Squared Away Blog

Rising levels of credit card debt are a good thing and a bad thing. And they are definitely rising: during the final three months of 2015, Americans added $52.4 billion to what they owe on their credit cards, according to a new CardHub report based on Federal Reserve Board data. For context, that is nearly as much as was added to cards in all of 2014. Spending rises when consumers have jobs or get better jobs and when the economy is growing, as it is now, said Lowell Ricketts, an analyst with the Center for Household Financial Stability at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. With incomes increasing, he said, “they’re in a stronger position to make those investments…

A nearly three-fold increase over the past decade in the number of fraud and related complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission has pushed the total to 1.7 million filings in 2015, according to the government’s consumer 2015 data book released this month. As Squared Away reported recently, older Americans are often the most vulnerable, as their cognitive abilities decline or they become more socially isolated. Not surprisingly, the FTC said Florida had the highest rate of reported fraud per resident last year (followed by Georgia, Michigan, Texas, and Nevada). One reason for the increase in complaints is that people are increasingly aware of fraud and more likely to report it. Another is that fraud-reporting agencies such as law enforcement…

Taxes are not as inevitable as most people assume. As the chart shows, the share of Americans paying federal income taxes falls precipitously after age 60. Young adults often have little or no tax liability, because they’re either in school or aren’t yet earning very much. Older people revert to a similar picture, after having paid taxes all their lives. The peak occurs around age 50, when nearly 80 percent of households pay federal income taxes. That share plummets to half at age 65 and to just over a third at 70, according to The Hamilton Project at The Brookings Institution, which produced the chart. [The chart is based on 2007 data; there may be some changes in current data,…

Privately financed college loans were less than 10 percent of the $1.3 trillion in unpaid student debt last year, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bulk of student loans are funded by the federal government. But the minority who borrow from private financial institutions often learn painful lessons after graduation: it is much more difficult to negotiate affordable repayment plans with private lenders. Private loans are unlike federal student loans, which have standardized repayment options and procedures. This blog is intended to help parents and future college students avoid getting into difficult situations in the first place with private loans. Squared Away interviewed two student loan experts at Clearpoint Credit Counseling, an Atlanta non-profit: Terrence Banks, a counselor…

This profile is the first in an occasional series about individual baby boomers who either have retired or are facing the retirement decision.   Jane Kisielius Jane Kisielius is at that age – 63 – when she is being pushed and pulled between the work world and the retirement lifestyle that her husband already inhabits. She retired once – temporarily – in August 2014 from a stressful job as head of the nursing team for the public schools in Quincy, a suburb southeast of Boston. But with her administrative and nursing skills in such demand, she was quickly sucked back into the labor market, this time as a part-time coordinator of a wellness program for Quincy residents. She was asked to…

College graduates learn very quickly that paying hundreds of dollars toward student loans each month makes it difficult to afford things like a nice apartment or a car. But they might not appreciate the long-term consequences of their record levels of borrowing: college debt is an added threat to their retirement security, according to a new study by the Center for Retirement Research. The researchers gauged the debt’s impact by looking down the road to retirement and projecting what would happen if working people of all ages had started out with the same profile as young adults: 55 percent of today’s 20-something households have student debt, and they owe $31,000, on average. College debt has a bearing on retirement security…

First it was the Irish, then Portuguese, then Brazilians – for more than 150 years, Somerville, Massachusetts, absorbed wave after wave of immigrants. Today, hipster professionals are pouring into this city next door to Boston. Somerville rents have shot up as much as 50 percent in 15 years, and a two-bedroom apartment for under $2,000 in a shabby chic neighborhood is a rare find. A similar trend is playing out all over the country – from Boston and Miami to Los Angeles and Seattle – and it’s squeezing working- and middle-class families the most, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. ……

“Lost my husband to 9/11 terror attack” – using heartbreaking stories like these, a U.K. scam that became public last month persuaded some lonely older men to turn their money over to widows. This report is a dramatic illustration of a relationship between loneliness and fraud that has been uncovered in recent research. That study found that people over 50 have been vulnerable to being victimized by fraud in recent years – but the prevalence of fraud was three times higher among people who are extremely depressed or lonely. The 2013 study in the journal Clinical Gerontologist might be the first to examine financial exploitation from the point of view of psychological vulnerability. It was based on a general survey…

The National Council on Aging (NCOA) has redesigned its website providing information for “house rich but cash poor” older people who want to think about tapping their home equity. Home equity – the house’s market value minus the amount owed on the mortgage – remains a largely unused source of income that many older Americans could be putting toward their medical care or to improve their lives. Home equity held by Americans age 62 and over reached $5.76 trillion last year – an increase of nearly 30 percent since 2013. A marker of how much of this retirement resource remains untapped is the small number of federally insured reverse mortgages – about 50,000 – that seniors take out every year against t…

This was going to be a quick blog post about the new student loan repayment program rolled out by the federal government in January. But the differences between it and the seven plans that preceded it were too confusing to figure out on a tight deadline. This isn’t just the view of one cranky blog writer. Craig Lemoine, a financial planning professor and student loan expert at the American College of Financial Services, which trains financial planners, also admits to being confused about the repayment options, which keep increasing in number. If Lemoine were a student, he asked, “How on earth would I know which one to pick?” His confusion pales in comparison with that of a lovely and loved…

It probably doesn’t feel like it, but workers got a decent pay raise in 2015. Inflation last year was an improbably low 0.7 percent, and the fairly strong job market helped, too, by pushing up average hourly wages by 2.6 percent. Together, these translate to nearly a 2 percentage point increase in workers’ pay. Wages rose again in January by one-half percent, which was the second-best monthly increase in the current economic expansion. Minimum wages are also going up in many states. It gets even better, based on an analysis by the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER) in western Massachusetts. An inflation measure designed by AIER that it calls the everyday price index, or EPI, actually declined last year…

Most people in a recent retirement survey fielded by the American College of Financial Services were confident that they had saved enough money to live in comfort in retirement. But how do they know if they’re on-track? Four out of five also flunked the survey’s retirement planning quiz, answering less than 60 percent of its 38 financial questions correctly. What’s striking about the poor results is that the quiz takers were a select and relatively well-off group: 60- to 75-year-olds with at least $100,000 in financial assets, excluding their home equity. A majority of them also have a financial adviser. One would think that people with both investment and retirement experience would do better. This also raises the question of what…