captivated by its beauty, as well as the left-leaning politics absent in the conservative Long Island community he grew up in. But Peters, equipped only with an English degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo, bounced around for years among the various part-time and full-time counseling jobs available to him in his new paradise. Not until age 38, after earning a master’s degree in counseling and 13…

Most people see multicolored chaos in the chart below, which is a visual representation of the returns each year to various types of investments. Morningstar Inc.’s director of quantitative research, Timothy Strauts, sees something else: the need for a diverse portfolio. Strauts, like most investment professionals, knows the Callan Periodic Table of Investment Returns. It has been around for 20 years and was just updated with 2016’s returns. Here’s how to read it. A colored square is assigned to each type of stock- and bond-market index. For example, the Bloomberg Barclay’s Aggregate (Agg) bond index is bright green, and the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index is khaki green – the boxes also give each index’s return for each year. ……

Just one in three native-born and immigrant Hispanics working in this country has a retirement plan through their employers. If they do have one, three out of four save money in their plans, which is somewhat less than their coworkers. One reason for the first abysmal statistic is that many Hispanics and Latinos, recent immigrants in particular, hold down part-time restaurant or hotel jobs at very low wages. But even among Hispanics working full-time, access to an employer savings plan is still much lower (44 percent) than it is for their white and black counterparts (more than 60 percent). Low rates of saving are compounded by the fact that elderly Hispanics and Latinos will need more money over their longer-than-average retirements.  A 65-year-old…

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad   Interest in the student loan problem from the media and politicians seems to be ebbing. The issue does not go away for Joshua Roiland. Every day, money worries grind him down – him and millions of other young adults working through the emotional fallout and shattered relationships caused by debt. Roiland owes $200,000-plus and earns only $52,000 as a newly minted University of Maine journalism professor. He begins his article on Longreads by describing a 340-mile round-trip drive to a clinic in Lewiston, Maine, that pays him $50 for a pint of his youthful blood. ……

Remarkably, middle-class Americans have at least as much money tied up in their homes as they have in all their retirement plans, bank accounts, and other financial assets combined. A hefty share of older U.S. homeowners are even better off: 41 percent between ages 65-74, and 63 percent over 74, have paid off their mortgages and own their homes free and clear. But only one in five retirees would be willing to use their home equity to generate income in a new survey by the National Council on Aging (NCOA). This reluctance seems to be on a collision course with financial reality for working baby boomers, when so many are at risk that they won’t be able to maintain their…

A couple years ago, Daniel Cooper noticed something at the commuter rail station near his home in suburban Boston.   A lot of parents were dropping off their adult children every morning to catch the train into the city. This fit with something he’d been thinking about as a Federal Reserve senior economist and policy adviser interested in macroeconomic issues like the housing market.  Are millennials living with their parents longer than previous generations?  And, if so, why? His suspicion was confirmed in recent research with his colleague at the Boston Federal Reserve, María Luengo-Prado. They found that, on average, 16 percent of baby boomers born in the late 1950s and early 1960s lived with their parents when they were between…

When older workers change occupations, many of them move into a lower-status version of the work they’ve done for years, according to a new study by University of Michigan researchers who tracked the workers’ movements among some 200 different occupations. Aging computer scientists were likely to become programmers or computer support staff.  And veteran high school teachers started tutoring, financial managers transitioned to bookkeepers, and office supervisors became secretaries. Late-career transitions need to be put into some context: a majority of Americans who were still working in their 60s were in the same occupations they held at age 55, the study found.  And these occupations ran the gamut from clergy to life scientists to cooks. Interestingly, while teachers, thanks to…

The retirement issues facing black Americans can’t necessarily be lumped together for many reasons – there are high- and low-income blacks, and there are recent immigrants as well as longstanding families.  A similar problem arises when treating the U.S. Hispanic-American population or the Asian-American population as a homogenous group. Having acknowledged this, however, some recent studies have highlighted the financial challenges particular to each group.  For Hispanic-Americans, a major issue is that they live a long time but have low participation in employer retirement plans. For Asian-Americans, extremely high wealth inequality in their working population spills over into retirement inequality. This blog looks at the recent erosion in homeownership among black Americans since 2000, which threatens to further undermine their…

Finding a new job in one’s 50s is not that easy to pull off, and it’s risky if the new employer doesn’t work out.  But there’s a silver lining for people who can make the change to a job they feel is better: they work longer than those who don’t make a move. A new study by the Center for Retirement Research, which supports this blog, finds the probability that older workers remain in the labor force until they’re 65 increases considerably – by 9 percentage points – if they voluntarily made a job change sometime during their 50s. This lends credence to other research showing that when older workers voluntarily find a new employer, they often experience more job…

“I thought I was going to live forever.” “I would’ve probably put more money away for later years.” “I was a stay-at-home mom for 17 years, and I didn’t realize that during those years I wasn’t working I wasn’t accruing Social Security.” Millennials asked what it’s like to be retired, and seniors answered in this video produced by The New York Times. The video’s point, it seems, is that it’s not natural for 20-somethings to think about old age at all. “Retirement wasn’t in my vocabulary,” as one senior recalled about being young. That’s why young adults, as soon as they enter the work world, should force themselves to make friends with a concept far in their futures – and…

With so many Americans in the dark about how to prepare for retirement, educating them about why it’s critical to save seems an obvious way to tackle this problem. But very few solid studies prove that financial education actually works. This field research should be counted as a positive result for a modest, low-cost financial education program. Carly Urban at Montana State found that tellers and other low-level employees working at 45 randomly selected credit unions around the country clearly made progress after spending just 10 hours in an online financial education program. The information-based program required the workers to do some reading and walked them through specific examples and scenarios they might face. Their improvements weren’t limited to increasing their…

More Americans have health insurance, but they’ve also become increasingly worried over the past two years about how to pay for every aspect of their medical care. While the majority of insured adults still can afford their health care, the minority who say it’s “difficult” to pay their monthly premiums, doctor and prescription copayments, and deductibles is growing. Potential explanations for these concerns, revealed in a new Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation poll, include rapidly rising prescription drug costs and the fact that employer-provided health insurance plans with high deductibles are far more common than they used to be. To be sure, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has expanded Americans’ access to health insurance, and federal subsidies have made t…