Squared Away Blog

September 22, 2022

Need for Low-Cost Retiree Housing is Urgent

San Francisco is caught in the vortex of two powerful forces: a fast-growing retiree population and rising rents.

Residents over 60 are expected to make up a fourth of the city’s residents by 2030, according to this video project for The San Francisco Standard by Chris Chang, a student in the University of California, Berkeley’s graduate journalism school.

And San Francisco rents, after collapsing during the pandemic as people left the city, are on the rise again. A one-bedroom apartment is going for $3,100 per month – second only to New York City – despite a rent control policy that limits annual rent increases.

A San Francisco retiree with an unusually onerous rent burden is Shao Yan-Zhen, whom Chang interviewed for the video. The rent soaks up nearly 70 percent of her and her husband’s modest retirement monthly income. They have been on a waiting list for a federally subsidized apartment for two decades and are among the two-thirds of retirees nationwide who qualify for the assistance but can’t get it due largely to a shortage of rental housing. …Learn More

September 20, 2022

Older and Self-Employed – a Satisfied Group

The transition to retirement can take many paths.

A couple years ago, Joelle Abramowitz at the University of Michigan described three groups of self-employed workers over 50. The bulk of them work independently, either as independent contractors or doing odd jobs, and are more often minorities, with very low pay and few employee benefits. Think Uber driver. The other two groups are business managers and business owners, who are predominantly white, male and in good financial shape.

In a follow-up to her earlier research, Abramowitz dug into 24 years of data to understand the self-employed older workers’ attitudes toward work and the transition to retirement. She found a heterogeneous group with a range of views about whether they are transitioning at all.

The independent contractors and workers stand out for being more likely to describe themselves as “partially retired.” Although they are self-employed, they apparently have their eyes on retiring. In addition to gig workers, they might be a caregiver, a stylist in someone else’s salon, or someone who drives people to the airport for a chauffeur company.

These workers have started their current jobs more recently than the owners and managers and say the work itself is not particularly stressful, which could indicate one of two things – that the job is less challenging than their past work or that its main purpose is just to generate extra income to bridge the financial gap to full retirement.

The owners and managers are much less likely to consider themselves in any stage of being retired, even though their roles may be changing. Their level of engagement reflects that. They usually work 30 to 40 hours and feel more stressed than the independent self-employed workers or older employees who are still on a company payroll. …Learn More

September 15, 2022

The Bridge to a Larger Social Security Check

Retirees who postpone collecting Social Security from age 62 to 66 – the full retirement age for most baby boomers – get around a third more in their monthly checks. Delaying to 70 increases it even more.

There’s one problem with this strategy. Many people want to retire well before they turn 66.

But there is an alternative for people with 401(k) savings: retire but don’t sign up for Social Security and withdraw an amount from the 401(k) equivalent to the Social Security check. Then delay Social Security for a few years. The start date will, of course, depend on how much money is in savings and how much of it the retiree can spend comfortably.

In a recent experiment, this idea appealed to a substantial minority of older workers who were made aware they could create this so-called “bridge” to a larger Social Security check.

The researchers randomly assigned the workers – all between 50 and 65 – to one of four groups. Each group was presented with the same choice of whether to use the bridge strategy but the choice was described differently. Regardless of the description, the share of participants willing to consider the strategy fell within a range of 27 percent to 35 percent.

This level of interest is “noteworthy,” given that “the survey is likely the first time the respondents would have encountered the idea of drawing down their 401(k)s to postpone claiming Social Security,” said the researchers at the Center for Retirement Research. …Learn More

September 13, 2022

How Disabilities are Tied to Food Insecurity

People with disabilities have high rates of food insecurity because they earn less or can’t work at all. Add to that their unusually large expenses for health care and assistive equipment like wheelchairs and special computers.

But the roots of food insecurity run deeper than just the financial constraints. Even middle-income people with disabilities are more food insecure, which the USDA defines as either deficiencies in nutrition or not having enough to eat.

Part of the problem is where they tend to live, according to a new Urban Institute study. Counties with unusually large disability populations have fewer places to shop for groceries and an oversupply of fast food restaurants, convenience stores, and small grocery stores with limited shelf space. Snack foods and sweet beverages are abundant in these establishments but the selection of fruits, vegetables and lean meats is limited.

A shortage of stores that sell healthy food is a bigger problem in the cities with the highest disability rates than in similar rural areas, the researchers found. But food deserts – a shortage of options for grocery shopping – are more concentrated in the less populated Southeast and Appalachia, as well as rural pockets in Maine, Michigan and New Mexico. The researchers used two sources of disability data: general disability rates in the U.S. Census, as well as data on people with disabilities severe enough to qualify them for Social Security benefits.

Two rural municipalities dramatically illustrate the difference in access to food establishments between areas with high and low disability rates. One in four residents reported having a disability in Hickman, a city tucked into the southwestern corner of Kentucky. But Hickman has fewer than three establishments that sell food for each 1,000 residents.

