Squared Away Blog

Karen James and John Kingrey remember very clearly breaking the news to their Millennial son that they would no longer support him. After struggling through his first year in college, Michael was sitting on his parents’ bed tossing around whether or not he should join the U.S. Navy. “I said, ‘You don’t have to join the Navy, but you’re not living here. And winter’s coming,’ ” Karen James recalled. And then she thought, but did not say, what many parents before her have thought about the offspring they love:  “You’re not living here doing nothing.” Easing their son out the door in the run-up to the couple’s 2014 retirement “was one of the toughest things we ever did,” John Kingrey said. Their…

Here’s just some of the evidence of the enormity of the challenge of caring for our elderly parents: One in three baby boomer women cares for an elderly parent. Even if they work, these caregivers devote anywhere from eight to 30 hours per week to that parent. The estimated value of informal senior care provided by family members approaches $500 billion in this country – or double the amount spent on formal, paid care. Caring for an elderly parent is usually done with love or out of a feeling of familial obligation. But there are real costs to taking on this responsibility, which most often lands squarely on a daughter’s shoulders. These costs could come in the form of lost wages…

Wives like to retire around the same time as their older husbands – so they can play. But what a difference the baby boom generation has made. For boomer wives, as members of the first generation of women to enter the U.S. labor force en masse, there can be a steep cost to leaving the labor force at a relatively young age to retire with an older husband. New research by Nicole Maestas of the Harvard Medical School bears out this logic. It’s obvious that working wives can increase their earnings from work by resisting the urge to retire at a relatively young age. And married women generally earn much more, relative to their husbands, than in the past. But,…

Mary Roby The stress of living with her son and daughter-in-law made Mary Roby’s blood sugar spike. But when she began her search for an independent senior housing community, affordable and nice never seemed to come in the same package. Roby, who is 80, said she looked around quite a bit. A one-room place in the Boston area for $4,500 a month had no senior services, a limited kitchen, and was housed in a poorly maintained building. She also knew, through her son’s in-laws, about a high-end assisted living community with extensive services, but it charged more than $6,000. Then she found Shillman House, which was both affordable and nice. “I love it here,” Roby said about the independent senior housing community…

After his wife of 36 years died from cancer, Dick St. Lawrence experienced something new: loneliness. “Worst feeling in the world,” St. Lawrence, 81, said about Linda St. Lawrence’s death in the winter of 2014. Like many widows and widowers before him, he had to build a new life for himself, despite having the comfort of a large family of four living children, six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. His first small step was accepting an invitation to play poker at Shillman House, an independent housing community for seniors owned and operated by Jewish Community Housing for the Elderly. The man who called to invite St. Lawrence knew a woman who used to play Mahjongg with Linda. Next thing he knew,…

An interesting psychology powers this video in which the youngest daughter of a low-income, single mother explains how she migrated into the financial services industry – and then became the company president. Mellody Hobson’s fascination with finance took hold as she watched her mother struggle with evictions, repossessed cars, and empty gas tanks. She once spent all her money on her daughters’ Easter dresses but then couldn’t pay the phone bill, Hobson recalls in the video above. “I do not think it’s an accident I work in the financial industry,” she explains, “because as a child I was desperate to understand money – desperate.  I hated the fact that I felt this insecurity around money.” Hobson is a celebrity in…

Physical power, fast reactions, steady hands, a crisp memory, and mental dexterity – these physical and mental abilities, taken for granted in youth, break down slowly but persistently over the years. A unique combination of physical and mental skills help to determine whether each worker’s continued employment is more or less susceptible to aging. To better understand who can work longer and who can’t, researchers at the Center for Retirement Research developed a Susceptibility Index to rank 954 U.S. occupations. Using the skills required for each occupation in the federal O*Net database, they ranked the occupations from 0 to 100 based on the risk that age-related decline will affect a worker’s ability to perform that particular job. The risk reflects the number…

Some suggestions for late-summer fun include an independent movie about a woman earning a very good living on a not-so-friendly Wall Street. But first, here are two practical financial guides, one for grown-ups and one for kids. Harris (Hershey) Rosen, who is 83, put serious thought into how to leave household financial information in good order for his wife should he die – and put his thoughts together in his homegrown “My Family Record Book.” This book “is not a money-making proposition,” he said. Rosen suggests husbands and wives make this important task a joint project. As the former owner of a candy company that made those lollipops packaged in strips of cellophane, Rosen learned to sweat details. His “Family…

Baby boomers on Medicare are streaming into Medicare Advantage plans, with nearly 18 million people currently enrolled in them. But a new study identifies pitfalls that might not be obvious to those signing up. Advantage plans are HMOs or PPOs that provide both basic Medicare Part B coverage and many of the benefits offered by supplementary Medigap insurance policies.  But Medicare beneficiaries’ premiums for an Advantage plan plus Medicare Part B coverage are roughly half, on average, of the premiums for a Medigap policy plus Part B. One reason is that Medigap policies typically cover more out-of-pocket costs. Another is that insurers offering Advantage plans assemble networks of hospitals and physicians to control their costs and reduce customers’ premiums. But,…

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration poster, 1954. When Social Security was created in the 1930s, wives were mainly full-time homemakers, with their pension benefits based on their breadwinner husbands’ earnings. But wives went to work in droves after Social Security’s passage. Today, women make up nearly half of the U.S. labor force.  Yet the program’s design remains the same, with the result being a steady decline in married couples’ replacement rates – the percentage of the combined earnings of two working spouses that Social Security replaces when both retire. A study by the Center for Retirement Research found that the replacement rate for couples has declined from 50 percent for married couples born in the early 1930s to around 45…

Dramatic changes in the U.S. family structure over several decades – more divorce, single motherhood, and unmarried couples – could have a big impact on the financial security of baby boomer women as they march into retirement – and on future retirees. A review of studies on Social Security spousal and survivor benefits by the Center for Retirement Research, which sponsors this blog, examines the difficulty of providing retirement security for the growing ranks of women and mothers who do not fit the traditional family mold. Social Security’s benefits were designed for the typical family when the pension program was enacted in the 1930s, a family portrayed at the time by Henry Barbour and his wife, Fanny, in the popular…

Inequality is frequently in the news. A new study puts an interesting spin on this now-familiar topic: rising health costs are a significant reason for wage inequality. The cost of employer-provided health insurance is a larger share of lower-paid employees’ total compensation than it is for the people higher up in the organization. Since insurance costs have been increasing faster than total compensation, squeezing out pay raises, the nation’s lowest-paid workers feel it most. For people with earnings at the 30th percentile of all U.S. workers, total compensation, including the cost of employer health insurance as well as actual earnings, increased by just 9 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars between 1992 and 2010, according to data in a new study by…