Squared Away Blog

A Lady Writing By the 17th century, the Netherlands had developed a major financial industry and thriving maritime commerce in goods produced by the country’s textile mills, dairy farms, herring fisheries, and sugar refineries. The resulting large and diverse middle class supplies the rich subject matter for a portrait exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The paintings in “Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer” are grouped into one of the three classes: the upper crust, the middle classes, and the laborers and indigent. The Dutch elite – nobility, textile merchants, and wealthy landowners – commissioned portraits “to express and affirm their status,” according to exhibit materials. These paintings are replete with class symbols, such as…

Many Americans have poor habits around saving for retirement, but tapping a 401(k) to buy holiday gifts seems beyond the pale. Yet that’s precisely what some people do. In a new T. Rowe Price survey of 1,000 adults, 7 percent said they have spent some retirement savings on “holiday spending.” Surprisingly, men are more likely to do so than women, who, the survey indicates, are better at planning ahead for the holiday shopping season. The survey doesn’t specify whether this spending is on gifts or a sleigh ride to grandma’s house, but it doesn’t really matter. When the commercial pressures of Christmas start eating into long-term saving for retirement, it seems to confirm that it’s too easy to withdraw money…

Americans who save for retirement throughout their working lives often hold tight to that savings after they retire. A new study shows they eventually do spend much of this money and sheds light on where it goes. The study focuses on the retirement spending patterns of couples, adding to similar past studies on single retirees. While both spouses are alive, the researchers found that a couple’s wealth remains relatively stable over time – until they start paying for medical care, nursing homes, and other major end-of-life expenses. The researchers examined spending patterns for more than 4,600 households over a 15-year period using a subset of the Health and Retirement Study that collects data on the health and wealth of peo…

Some people might plan to work well into their 60s if they can’t afford to retire, or if they just think they’ll be around a long time. But this strategy is more difficult for women to execute than for men. A study of employer discrimination in hiring found “strong and robust” evidence that female job applicants in their mid-60s were much less likely to be called in for interviews for low-skill jobs than were younger women. Evidence of age discrimination among older men was more mixed, or even non-existent in one occupation. “It seems there was age discrimination for women – no matter what,” said Patrick Button, an economist at Tulane University. To conduct their meticulously designed study, the researchers…

“The best adrenaline rush ever,” says one of the barrage of fantasy sports commercials broadcast into living rooms this football season. An adrenaline rush is known to be a hallmark of addiction to other types of gambling, which can trigger the brain’s pleasure center much like the triggers in a drug addict’s brain, according to University of Cambridge psychologists. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans are playing fantasy football and other sports online for money. The Internet has made this so accessible that it could facilitate the rapid-fire betting associated with problematic gambling. Playing fantasy sports is “as easy as ordering a pizza online … [or] texting your friends,” a relapsed gambler told the New York Times. He said…

Workers are feeling very ambitious these days: one in three plans to retire after age 65. In the 1990s, just one in 10 did. In reality, though, many older Americans today are retiring before they’d planned, resulting in lower monthly Social Security checks, slimmer 401(k) accounts, and more golden years to pay for. There’s no shortage of research looking into what derails these plans. But, for the first time, a new study ran a statistical horse race among the various reasons known to impact older workers’ decisions. Health issues finished first in the race, followed by layoffs, and a spouse’s early retirement. In an ideal world, eliminating these major shocks, along with a few less prevalent shocks that were also analyzed,…

What matters most in retirement is how much money comes in the door every single month. That’s why this blog – and its sponsor, the Center for Retirement Research – hammers away at the wisdom of delaying when you sign up for Social Security in order to increase the size of your monthly checks. So here’s a very quick project for the long Thanksgiving weekend: insert your birthday and earnings into this new online tool to get an anonymous, back-of-the-envelope estimate of how much a delay is worth to you. The age you claim your benefits is crucial, because two out of three households rely on Social Security benefits for more than half of their retirement income. Yet the majority…

People do not like to hear advice from their “elders.” But shouldn’t retirement be an obvious exception? The options for what most workers can do to salvage their retirement finances rapidly narrow as they get closer to retiring. After 50 or so, it’s also tough to find a better job, and only so much can be saved in short bursts – retirement saving requires years of diligence. If you’re still listening, the following is sage advice drawn from two recent New York Life surveys of older workers on the cusp of retirement and octogenarians. Workers in their 50s and early 60s said they started saving too late for retirement. They put the “magic age” at around 26. Automatic savings vehicles…

In an upside-down aspect of long-term care insurance, about one in four older people with a policy who eventually go into a nursing home had let that policy lapse sometime in the previous four years, forfeiting coverage that would’ve paid for their care. The questions are who does this and why. New research by the Center for Retirement Research (CRR) finds two explanations for why: a scarcity of financial resources and cognitive impairment, which limits the elderly’s ability to properly manage their finances, including their long-term care policies. The researchers found no support for what they call “strategic lapsing” – a deliberate decision to quit paying the premiums by healthy older individuals who, upon reconsideration, conclude that their risk of…

Financial planner Diahann Lassus views as misguided the “obsession” some baby boomers have with paying off their mortgage before they retire. But Jane Rose, who has done just that with the loan on her home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, has discovered how liberating it is. “I’m such a happy camper,” she said. The math versus the emotion, the rational versus the irrational, head versus heart – that’s a simple way of framing a complex issue. Many boomers looking ahead to their retirement years are grappling with whether to pay off their mortgage before they retire or shovel any spare funds into their employer’s 401(k). Both arguments have merit for very different reasons. First, the math.   The alternative to paying…

This will not surprise you: men have more money saved for retirement than women. Men averaged $123,262 in their defined contribution plans, compared with $79,572 for women, according to a new report by Vanguard based on its 2014 recordkeeping data. But these figures hide a larger truth: women are actually better at saving for retirement. “Overall, women are better at this but men earn more money so they have higher wealth accumulation,” says Vanguard researcher Jean Young, author of the new report, “Women versus Men in DC Plans.” Young’s research found that women are 14 percent more likely to enroll in a voluntary workplace retirement savings plan. Women save 7 percent of pay, compared with 6.8 percent for men, controlling…

Older workers with jobs that give them a high degree of control and influence or a sense of achievement and independence tend to be healthier, new research finds. The specific benefits of these “psychosocial” aspects of work include lower blood pressure, musculoskeletal agility, better cognitive functioning and improved mental health. They’re equivalent to the health benefits associated with vigorous exercise three times a week, the study found. Researchers long ago established a strong connection between poor health and jobs requiring strenuous physical activity in harsh conditions. This new study looks at a wide array of psychosocial job characteristics increasingly relevant in the New Economy, as well as revisiting the grueling physical characteristics prevalent in the manufacturing-driven economy of the past…