Squared Away Blog

The first baby boomers will turn 80 in 2026. Arranging in-home care by nurses, home health aides, physical and occupational therapists, or social workers will become a pressing concern for growing numbers of Americans. To sketch out the home care landscape, Squared Away interviewed Carol Levine, director of the families and health care project at the United Hospital Fund, a New York non-profit. She’s written widely on long term care, from academic articles to her new book, “Planning for Long-Term Care for Dummies.” Is it logical that baby boomers will try to avoid nursing or assisted living facilities and will view home care as the way to go – at least for as long as possible? You’re right. Most people,…

Millennial women may have higher expectations about their financial prospects than their baby-boomer mothers. But Millennial women, just like their mothers, are earning less than their male counterparts and saving less for retirement. The vast majority of single and married men and women, ages 22 through 33, said they recognize the need to save, whether as a defense against economic uncertainty or in response to the onus on each U.S. worker to prepare for his or her own retirement. A major reason cited for not saving is “not having enough money to save right now.”  This is especially germane for women: for example, the median annual income for Millennial women is $45,000, while their male counterparts earn $61,000. Women, on…

Financial knowledge is critical to one’s retirement security, finds a new study showing that 401(k) plan participants who scored higher on a test of their financial knowledge earned an additional 1.3 percentage points of investment returns annually on their retirement accounts. Over a 30-year working life, that higher rate of return would add 25 percent to total savings at retirement. Readers can take the quiz by clicking here; answers appear at the end of this blog post. ……

Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont, Wisconsin, California and Maine – these states may be the best places to grow old. They came out on top in AARP’s new State Scorecard based on their access, cost and the quality of their care services for aging adults and on their supports for the most common form of caregiver – family members. To see your state’s overall ranking, run your cursor over the map below. To see how your state ranks on other measures, click here. Enid Kassner, an AARP vice president who helped developed the rankings, said the Scorecard is useful to the leading edge of the baby boom generation, who will start turning 80 in 12 years. For example,…

Retiree health benefits are a luxury item. In 2013, just 28 percent of government and private-sector employers with more than 200 employees offered health benefits to their retiring workers, down from 66 percent in 1988, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. These plans are popular with workers, but their declining prevalence has a silver lining. A long history of research shows that people who can retain their employer health benefits if they retire tend to retire earlier, confident they’ll be insulated from extraordinary medical expenses that could wipe out their savings. Here’s the silver lining when retirees lose that coverage: by inducing them to remain in the labor force longer, perhaps until their Medicare starts, it improves their retirement security…

Waiting to claim Social Security is good for retirees’ financial health – none more so than the U.S. Latino population. This message is delivered in Spanish in the above video, “El Seguro Social: Vale la Pena Esperar.” The video was produced by the National Academy of Social Insurance, a policy research non-profit, and Squared Away found it on the website of Latinos & Economic Security. Latinos & Economic Security, which is part of UCLA’s Center for Policy Research on Aging, said Latinos make up 7 percent of the U.S. population age 65 and older. But due to their lower incomes during their working years, Latinos are more reliant on Social Security than are Asian-American, African-American and white, non-Latino retirees, t…

Older people often wonder why young adults get tattoos that they’ll later want to remove. In this Ted video, psychologist Dan Gilbert says tattoos are a good example of a universal error in thinking. ……

Sudden changes in older workers’ financial expectations for retirement can cause depression, according to a 2011 study. The study, which came out of the Netherlands, suggests that cuts in Dutch pensions, announced on very short notice, produced feelings of differential treatment and a loss of control that increased the incidence of depression among the workers who were adversely affected. Workers were tested for depression two years after a 2006 pension reform reduced the share of their salaries replaced by the government-mandated defined benefit pension plans provided by employers. Workers born in 1950 and after suddenly learned their “replacement rate” – the percent of pay the pension replaces – would drop to 64 percent, from the 70 percent initially promised.  Everyon…

State and local government workers have long felt their pensions were more secure than the vanishing pension coverage in the private sector.  But a spate of changes to cost-of-living protections should give them pause. In the wake of the Great Recession, 17 states reduced, suspended, or eliminated cost-of-living increases (COLAs) in their defined benefit pensions for state and local workers, according to a recent summary of legislative actions around the country by the Center for Retirement Research, which sponsors this blog.  And the courts are backing them up, deciding that the inflation protections – a fixture of the majority of public pensions – do not have the same constitutional or other legal protections that apply to core benefits. The COLA…

Are people who claim their Social Security retirement benefits when they’re 62 too sick or impaired to work? Fast forward three years, to when these early claimers turn 65.  They’re about as healthy as those who decided to wait until age 65 to start receiving their Social Security retirement benefits, according to preliminary findings from a study using Medicare spending data as a proxy for health.  The early claimers are also far healthier than people who left the labor force early to go on federal disability. Some 8,500 older Americans were in the study’s sample, and they fell into four different groups: those who claimed a reduced Social Security pension soon after turning 62; those who claimed a larger pension…

Dementia is a critical personal finance issue when so much is at stake in managing, investing, and spending one’s lifetime savings.  But one study found that, in the vast majority of older couples, the person in charge of managing the household finances continues to do so after dementia sets in. Dementia can be difficult to perceive in oneself or a spouse or parent, because changes are usually so gradual, psychologists say. Individuals can now get a rough assessment of their own or a loved one’s cognitive abilities with a test posted on the website of Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center in Columbus. Spokeswoman Elaine Scahill said more than 900,000 people have downloaded the test since it went online in…

Americans have a very good chance of entering a long-term care facility. New research at the Center for Retirement Research, which sponsors this blog, finds that 44 percent of older men and 58 percent of older women will likely enter such a facility for at least a short stay. Only 29 percent of adults age 40 and over, however, are “extremely” or “very” confident they’ll have enough resources to pay for such care, or for other types of care they may need in old age, according to a survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, an independent survey organization based at the University of Chicago. The AP-NORC poll also revealed that people are poorly informed about how…