Behavior

March 18, 2021

A new study finds that debt burdens have grown for older workers and retirees in recent decades. But this isn’t the first research to reach that conclusion.

What is new is whose debt burden is increasing the most: the people who score higher on simple memory and math tests.

Across the three age groups the researchers examined – 56-61, 62-67, and 68-73 – the high scorers on the cognitive tests were more likely to have debts exceeding half of their assets in 2014 than the high scorers who were the same ages back in 1998.

They also added disproportionately more mortgage debt than people with lower cognition during the study’s time frame, a period when house prices were rising.

The upshot of this study is that people who have retained more of their memory and facility with numbers are “more financially fragile” than the high scorers were in the past, the University of Southern California researchers said.

The findings run counter to a common belief that financial companies in recent years have had more success selling their increasingly complex products to unwitting borrowers – a belief perhaps fostered by the subprime mortgages targeted to risky borrowers in the mid-2000s that triggered the global financial collapse.

The share of the older people in the study who were carrying debt increased between 1998 and 2014 regardless of their cognitive ability. The biggest jump occurred after 62 – a popular retirement age pegged to Social Security eligibility.

The heart of the analysis, however, is exploring the connection between cognitive ability and financial vulnerability. The researchers found the opposite of what one might expect: debt problems have loomed larger over time for those with higher scores on survey questions testing word recall and cognitive ability using simple subtraction and backward-counting exercises. …
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Behavior

February 9, 2021

Baby boomers love to discuss this age-old question: Should I pay off the mortgage before retiring?

Our blog readers fell into two camps in their comments on a recent article.

Some made an emotional argument – that a mortgage-free retirement makes them feel secure. The other camp argued that paying off the mortgage does not make financial sense.

The article, “Boomers Repairing their Mortgage Finances,” described research showing that boomers have sharply cut what they owe on their mortgages by paying extra in the years since the housing market bust. People naturally pay more of this debt as they age. But the boomers’ rapid payoffs partly explain why 40 percent to 50 percent of Americans in their 60s no longer have a mortgage, wiping out what is often a retiree’s largest single expense.

Despite the recent payoffs, boomers still trail their parents. Roughly 80 percent of the homeowners born in the 1930s had paid off their home loans by the same age, according to Jason Fichtner’s analysis for the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin.

As for whether to pay off the mortgage, many boomers don’t have that luxury. After the wave of foreclosures a decade ago, Fichtner found, the homeownership rate for 60-something boomers quickly slid more than 10 percentage points, to around 65 percent. The U.S. homeownership rate has increased in recent years but is still below the pre-recession peak.

The financial argument against paying off the mortgage was made in a blog comment by Tony Webb, a research economist at The New School. “At current interest rates and anticipated inflation rates, mortgage borrowing is almost free,” he wrote.

“All but the most risk-averse should load up on money while it’s on sale,” he said. [Full disclosure: Webb used to work at the Center for Retirement Research, which sponsors this blog.]

Another reader, Beth, said paying off the mortgage “is one cornerstone of a worry-free retirement.” However, she knows “several financially savvy people who for various valid reasons have not paid off their homes.” …Learn More

Behavior

January 14, 2021

The housing market collapse more than a decade ago inflicted a lot of financial damage on baby boomers nearing retirement. But a new study finds that some have been trying to make up for lost time by rapidly reducing their mortgage debt.

Since the Great Recession, the boomers who were born in the 1950s – they are now in their 60s – have paid down more than 40 percent of their remaining mortgages and home equity loans, on average – a much faster pace than their parents did at that age.

Not all the damage from the Great Recession can be repaired, however, because many people lost their homes in the wave of foreclosures. For example, the homeownership rate for the boomers born in the early 1950s quickly dropped slightly more than 10 percentage points after the housing crisis, to 67 percent, where it remained until 2016, the last year of data in the study.

Since then, the U.S. homeownership rate has increased but is still below the pre-recession peak.

The impact of the housing crisis was far less dramatic for Americans born in the early 1930s. Their homeownership rate dipped 2 percentage points right after the crisis, to a relatively high 76 percent, according to Jason Fichtner of Johns Hopkins University.

The decline in boomers’ homeownership leaves fewer of them with housing wealth to fall back on when they retire.

They have also fallen behind in fully paying off their mortgages, which would eliminate their monthly payments and make the house a low-cost place to live. Just half of the boomers born in the early 1950s who held onto their homes during the Great Recession own them outright – two-thirds of the people born in the early 1930s had paid off their mortgages by that age. …Learn More

On the Web

January 5, 2021

2020 was a year like no other.

But despite the pandemic, most baby boomers’ finances emerged unscathed. The stock market rebounded smartly from its March nosedive. And the economy has improved, though it remains on shaky ground.

Our readers, having largely ridden out last spring’s disruptions, returned to a perennial issue of interest to them: retirement planning.

One of their favorite articles last year was “Unexpected Retirement Costs Can be Big.” So was “Changing Social Security: Who’s Affected,” which was about the toll that increasing the program’s earliest retirement age could take on blue-collar workers in physical jobs who don’t have the luxury of delaying retirement.

COVID-19 in the nation’s nursing homes has caused incomprehensible tragedy. A nursing home advocate explained how this happened in “How COVID-19 Spreads in Nursing Homes.” And the mounting death toll in nursing homes surely confirmed a longstanding preference among baby boomers – as documented in “Most Older Americans Age in their Homes.”

Despite the economy’s halting recovery, layoffs due to COVID-19 still “may be contributing to the jump in boomer retirements,” the Pew Research Center said. Pew estimates that 3.2 million more boomers retired last year than in 2019, far outpacing the increases in recent years.

