Squared Away Blog

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…

It was Gerry Smythe’s final confirmation he had never quite felt at home working in the Oklahoma airplane manufacturing plant.  When well-meaning coworkers bought a cake to celebrate his and another person’s retirement, they got Smythe’s name wrong on the sign inviting everyone to the break room. At age 63, he until recently was one of the nation’s 10 million older Americans working in physically demanding jobs in difficult conditions. He felt worn down by the factory noise, carbon dust, and standing all night on collapsed arches to assemble cabin floor beams for Boeing 777s.  His requests for a transfer away from the hard floor never went anywhere, he said. “It wasn’t really the job – I kinda liked t…

Like the United States, many European countries are concerned about shoring up their pension systems for their aging populations.  In 2000, Austria took action by introducing a series of small increases in the earliest age at which workers can begin receiving their federal pensions. This reform is gradually phasing out early eligibility entirely. Raising the earliest claiming ages, from 60 to 65 for men and from 55 to 60 for women, will cause them to converge, next year, with the pension program’s standard – or “normal” – retirement ages. Prior to the reform, workers who had signed up for benefits before their normal retirement age received only mild reductions in their monthly benefits.  The reform, in addition to gradually raising t…

High school students who participated in Boston’s summer jobs program in 2015 work on a public beautification and landscaping project. It’s a spring rite in Boston.  The mayor’s office and private and non-profit employers hustle to get ready for a program employing more than 10,000 inner-city teens for the summer. A new study of the summer 2015 participants shows that the high school students made remarkable strides, compared with the kids who applied but were not accepted for the limited number of slots available in the program.  New York and Chicago have similar, large programs. The Boston teens, who are mostly either black or Hispanic and from low-income neighborhoods, improved their job readiness, from showing up on time to developing their…

Social isolation kills – literally. In this video, Professor James Lubben, founding director of Boston College’s Institute on Aging, discusses numerous research studies showing that people who lack a social network of friends or family are more likely to neglect good health practices and to experience psychological distress, cognitive impairment, the common cold, and even death – “it’s on a par with smoking,” he said. Seniors become particularly vulnerable to becoming isolated as they decline physically, but isolation then makes them more vulnerable to worsening health. Social health should “be as important as mental health and as physical health,” said Lubben, who also is a professor of social work here at Boston College. Summers are a fun and busy tim…

The economy keeps chugging along, unemployment has been bobbing at or below 5 percent all year, and wages have been creeping up. Yet anxiety is rising, according to a newly released survey by Northwestern Mutual.  In February, 85 percent of Americans said they had “financial anxiety,” particularly about how they would pay for an unexpected emergency or medical bill. And here’s how financial anxiety affects them: 70 percent say it reduces their “happiness,” their mood, or their ability to pursue their dreams, passions, and interests. 67 percent say it impairs their health. 61 percent say it has a negative effect on their home life. 51 percent say it has a negative effect on their social life. For more than half,…

A small group of researchers at the Center for Retirement Research, which sponsors this blog, produces a large volume of analysis of the nation’s state and local government pension funds. Their work isn’t typical of the personal finance information that appears in this blog. But it turns a bright light on the financial condition of the pension funds that millions of state and local government workers and retirees rely on. The bottom line, according to these studies, is that while some funds are in poor condition, many more are managing. The following are short descriptions of the Center’s recent reports, with links to the full reports: The big picture is updated in the new brief, “The Funding of State and…