Squared Away Blog

About one out of every five Latinx workers in this country lacks health insurance. The uninsured ratio rises to one in four in the states that have chosen not to expand their Medicaid programs to more low-income workers under the Affordable Care Act. The motivation for Josefina Flores Morales’ new research is that there’s more to health insurance than just medical care. It is also critical to individuals’ financial health, she argues, and broader insurance coverage in the Latinx community is an underappreciated way that the vast wealth gap between them and non-Latinx White workers could be reduced. Having insurance keeps people healthy so they can continue to work and is important for other financial reasons. Insurance reduces the size of medica…

A popularized image of parents who struggle when adult children move back home is not shaping up as an accurate picture of the arrangements. Unemployment, divorce, college graduation – adult children in their 20s and 30s move back into a parent’s home for many reasons. And the parents can have all sorts of reactions, good and bad, to their boomeranging kids. Some parents get stressed out by young adults who return home because they need financial support. Others welcome having the kids back to pad the empty nest, help with household chores, or help pay the bills. The return home isn’t necessarily a one-time thing either. “As they attempt to gain financial independence, adult children may alternate between living on…

For the sliver of retirees who are far behind in paying their own or their children’s student loans, Social Security can withhold part of their benefits to pay the loans back. But college has gotten much more expensive since the baby boomers attended, and loan delinquencies are higher among working people and especially Black Americans. When today’s Black workers retire, their estimated household delinquency rate will be 5.4 percent – well more than double the rate for White and Hispanic retirees. The question is how withholding Social Security benefits will impact the financial security of these future retirees. In cases where the federal government withholds some benefits, it garnishees the lesser of 15 percent of a delinquent borrower’s monthly retirement…

Walk into a restaurant, retail store or hotel, and you might encounter a manager who seems to be doing the same tasks as the people he’s managing. Maybe you’re in one of those jobs. A lawsuit by employees against a retail store revealed how meaningless the title of manager can be: the store managers were “stocking shelves, running cash registers, unloading trucks and cleaning parking lots, floors and bathrooms.” Hardly the types of responsibilities that go with overseeing one’s coworkers. The employees were suing for overtime pay under a Depression-era federal law to receive back pay for overtime when they worked more than 40 hours per week. Employers are exempt from paying overtime under this rule, however, if the employ…

The net benefit of the programs to the middle class dwarfs the $153,000 in average net benefits for retired households in the top fifth of the lifetime earnings distribution, and it also exceeds the $196,000 gain for the bottom fifth. The middle class is defined as the second, third, and fourth of the five earnings groups the researchers analyzed in this study. The annual data used to calculate the health spending and payment estimates for this analysis are adjusted for inflation. Second, the taxes the middle class pays to fund Medicare and Medicaid are less than is paid by the top earners. Middle-income workers and retirees have a lower marginal tax rate for the portion of their federal and stat…

“Is it medically necessary for a person to be able to chew?” Dr. Lisa Simon, a physician and dentist at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, asks. This is a serious question for older Americans in fragile health. I know a 93-year-old man whose teeth problems make it extremely difficult for him to eat meat and many other foods on the dinner table. Two-thirds of retirees do not have dental insurance, which means they may decide to forgo getting expensive dental care. The importance of dental care to nutrition and health is also an equity issue for older Blacks and low-income retirees, who are more likely to be missing all of their teeth. Medicare has historically paid for very few dental procedures…

Starting months before my 65th birthday, my mailbox has been swamped with advertisements for Medicare Advantage insurance plans. The ads are still coming in. And then there are the television commercials with promises of Advantage plan benefits that original Medicare doesn’t cover – vision, dental, hearing services, rides to doctors’ appointments, zero premiums. Sounds amazing, doesn’t it? The advertising blitz surely has contributed to the doubling in Advantage plan enrollment since 2013, to 28 million last year. The plans are overtaking Medigap plans, which the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund estimates do not bring in as much profit for brokers as Advantage plans. It is true that the vast majority of Advantage plans provide some type of vision, dental and hearing coverage. And retirees with these benefits in…

The researchers found that the stresses and financial strains on parents from the Depression’s extraordinarily high unemployment over a protracted period of time did long-term damage to the health and careers of their children that persisted late into their lives. In a separate but related paper, they also found that people exposed to the Depression in utero experienced an acceleration in the aging process after age 75. “The shock of the Great Depression was massive and everyone, no matter what group they belonged to, was to some extent impacted,” concluded the researchers, Valentina Duque and Lauren Schmitz. For a whole host of reasons, a parent’s loss of income and joblessness have a huge impact on their children’s development and socioeconomic status, which in…

Scores on 8th grade standardized math tests dropped during the pandemic, reversing a large part of the gains students had made since the 1990s. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona called the news last October “appalling.” But declining scores only confirmed for many parents what they had witnessed as their children struggled to engage in classes conducted over Zoom when the schools were closed down. Now comes some of the fallout. The decline in math scores between 2019 and 2022 is expected to reduce the lifetime earnings for the average student by nearly 2 percent, or $19,400 in today’s dollars, according to a new study. This may not sound like a lot spread out over a decades-long career. But think about…

Applying for federal disability benefits is a precarious situation for workers who were either forced, or have chosen, to quit their jobs due to an injury or chronic medical condition. There are no guarantees an application will be approved, and it can be hard to find a job after waiting months for a decision on whether they qualify for the benefits. In new research documenting how long individuals wait for a decision on their initial disability applications to a Social Security Administration (SSA) field office, the average ranges from about seven to nine months. The entire process can take twice as long if SSA denies the request for benefits and the applicant appeals within the agency or to an administrative law judg…

As the lower-paid sex, women have no shortage of insecurities about their retirement finances. Only one in five working women feels “very confident” of being able to retire comfortably, the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies reports in its annual retirement survey. More than half say they don’t earn enough or have too much debt to leave a lot of room for saving. Four in 10 expect to retire after 70 or not at all. These insecurities probably reflect, to some extent, the poor retirement preparedness of Americans as a whole, not just women. In fact, women have made significant strides over the past half-century. A new study documenting their personal and economic progress since the 1970s finds that their financial standing, compared with men, has…

Older Americans who want to be smart about retirement finances are curious about the intricacies of Social Security. The blog that drew the most traffic from our readers last year – “The Bridge to a Larger Social Security Check” – suggested a strategy for getting more out of the program: delay signing up for Social Security by withdrawing savings from a 401(k) to pay the bills. Each year that Social Security is postponed adds 7 percent to 8 percent to a retiree’s monthly benefit check. A couple of years of delay, funded with savings, can provide significantly more money, month after month, to pay the bills. The researchers concluded from an experiment that asked older workers to consider the delay strategy…