The layoffs have no doubt forced some boomers to start their Social Security earlier than planned, as explained in “Social Security: Tapped more in Downturn” and “A Laid-off Boomer’s Retirement Plan 2.0.” But unemployed older workers who are still too young for retirement benefits might apply for disability insurance, according to a study described in “Disability Applications Spike in Recession.”

Baby boomers hoping to ease into retirement on their own terms liked a pair of articles about ongoing research by Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile: “Mapping Out a Fulfilling Retirement” and “Retirement is Liberating – and Hard Work.”

Other 2020 articles popular with our readers included: …Learn More

On the Web

August 4, 2020

Watch these six videos and walk in the shoes of low-income older Americans. It’s an arduous journey.

Social Security is the primary or only source of income for the retirees who agreed to be interviewed for the videos. Since their income doesn’t cover their expenses, they live with family, frequent the Salvation Army, and continually stress about money.

“You’re lucky if you come out even or a little behind” at the end of the month, said Howard Sockel. The 81-year-old resident of Skokie, Illinois, supports two sons – one with autism and one unemployed – on his Social Security, a small Post Office pension, and credit cards.

The older workers who were interviewed are on the same road to a difficult retirement. Cathy Wydra, who was 64 when the videos were made, shares the expense of a two-bedroom apartment in a Chicago suburb with her daughter and grandson and sleeps on an inflatable mattress.

“It’s a little scary. I think, am I going to be able to retire in two years?” she says.

One out of three older people can’t cover their costs comfortably, often because they lack savings, said Sarah Parker with the Financial Health Network, which produced the videos in conjunction with AARP Foundation and Chase. “You often have to rely on debt, and that’s a very precarious financial situation to be in,” she said.

The video topics are: “When Fixed Incomes Fall Short,” “All in the Family,” “The Caregiver Conundrum,” “A Shock to the System,” “When Retirement Won’t Work,” and “Good Advice Never Gets Old.”

Some of the retirees admitted to making strategic mistakes around their retirement finances. Many other people have made these same mistakes, but they are catastrophic for people who were already on shaky ground. Verner Reid, a former Chicago teacher, was forced to retire when she became ill. Rather than a teacher’s pension, she took a lump sum and is now short on funds – “the mistake of my life.” …
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On the Web

July 2, 2020

The COVID-19 recession has changed everything.

This extreme disruption in our lives is always top of mind, which was reflected in our most widely read articles so far this year, based on the blog’s traffic.

Baby boomers, their retirement plans having been deeply affected by the Great Recession, are once again reassessing their finances. One popular article explained that the boomers who were in their early to late 50s during the previous recession lost about 3 percent of their total wealth at the time. This put their retirement planning at a distinct disadvantage compared with earlier generations in their 50s, whose wealth, rather than shrinking, grew 3 percent to 8 percent. The current recession is the second major setback in just over a decade.

Prior to the pandemic, readers liked articles about making careful retirement plans. Post-pandemic, the most popular article was about laid-off boomers desperate for income who may have to start their Social Security prematurely. The retirement benefits can be claimed as early as age 62, but doing so locks in the smallest possible monthly Social Security check – for life.

Even before Millennials were hit by the recession, they were already farther behind older generational groups when they were the same age. One article explained that the typical Millennial had just $12,000 in wealth. They are “the only generation to have fallen further behind” during the pre-pandemic recovery, the Federal Reserve said.

Here are a dozen of this blog’s most popular articles for the first half of 2020. They are grouped into three topics: COVID-19 and Your Finances, Retirement Planning, and Retirement Uncertainties.

COVID-19 and Your Finances:

Social Security Tapped More in Downturn

Lost Wealth Today vs the Great Recession

Boomers Facing Tough Financial Decisions …Learn More

June 18, 2020

Several young adults in my life have been derailed by the COVID-19 recession.

A few examples. My daughter-in-law just finished her graduate degree in occupational therapy and sailed through her certification only to be met by a stalled job market. A friend’s daughter, fresh out of nursing school, has already been turned down for one job. My nephew, a late bloomer who had finally snared a job making jewelry for a major retailer, was laid off and is floundering again.

Student loans, the Great Recession, and now a pandemic – Millennials can’t seem to catch a break.

Going into this pandemic, people in their 20s and 30s already had lower wages, more student debt, and less wealth than previous generations at the same age. This recession arrives at a critical time when Millennials were trying to catch up, build careers and strive for financial goals.

For the youngest ones, this is their first recession. But the downturn is the second blow for older Millennials, many of whom had the bad luck of entering the job market in the midst of the Great Recession a decade ago.

Does this double jeopardy put them in danger of becoming “a lost generation”? Millennials’ predicament prompted the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis to ask this question in a new report on their finances.

The COVID-19 recession, the report said, “could upend many of their lives.”

The situation is far from hopeless, of course – they have several decades to make up for this rough patch! There’s no reason they can’t overcome the setbacks with some pluck and determination.

But this will require much more effort to pull off amid the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. The Federal Reserve estimates more than 5.5 million Millennials have become unemployed this year – African-Americans bore a disproportionate share of the layoffs.

Young adults were over-represented in the food service, hospitality, and leisure industries slammed by state shutdowns to control the pandemic. And as the recession plays out, Millennials, with their shorter tenures in the labor market, will continue to be vulnerable to layoffs.

Don’t forget about Generation Z either. The recession will be a tough period for its oldest members, who are just graduating from college and haven’t built up their resumés. They may be less appealing job candidates when so many experienced people are eager to work and willing to compromise on pay at a time of sky-high unemployment. …Learn More