Squared Away Blog

Squared Away periodically alerts readers to information online that might be useful to them.  These three crossed the transom in August: Natural disasters quickly turn into financial disasters. On Hurricane Katrina’s 10th anniversary, the National Endowment for Financial Education and other organizations have released a guide, Disasters and Financial Planning.  The guide includes tips on how to insure properly against hurricanes, floods, or forest fires and how to hire contractors to make repairs after disaster hits. The U.S. Social Security Administration posts a raft of brochures online to explain everything from how to get your newborn’s Social Security number or replace your old one (citizen or non-citizen, international students) to disability information for veterans. There’s also information on federal benefits…

It would be even tougher for Sher Polvinale to get by solely on her late husband’s Social Security check of $1,700 per month if he had not bought a life insurance policy that has paid off their house. Despite her meager financial circumstances, Polvinale’s retirement is rich in rewards. This 69-year-old former payroll administrator for a construction company said she brings in $200,000 in annual donations for her non-profit, which cares for old, unwanted dogs that need expensive medical care and attention. One can’t help thinking, while watching the National Geographic video below about the retired dog sanctuary in her home, that many elderly people would be lucky to have such a place to live out their final years. For financia…

Inequality goes beyond the wealth and income disparities that frequently make it into today’s headlines. Employer benefits also flow more freely to people at the top. The newly released survey of employers by the U.S. Bureau of Labor shows how stark the differences are. The charts below compare the share of private-sector workers in the lowest income bracket who receive benefits – their earnings are in the bottom 25 percent of all U.S. workers’ earnings – with the share in the top 25 percent. Four benefits are compared: health insurance, the percent of health premiums paid by employers, paid sick leave, and – since it’s August – paid vacations.                       For…

One-third of 18-24 year olds in a new Allstate poll said the best use of their extra funds is getting their college or other debts off their backs. For those considering making larger payments, a loan amortization table demonstrates the impact. Paying down debt is just another form of saving, and larger loan payments significantly shorten the time it takes to pay it off, while reducing the total interest paid. Start with the $5,000 loan example already loaded into a Bankrate.com student loan amortization calculator: Paying $96.66 per month on a $5,000 student loan with 6 percent interest eliminates it in five years. An extra $50 every month – a couple of nights out – knocks two years off the payment…

Gray, small, and distinctly female. This is what the director of MIT’s AgeLab, Joseph Coughlin, sees when he peers into the future of retirement. “The context and definition of retirement is changing,” Coughlin said earlier this month at the Retirement Research Consortium meeting, where nearly two dozen researchers also presented their Consortium-funded work on a range of retirement topics. Their research summaries can be found at this link to the Center for Retirement Research, which supports this blog and is a consortium member. Coughlin spooled out a list of stunning facts to impress on his audience the dramatic impact of rising longevity and graying populations in the developed world, and he urged them to think in fresh ways about retirement…

Saving for retirement is more crucial for Millennials than for any prior generation. Data are emerging that reveal how they’re doing. Vanguard’s 2014 data from its large 401(k) client base shows that 67 percent of young adults between 25 and 34 who are covered by an employer plan are saving – this is well above a decade ago. A survey recently by the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies found evidence that this generation makes retirement a priority: a majority of working adults in their 20s and early 30s – now the largest single demographic group in the U.S. labor force – view retirement benefits as “a major factor in their decision on whether to accept a future job offer.” This…

Traditional Medicare with a Medigap plan or Medicare Advantage? My Aunt Carol in Orlando wrestled with this decision for some five hours in sessions with her Medicare adviser, which she followed up with multiple phone calls – and a raft of additional questions. “You have to ask these questions. You really have to think about it,” she said. “It’s confusing.” Essentially every 65-year-old American enrolls in Medicare, and many get additional coverage. One form of additional coverage is through supplements to traditional Medicare, which include a Part D prescription drug plan and/or a Medigap private insurance plan to cover some or all of Medicare’s co-payments, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket costs. The other is through Medicare Advantage, a managed care option…

Why do older workers retire before they’d planned? How has the Affordable Care Act affected retirees in particular? And what’s known about U.S. immigrants’ wealth levels and Social Security contributions? Researchers from around the country will present their findings on these and a range of other retirement topics during the 17th annual meeting of the Retirement Research Consortium, starting today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. For the meeting agenda, click here. The Consortium’s members are the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College (which supports this blog), the NBER Retirement Research Center, and the University of Michigan Retirement Research Center. The studies being presented are all funded by the U.S. Social Security Administration through the Consortium’s members…

Shirley Floyd Things are looking up for Shirley Floyd of Chicago. Her daughter just earned a college scholarship, and Floyd has landed a better job. The new job requires the 37-year-old to stand on a concrete floor, sometimes 10 to 12 hours a day, inserting automobile gaskets into cardboard sleeves for shipping. But her earnings, including overtime, are much larger than her $216 biweekly paychecks in 2014, when she was a part-time home health aide. When Floyd was unable to keep her head above water last year, she received a financial lifeline from a program run by the Center for Economic Progress in Chicago. Under the pilot program, which was supported and funded by the Chicago mayor’s office and housing…

How much teenagers must borrow for college often depends on whether their parents can help foot the bill – and how much they can afford. Fresh data from a survey by Sallie Mae, the private college lender, shed light on how low-, middle- and high-income families find the money to pay for a college education. The data break down how much of students’ total costs – tuition, plus books, room and board, fees, living expenses, and transportation – come from earnings, savings, borrowing, grants or other sources. Here’s what stands out in the data, which are displayed in this chart: In low-income families, the students themselves take responsibility for saving, earning or borrowing money to cover 32 percent of their…

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services just introduced a five-star rating system for home health agencies on its Medicare.gov website. The ratings, based on patient surveys, were rolled out on the heels of recent upgrades to the government’s nursing home ratings, which had been criticized for giving high ratings to some facilities with problems. Consumers can search, by area code, for home health agencies, or they can look up specific agencies that they’ve heard about or seen in the neighborhood.  (Some agencies listed on the website are unrated.) Separately, Kaiser Health News also culled the government ratings to compile its own list of the lowest- and highest-ranked agencies for many states.   But according to Medicare.gov, most agencies “fall ‘in…

Celebrated scholar Jared Diamond doesn’t mince words in exploring “the low status of the elderly in the United States” in the above Ted video. An obvious example is beer, which older people are known to buy and consume. Yet, Diamond asks, “When’s the last time you saw a beer ad that depicts smiling people 85 years old? Never.” Diamond, who is himself closing in on 80, has developed many specialties – traditional societies, geography, evolutionary biology, and physiology (to name a few) – which give him license to paint with a broad brush, as he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning, “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.” His sobering lecture on the elderly ends on a positive not…