Squared Away Blog

When a spouse or parent requires long-term care, quality is the top priority. But a report last year by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) cited concerns about the quality of the federal data essential for monitoring the quality of care.  For example, three key indicators point to improvements: better nursing staff levels and clinical quality and fewer deficiencies in care that harm residents. Yet consumer complaints jumped 21 percent between 2005 and 2014, even though the number of nursing home beds has remained roughly flat in recent years. Anthony Chicotel, an attorney with the San Francisco non-profit California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, said care quality is intertwined with affordability, payment sources, and dramatic changes under way in nursing…

These personal finance videos are like sensible shoes: they won’t win any awards, but they can be useful. Produced by the College of Financial Planning, the short videos demystify the fundamentals of personal finance that the planners who teach and take courses at the college rely on in their practices. “Free Money” (above) features Dirk Pantone, a vice president and certified financial planner, interviewing Kristen MacKenzie, who teaches there, about 401(k)s, 403(b)s, 457(b)s and the employer match. “Living on Borrowed Time,” has Pantone and MacKenzie discussing the difference between good debt and bad debt, both of which impact credit scores. “The Road to Investing Your Assets” explains why low fees and portfolio diversification are so important. There are 13 videos. …

Low-income residents are in better financial shape in the 31 states that have expanded their Medicaid health coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). That’s the bottom line in a new study finding that they have fewer unpaid bills being sent to collection agencies and their collection balances are $600 to $1,000 lower than their counterparts in non-expansion states. This contrasts with the years prior to the 2014 Medicaid reform, when residents of would-be expansion and non-expansion states had very similar financial profiles. State decisions about whether or not to expand their Medicaid rolls are having “unambiguous” and “important financial impacts,” concluded researchers at the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Medica…

As Squared Away readers scatter to the winds this summer, those going overseas should take a close look at the currencies in their travel destinations. There are some gorgeous currencies out in the world, in places like Sao Tome & Principe off of the coast of Gabon in West Africa. June begins peak season for the island country, which The Lonely Planet says has a relaxed “leve leve” vibe to go with its miles of beaches, “swaths of emerald rainforest, soaring volcanic peaks and mellow fishing villages.” Sao Tomean Dobra Currency as art is a refreshing contrast to U.S. currencies, with their button-down images of presidents and buildings.  Try the red-billed kingfisher bird on Sao Tome & Principe’s 50,000 dobra…

Rather than put his money in a bank, my cousin, who’s in his mid-40s, makes loans in $25 increments on a peer-to-peer lending website.  He decides on the amount of risk he’s willing to take on – and the riskier the borrowers he chooses, the more he earns on his “savings.” My cousin’s $25 investments illustrate how much our consumer finance market has evolved over several decades. We all embrace the convenience. Car loans are a more affordable way to buy a vehicle, Internet banking lets homebuyers get several mortgage quotes at once, and paying with cell phones is much easier than paying with cash or even credit cards. But all this innovation has a downside. One example is t…

This online tool for exploring urban job markets is very cool. It could be a big help for high school and college graduates looking for work, especially those willing to migrate to a new city and trying to figure where to go. What’s unique about it is that it ranks the nation’s large, mid-sized, and small cities based on the user’s personal preferences. To use the tool, created by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), the job hunter decides how high to rank the importance – from 5 (most important) to 1 (not important) – of nine different aspects of the job market and lifestyle in their ideal city: low unemployment, high average earnings, high labor force participation, public…

What does it mean to have a sense of financial well-being? Or what does it mean to have its opposite, financial uneasiness? Based on in-depth interviews with dozens of people in focus groups, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has developed a financial well-being quiz. The quiz is the agency’s attempt to quantify a very subjective concept so that researchers can measure it and integrate this measure into their research, said Genevieve Melford, a senior research analyst for the CFPB. “It’s about creating a tool that allows meaningful research and effective interventions that might help people,” she said. We think regular people can also gain personal insight by taking a short version of the CFPB’s quiz on this blog. After…

If having an adequate income in retirement won’t persuade you to delay that retirement date by a year or two, try this argument: you’ll live longer. A new study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found strong evidence that older workers who retire even one year later have lower mortality rates.  This held true for both healthy and unhealthy people. The researchers at Oregon State and Colorado State used a survey of older workers to follow some 3,000 people who were employed in 1992 but had retired by 2010.  Since health drives mortality and is a factor in deciding when to retire, they separated their research subjects into two groups – healthy and unhealthy – to see if…

Most workers quickly realize that the best solution to low earnings in a job with scant or non-existent benefits is to move on to something better. But this is increasingly difficult to pull off, because technology and other powerful forces are reshaping the 21st century economy – and degrading the quality of the jobs that are available.  As companies seek to cut labor costs, technologies like scheduling software for retail and fast-food workers and platforms like Uber and Task Rabbit are making it easier to do. The result has been a rapidly growing contingent labor force of temp-agency workers, freelancers, independent contractors, workers for contract companies, and on-call workers with unpredictable schedules, according to a recent study by prominent Harvard…

The harsh reality is that you aren’t earning as much money as you think you are, and you don’t have as much to spend as you think you do – so it’s easy to let spending get out of control. Andrea Woroch, only 34 years old herself, delivers some tough love to those who’ve already developed poor spending habits. A personal finance expert for the Millennial generation, Woroch said a perilous time is between the cash-strapped period right after college and the time when the steady, but modest, paychecks start flowing. Early on, she explained, the attitude was “Okay, let me go to happy hour on this day because I can get $1 tacos and a beer. Now it’s okay to…

Call it the “fed-up factor” – the uncomfortable circumstances at work that spur some older people to retire, sometimes prematurely. Squared Away’s readers recently shared their personal experiences in comments posted to a blog post about three job characteristics, identified by researchers, that are linked to earlier retirements: stress, inflexibility, and increasing demands. Working in the healthcare field has had unique stresses – at high levels – for one reader, Elin Zander, a dietician. Stress “is experienced by clinicians trying to provide quality care in an ever more difficult environment,” she said. “That is why I will retire as soon as I can afford to.” Paul Brustowicz and his wife both retired to remove themselves from uncomfortable situations – her…

How will your spending change once you retire? Will you be able to afford your needs? Will healthcare drain your budget? The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) provides some clues in its data on the spending patterns of older Americans. The pie charts below show the percentage of total household budgets in 2014 that went to everything from housing to entertainment for two older age groups. The two age groups selected highlight how spending changes between one’s final years in the labor force (ages 55-64) and retirement (the over-75 group). (Note: a household’s age is determined by the age of the individual who responded to the survey.) The pie charts tell part of the story. Here’s what the BLS…