May 12, 2022

Got a Retirement Plan? Race Plays a Role

The following statistic will sound familiar since I use it regularly: about half of U.S. workers are not saving enough and may see their standard of living drop when they retire.

A major culprit in this poor state of preparedness is that millions of Americans at any given moment don’t have a traditional pension or 401(k) savings plan at work.

A new study takes a close look at who these people are and shows stark differences along racial lines. A large majority of Hispanic workers in the private sector – two out of every three – do not have access to a pension or 401(k)-style plan, and more than half of Black workers do not have access. Although the numbers are lower for Asians (45 percent) and whites (42 percent), they are still substantial.

Other estimates of private sector coverage, also from this study by John Sabelhaus of the Brookings Institution, show big gaps between high- and low-paid workers and workers with and without college degrees, and at large and small employers.

Coverage also varies from state to state: In Pennsylvania, 41 percent lack access to a retirement plan, but in Florida, 59 percent do not have coverage.

Sabelhaus is certainly not the first to document disparities in retirement plan access for different demographic groups. But his methodology advanced the ball, resulting in more reliable estimates. By using three data sources, he could compensate for their shortcomings while taking advantage of the unique information in each one. He combined recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the IRS, and the Federal Reserve Board. …Learn More

February 1, 2022

Every Caregiver’s Challenge is Unique

Caregivers for loved ones with dementia experience their duties in ways that are unique to the individuals they’re caring for.

Some wrestle with the behavioral issues of the people in their care, while others must balance caregiving and work or struggle to navigate the Medicaid system, line up day care, or track down a reliable in-home professional.

“There is no one way to care for a loved one who has dementia,” says Amy Goyer, caregiver and author of “Juggling Life, Work and Caregiving.”

Goyer feels that every caregiver’s perspective could be useful to someone else going through the same thing. She recently hosted a webinar that opened a window on the lives of three Pennsylvania caregivers – one for a father, one for a husband, and one for a partner’s mother.

The three women had a couple things in common, including the stress of shouldering the burden and the strain on their finances of paying for the all-day care that family members required, especially in the later stages of dementia.

But the similarities ended there. To understand the variety and depth of each person’s experience, there is no substitute for hearing directly from them in this webinar, which was sponsored by AARP, the Alzheimer’s Association, and the Pennsylvania Association of Area Agencies on Aging.

Here are snippets of their stories:

Robin Madison’s husband had Lewy body dementia, and Madison had four jobs: wife, mother, breadwinner, and caregiver. Her husband was 18 years older, and she was fully aware that she might one day have to take care of him. On the good days, he could be entertained by playing music on his tablet or watching television for hours. But he was often ill-tempered and difficult to manage.

Madison described her seven years of caregiving as a “battle” – a battle to get a diagnosis, to work at home while her husband roamed the house, and to secure consistent end-of-life caregivers for her husband, who died last year.

In the final months of his life, he was receiving in-home hospice, which proposed sending him to a facility close to home – for $10,000 a month. Should Madison pay that bill or pay for college for her son, Morgan? “I had to choose my son and his future,” she said. The pair shared caregiving duties.

Madison stressed that it was important to get something positive out of a very difficult time. Her son decided they should donate his father’s brain to science “to help somebody else,” she said. Madison is grateful to have emerged from the experience with a stronger bond with her son. “All we had was each other,” she said. Turns out that was a lot to have.

Diane Powell’s family could not afford professional care for her mother and father either. But one of the hardest things for Powell and her sister, who shared caregiving duties, came early in their father’s dementia, when they were “trying to figure out what is wrong.” Something was clearly amiss when her father, who owned a trucking company, would get lost on the road and couldn’t remember how to get home. A family member would figure out where he was and drive there to guide him home. …Learn More

December 22, 2020

Video Documents Nursing Home Tragedy

When COVID-19 started spreading through nursing homes last spring, the United States had no first-hand experience battling a coronavirus.

That’s a fair point but an inadequate explanation for a tragedy in which more than 100,000 nursing home residents and staff to date have died of COVID-related causes.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Governments either wouldn’t or couldn’t provide enough personal protective equipment, forcing the certified nursing assistants to don garbage bags and recycle masks. A shortage of tests limited the ability to detect asymptomatic cases and contain outbreaks. The Centers for Disease Control, prior to the pandemic, had documented poor infection control practices. This made nursing homes a petri dish for spreading the virus. Acute staffing shortages compounded the dangers.

This video by AARP is a chronology of what went wrong. It’s a horror story of panic, chaos, and blunders. It’s also a start on understanding how we can do better in the future to protect our most vulnerable population – the elderly.

“We need to continue to raise alarms and demand action to prevent anything like this from happening again,” said Bill Sweeney, a senior vice president of AARP.  AARP is a corporate partner of the Center for Retirement Research, which sponsors this blog.

Read our blog posts in our ongoing coverage of COVID-19. …Learn More