At the other extreme, Billings, Montana’s disability rate is half that of Hickman’s and there are 13 food establishments per 1,000 residents. …Learn More

September 8, 2022

Keeping Your Cool in Salary Negotiations

One big problem people have when negotiating for a job or a raise is that they get in their own way. Negotiating unleashes a brew of emotions – fear of rejection, a lack of confidence, doubts – that can sabotage them. The British have coined a word for this type of anxiety: collywobbles.

Moshe Cohen, author of “Collywobbles: How to Negotiate When Negotiations Make You Nervous,” consults with companies and individuals on leadership and negotiation strategies. But his idea for the book came out of the graduate classes on negotiation he teaches at Boston University. Cohen realized that even when students are fully prepared for a negotiation, they will choke in the moment. He agreed to share some of his insights in the book, which examines negotiating from the perspective of someone who has anxiety. He recently published his second book inspired by the pandemic lockdown: “Optimism is a Choice and Other Timeless Ideas.”

What are collywobbles and how do they manifest in salary negotiations?  

Collywobbles is a British term that means butterflies in your stomach. And people get nervous when they go to negotiate. I wrote “Collywobbles” for a student who works full-time and negotiates every day for her boss but can’t negotiate with her boss because she gets too nervous. She works really hard and never gets that raise or promotion because she never asks for it. The question I answer in my book is: how does she overcome that?

Are women worse negotiators than men and why?

Yes, for two reasons. One is socialization. Generally, I think women are brought up to be more aware of and care about relationships, and they fear that if they advocate for themselves they’re going to damage relationships. Men are socialized to be much more oblivious to those things and freer to ask for things. Men will do things that might damage the relationship but aren’t aware they’re doing it.

The second thing is society’s expectations. If women are strong self-advocates, very often there’s a backlash and they get punished for it in ways that men don’t. If I, as a man, am pushy at my job, I’m seen as a go-getter. If you’re pushy, you’re seen as a bitch. The combination of how society socializes women and how it responds to women is a really intimidating factor.

How about people of color?

I’m certainly not an expert on that but here’s what I’ve observed. One exercise I give my students is that they have to go out and ask for stuff until 10 people say no. They can go to stores and ask for discounts – anything. An African student came to me and said, “How can I ask for a discount when the second I walk into a store employees start following me around?” Once again, context is important. Do people negotiate differently when they’re in a context where they feel comfortable and less likely to incur a backlash? African students negotiate very differently here than they do in Africa where they may have a societal status that entitles them to ask for more. When they’re in this country, they’re just seen as a minority. …
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September 6, 2022

Women Get Less from Workers’ Comp

Women receive less medical care for their health problems than men with the same conditions, research shows. And doctors are more likely to tell women their symptoms are emotional rather than physical.

Differential treatment for men and women also exists in another corner of the healthcare system: workers’ compensation claims.

Women injured on the job who are evaluated by female doctors are more likely to be determined to have an injury that qualifies them for workers’ comp benefits than when the doctors are men, according to Marika Cabral at the University of Texas at Austin and Marcus Dillender at Vanderbilt University.

Among the women whose injuries are under review, the evaluations performed by female doctors result in 9 percent more benefits than evaluations by male doctors.

In contrast, the likelihood of the men in the study receiving benefits and the dollar amount of their benefits are about the same regardless of whether their doctors are men or women.

The researchers said their findings are consistent with male doctors evaluating female patients against a stricter standard than male patients, while female doctors apply similar standards to all their patients.Learn More

September 1, 2022

Suburban ‘Rent Deserts’ are a Problem

Boston, a city of fewer than 1 million people, is surrounded by layers and layers of suburbs linked to the city by subways, ferries, and a commuter rail. The suburbs’ opposition to a new state law requiring them to zone some land for apartments illustrates why U.S. rental housing is scarce and rents have soared.

The sprawling town of Hamilton, with 8,000 residents, told The Boston Globe that rental housing will “destroy the well-being of our community.” Other municipalities warn their schools, infrastructure, and police and fire departments will be overwhelmed by population increases or that they don’t have enough land to accommodate multifamily rental properties.

Not all of Boston’s suburbs are opposed to building more multifamily housing. Before the state law passed, the city of Newton had already started revamping its zoning regulations to encourage more rental properties around transit stops. But three out of four of the 23,000 lots in Newton are currently zoned for single family homes.

Suburban neighborhoods around the country account for more than two-thirds of “rental deserts,” according to a report by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. The deserts are mostly white and mostly higher-income, and less than 20 percent of their housing stock is rentals, compared to a range of 50 percent to 80 percent in areas with ample rental properties. Low inventories nationwide have fueled double-digit rent increases from Idaho to Florida.

In the city of Boston, house prices have skyrocketed, so suburbs with mass transit are somewhat more affordable for lower- and middle-income workers who commute downtown to their jobs. But rental deserts, with their “not-in-my-backyard politics” are “a significant factor in limiting opportunities for rental households and for lower-income renters in particular,” the housing center said. …Learn More