Squared Away Blog

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…

Young people in the noon yoga classes here at Boston College bend, twist, or flatten themselves more easily than their much older classmates. But older people are better savers – 50-year-olds save at more than double the rate of 40-year-olds – and perhaps yoga can explain how this happens. In yoga, one doesn’t immediately balance into Warrior III without toppling over or find the upper-body strength for the Crow pose shown above. It takes practice to build the balance, strength, focus, or flexibility that each pose requires. Only with time do these pretzel-like configurations become less painful and more convincing. Poorly executed poses, practiced and repeatedly improved, are the only path to perfection. Like yoga, saving is also a practic…

It is the most important source of retirement income for most workers. Yet too many older Americans lack a basic understanding of certain aspects of Social Security benefits. In fairness, many people got some key questions right in a survey that quizzed them about the program’s rules and incentives. But a significant minority, and sometimes a majority, revealed a poor understanding of several major features of the program. As the researchers note, misunderstanding Social Security benefits could lead to poor financial decisions about retirement. They analyzed responses by more than 2,300 people – all between ages 50 and 70 – to a nationally representative survey administered online in 2008. The survey, which took about half an hour, started with basic…

Mistakes made during initial Medicare enrollment can be costly. Someone with on-the-job health care coverage who enrolls at age 65 may be paying Medicare premiums unnecessarily. Even worse, retirees who sign up too late incur a penalty for life. “If you’re actively working, that’s the only reason you can enroll late in Medicare” without paying the penalty, Medicare trainer Andy Tartella says in the above video, “The ABCD’s of Medicare,” produced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Medicare has been around for exactly 50 years. But enrolling in the program is a new experience for every single American who turns 65.   To navigate Medicare enrollment and…

Two important U.S. Supreme Court decisions in two years removed not only the obstacles to same-sex marriage but also most of the financial inequities couples faced. The June decision upholding same-sex marriage opened up financial advantages of marriage that either had been completely unavailable to gay and lesbian couples or were complicated by marrying in a different state than the state in which they live. The decision came on the heels of the high court’s 2013 ruling against sections of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, a ruling that made Social Security benefits available to gay and lesbian couples in states that permitted them to marry. In the wake of these decisions, “If marriage is an option and it makes…