Squared Away Blog

The older people who either consider a reverse mortgage or actually get one don’t have much else to fall back on.  Their primary assets – outside of their homes – are a car worth no more than $7,000 and about $2,000 in a checking account. This was one salient fact unearthed about reverse mortgage users – or people who’ve looked into them – in a 2014-2015 survey led by Stephanie Moulton at Ohio State University. This supports a later study by Moulton that found that people who take out the loans tend to be in worse shape financially than other homeowners. The survey provides a more complete picture of who is turning to reverse mortgages – and why other people find…

Resourceful retirees usually weather the financial surprises that come their way. But a handful of unexpected health events can really hurt. The death of a spouse is at the top of the list. Net worth drops by more than $30,000 over a couple of years as retirees pay for the extraordinary medical and other expenses surrounding a spouse’s death. Two serious health conditions also deplete retirees’ assets: strokes and lung disease, which strike about one in five older Americans during their lifetimes, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study funded by the U.S. Social Security Administration that tracked changes in the finances of people 65 and over. Despite the presence of Medicare, a first-time stroke reduces a retired…

Social Security’s old-age pensions were designed to replace more of the earnings of retired low-wage workers than of higher-wage workers. But how is this progressivity affected by the federal income taxes paid by all workers and retirees?  A study by economists at the Center for Retirement Research, which sponsors this blog, analyzed this complex issue and found that income taxes have not had any real impact on the overall progressivity of the Social Security program. To reach this conclusion, the researchers used the actual experiences of older American households contained in survey data linked to their lifetime earnings.  There were several different tax effects to consider. First, the payroll tax that funds Social Security is shared by workers and employers,…

Now that COVID is fading, researchers looking back on the financial assistance passed by Congress during the pandemic are concluding that it helped millions of Americans get through a time of unprecedented distress.   That the assistance would be adequate was not obvious in the midst of the economic turmoil in 2020 as COVID unfolded. But a year into the pandemic, Americans were feeling better off after the infusions of cash from federal relief checks and more generous benefits for laid-off workers that included an extra $600 per month and – for people with assets – soaring house and stock prices. When working-age adults were asked in 2021 how they perceived their finances, 36 percent said they would have troub…

In today’s world, workers need to save if they want to be comfortable in retirement. But there are also limits to what many people can afford. A new study finds that when U.K. workers were automatically enrolled and started contributing to a retirement savings plan, their household debt – credit cards, bank overdrafts, and other unsecured loans – increased. For every 32 to 38 pounds (or $40-48) in combined monthly contributions by the employer and employee, their debt rose by just over 7 pounds (about $9). Stepping back to look at the big picture, this research also confirms the benefit of auto-enrollment: it encourages workers who might not otherwise have saved to get started. And the increase in unsecured debt,…

Americans are known for being reluctant to spend their life savings after they retire. The burning question has always been why. New research comparing tight-fisted Americans with more free-spending Swedes found that U.S. retirees tend to hold on to their savings, because they face more risk of having to pay high out-of-pocket costs in the future for their medical and long-term care. U.S. households, by the time they’re in their late 80s, have tapped only about one-third of the net worth they held in their late 60s, according to the study. Swedish households in their late 80s have spent more than three-fourths. In preliminary findings presented at an August meeting of the Retirement Research Consortium in Washington, researcher Irina Telyukova…

The tax landscape shifts suddenly when most Americans leave the labor force to retire.  The single most important thing to remember is that income taxes can fall dramatically, because retirement incomes are typically lower and because all or a portion of your Social Security benefits will be tax-exempt. This was among the tax insights supplied by Vorris J. Blankenship, a retirement tax planner near Sacramento, California, who has just finished the 2015 edition of his 5-inch thick “Tax Planning for Retirees.”   The following is an edited version of tax information he supplied to Squared Away: Lower taxes in retirement. Brian and Janet are a hypothetical couple renting an apartment in Nevada, a state with no income tax. In 2013, Brian…

Older Americans who are in debt are choosing to delay their retirement, researchers conclude in a new working paper. In earlier findings released last summer, the researchers, Barbara Butrica and Nadia Karamcheva of the Urban Institute, documented the growing prevalence of borrowing since the late 1990s among adults ages 62 through 69. Median debt levels among those who owe also surged from $19,000 to $32,100, adjusted for inflation – and debts as a share of their assets increased. Now comes the rest of the story. When the researchers controlled for health, financial assets, home values, and other forms of wealth, as well as spouses’ earnings and other factors that play into decisions about retiring, they found that individuals with debt,…

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…

Employers beware: changing your retirement plan’s design can have unfortunate, unintended consequences for your employees. That’s what happened to the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) for federal workers, says a new study by a team of researchers for the NBER Retirement and Disability Research Center. Like many private-sector savings plans, the $500 billion TSP – one of the nation’s largest retirement plans – has automatic enrollment. Federal employees can make their own decision about how much they want to save and, in a separate decision, how to invest their money. But if they don’t do anything, their employer will automatically do it for them. In 2015, the TSP changed its automatic, or default, investment from a government securities fund to a…

Nursing homes are usually at the bottom of people’s list of places for their parents. A workable and little-known alternative is available in many states: adult foster care. This PBS video about Oregon’s program features a suburban Portland woman, Carmel Durano, who provides 24-hour care in her home for five elderly people, including her mother. Durano has been a good solution for Steve Larrence’s 99-year-old mother. He feels comfortable with Durano and lives in the same neighborhood, so he can walk over anytime to talk to his mother.  “You don’t feel like you’re in an institution. You feel like you’re living with a family,” Larrence said in the video. Durano is part of a network of more than 1,500…

In 2007, the majority of workers in The Netherlands were retiring by their early sixties to take advantage of the country’s generous pension scheme. Then came a sweeping 2009 policy that rewarded older workers with a tax break if they remained employed and active. In a new study, researchers used this tax break – the Doorwerkbonus, or continued work bonus – to ask the question: do people who worked longer in response to this policy also live longer?  The short answer is “no” for women but “yes” for men. Delaying retirement increased men’s lifespans by three months, compared with a group that was not eligible for the bonus, possibly because working longer improved their health. The tax break was t…