Squared Away Blog

Apprenticeship programs in the United States are largely found in just a few unionized skilled trades: construction worker, plumber, electrician. But a recent panel made up of British and American employers and other experts made the case that U.S. employers in myriad professional fields – health care, social care, information technology, law, medical exercise therapy, lab technician, teaching assistantship, nursing, and finance – would benefit from thinking more creatively about providing apprenticeship training. Apprenticeship programs are much more common among U.K. and other European employers. Microsoft Corp. is a big exception here: its U.S. program, modeled on what the company does in Europe, will graduate 1,000 apprentices next year, said Bill Kamela, Microsoft’s policy counsel for U.S. government affairs. Apprentices “have incredib…

More than half of older Americans with the lowest socioeconomic status can expect to face an income gap if they retire when they’re planning to. That finding is from a study by the Center for Retirement Research, which supports this blog. The researchers quantified and compared the gaps in the retirement preparedness of more than 3,000 older U.S. households, grouped by four levels of educational attainment. First, the researchers estimated the target income that each working household will need in retirement to maintain its current standard of living.  That target income will be less than its current income from working, because retirees no longer need to save money, and they pay less in taxes.  Then, the researchers projected the incom…

A decade of research into the impact of cognitive aging shows that workers throughout their 50s and 60s are generally just as productive as the younger people working alongside them. A new summary of this research, by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, explains how older people are able to adapt to the gradual loss of brain mass in the parts of the brain associated with memory and an ability to think on one’s feet – their “fluid intelligence.” The highly skilled pharmacy profession is a good example of how workers in their 50s or 60s adjust to this changing dynamic.  These pharmacists have an advantage over their younger coworkers in what psychologists call “crystallized intelligence,” which is…

It’s easy to drown in the financial details of student loan repayment.  Here’s a life preserver. The rules of thumb listed below were culled from interviews with two experts on student loans. Betsy Mayotte is director of consumer outreach for American Student Assistance, a non-profit that educates people about their loans. Craig Lemoine is program director for the American College of Financial Services, which trains financial planners. 1. If you earn enough to make your payments, start paying. The reason: Student loans in most cases must be repaid in full.  The sooner you start making your full monthly payments, the sooner your loans will be paid off and the less in total you will have to shell out.  A decision…

The majority of retirees pay no federal taxes. But taxes should be a concern for retirees who have retirement savings. That’s because the money they take out of their retirement accounts for living expenses will be treated as federal taxable income. It’s difficult enough to figure out how much money to withdraw – and when. Taxes are a separate but related issue.   In this blog, we interviewed Michael Kitces, a well-known financial adviser and partner with a Maryland financial firm, who writes the “Nerd’s Eye View” blog. He discusses the basics of navigating the tax code. The challenge facing retirees is to make tax decisions today that will minimize taxes now and in the future. Question: Do you find…

Vivian Gibson Taking care of her elderly parents is Vivian Gibson’s full-time job. The last two weeks in October weren’t so unusual.  She tended to her 86-year-old father for several days in the hospital – another episode in his unending battle with ankle sores stemming from service in the Korean War. Gibson also helped her mother, age 81, get through a medical procedure and chauffeured both parents to more than a dozen doctor’s appointments and to their dentist. Her mother has been dealing with a pulled tooth, along with abnormal cells in her bladder and an abnormal EKG. In addition to their medical needs, Gibson helps them with everything else, from cleaning and dressing her father’s wound daily to buying…

The staff at Squared Away  hope our readers enjoy their time with family and friends during the holiday weekend…

Just hours after the following blog went live on Tuesday, major media reported that a Texas judge blocked implementation of the new overtime regulation in response to challenges by a group that included 21 states and businesses. The future of this regulation is now in question. On Dec. 1, an additional 4.2 million U.S. workers will potentially be eligible for overtime pay when the annual earnings cap doubles to $47,476 under the new federal overtime rule. Retail workers bracing for the holiday onslaught will be among those receiving overtime if they work more than 40 hours per week but earn less than $47,476.   The previous cap, $23,660, was set in 2004. Under the new rule, employers must pay overtime to any eligible full-tim…

Retirement experts and financial advisers maintain there is a right way and a wrong way to approach Social Security. For most people, the right way is to view waiting until your late 60s to sign up for benefits as the route to boosting your retirement income and protecting against out-living your savings.  People who delay will have a larger Social Security check to pay the bills that come due every single month for as long as they live. The wrong way is to make a decision based on fear – the fear of losing money if you don’t sign up soon after turning 62, the earliest age allowed under the program.  While you might feel that delaying means losing out,…

“The economy” was the top priority for the vast majority of American people in one poll last summer. Surely, what they were talking about was quality jobs and economic and financial security for themselves and their children. Or as my brother, a father of three and service manager at an auto dealership outside Chicago, put it in a recent text message, “No one can afford anything anymore.” This simple idea seemed to resound throughout the primaries and long presidential campaign. With the election over, I compiled the following wish list for working people based on what the polls and research studies reveal about what they are hoping for. Good jobs. The disruption created by the transition from an industrial to a…

Wyoming government has brought some 535 employees of the state’s executive, legislative and judicial branches into its retirement savings plan since July 2015 under a new policy of automatically enrolling each new hire. They are free to withdraw from the plan at any time, but only 15 of the 535 have done so – “and not a complaint from anybody,” said Polly Scott, who manages the savings plan and heads employee retirement education. This technique, borrowed from behavioral economics, addresses the inertia that prevents many people from ever signing up to save in their employer’s plan.  So why wait for them to join? Instead, Wyoming uses inertia to benefit state workers: when people are automatically enrolled, research shows, they tend…

We’ve passed a milestone: workers typically spend more than 10 percent of their incomes for their employer health coverage. A decade ago, they spent 6.5 percent on health costs. One reason for the rising cost burden is the growing prevalence of high-deductible insurance plans, and, within these plans, the deductibles themselves are increasing. Although premium hikes in employer plans have slowed in the past five years, they are also still going up. The nation’s aging work force could be another indirect pressure on costs. Workers’ incomes have also been going up, but growth remained sluggish over the past decade and “have not kept pace” with employer health costs, the Commonwealth Fund reported. Healthcare news in recent weeks has focused on t…