Research

November 18, 2021

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and hasn’t budged since 2009. But many states and some municipalities have raised their minimum wages. Today, more than half of the state minimums exceed the federal minimum.

Now a new trend has emerged: 19 states have enacted or approved automatic yearly increases in their minimum wages to protect their residents from inflation. These adjustments just went into effect this year in Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and Washington D.C.

How might higher minimum wages affect applications for disability insurance? On the one hand, the higher pay could prevent some people with mild disabilities from resorting to the fallback option: applying for disability benefits. But if small employers lay people off to cut costs or feel they can’t afford to hire workers at the new higher minimum wage, applications could go up. Facing fewer job opportunities, more low-wage workers might apply for benefits from a program that currently covers some 16 million Americans.

A new study finds that a rising minimum wage does, indeed, increase disability applications to the U.S. Social Security Administration. But the researchers stress that this impact is minimal compared with the increase driven by an economic downturn that throws more people out of work.

In their analysis of nearly 3,000 counties from 2000 through 2015, a one-dollar increase in the minimum wage added some 80,000 more applications to the disability program and its companion, the Supplemental Security Income program for the poor, elderly, and adults with disabilities. That represents a 2 percent increase.

Contrast that to the impact of a rising unemployment rate, which was about three times larger. …Learn More

On the Web

July 22, 2021

The pandemic will be on the marquee at this year’s annual meeting of retirement and disability researchers.

COVID-19 has encroached on every aspect of older Americans’ lives, from their day-to-day work and home life to their retirement planning. Researchers will present studies on three impacts of the pandemic in presentations funded by the U.S. Social Security Administration.

The event will be held over two days, Thursday and Friday, Aug. 5 and 6, from noon to 4 p.m. The event will be virtual again this year and anyone can sign up to attend for free.

The first study on the agenda will explore the pandemic’s impact on older workers’ ability or willingness to work and on their retirement decisions. And for the adults who lost their jobs during COVID-19’s economic downturn, a second study will explain whether the slump will affect their future Social Security benefits. In the final study relating to the pandemic, researchers will assess whether the relief bills passed by Congress helped older people.

Other prominent topics of discussion include retirement planning and retirees’ financial security. These will include new findings on workers’ decisions about saving, retirees’ decisions about spending, and the financial adjustments couples make after their children leave home.

The final major topic is federal benefits for people with disabilities. The presentations here include the relationship between the benefits and two government programs: food stamps and workers compensation insurance.

Summaries of the working papers will be posted online for the meetings. …Learn More

Behavior

June 10, 2021

In the United States and Singapore – places that emphasize self-reliance – many older workers and retirees admit that, if given a do-over, they would have saved more money over the past 20 or 30 years.

Regret was more common in the United States – 54 percent of older Americans had it versus 46 percent in Singapore, according to comparable surveys in each place. Perhaps the reason Singapore has less is because the government requires that employees set aside more than a third of their income in three government-run savings accounts for retirement, healthcare, and home purchases and other investments. On the other hand, Singapore doesn’t have Social Security or unemployment insurance, and private pensions are rare.

Whatever the differences, regret is a common sentiment in Singapore and the United States. What researchers wanted to know is: what is the source of that regret?

They tested two hypotheses. One is the human tendency to procrastinate and never get around to tasks that should be a priority. The other reason is largely outside of workers’ control: financial disruptions earlier in life that sabotage efforts to save, such as a layoff or large medical bill.

Employment problems, the researchers found, were a major source of saving regrets for 60- to 74-year-olds in both places but the impact was especially strong in the United States, which historically has had a more volatile labor market than Singapore. Disruptions that interfered with workers’ ability to save included bouts of unemployment and earning less than they were expecting. Early retirements and disabilities also led to saving regrets, as did unanticipated health problems and bad investments.

But procrastination as a reason for regret did not stand up to scrutiny. In this part of the survey, individuals agreed or disagreed with various statements designed to indicate whether they were procrastinators, including whether they work best under pressure or put off things they’re not good at. …Learn More

Money Culture

January 21, 2021

The COVID-19 economy is really a tale of two worlds.

The stock market and housing market have largely shrugged off the economic slowdown. But severe financial problems are brewing for millions of workers who have lost their jobs or are earning less in a lackluster economy.

The assistance passed by Congress will certainly help. Still, half of all workers reported in a Transamerica Institute survey late last year that they are experiencing at least one employment disruption, whether a layoff, reduced work hours, shrinking paychecks and commissions, or an early retirement. A crisis also looms for thousands of renters if the Centers for Disease Control allows its eviction moratorium to expire at the end of this month.

Paying taxes is another big worry. When the pandemic struck and unemployment spiked last spring, the IRS postponed the deadline for filing federal taxes by three months, to July 15.

COVID-19 hasn’t gone away – and neither has concern about paying taxes. More than half of taxpayers said they might have to borrow money to pay their 2020 taxes this April, according to a LendEdu survey last month.

Other aspects of Americans’ financial problems were captured in two more surveys about the pandemic’s impact:

The Millennials who are still saddled with student loans have struggled for years to pay their other living expenses. The COVID-19 relief bill gave them a respite by suspending their monthly payments for most of 2020, and the U.S. Department of Education extended that at least through January. But one financial problem has been replaced by others for the young adults who are unemployed or earning less.

About one in five people in their late 20s and 30s reported in a 2020 survey by Georgetown University’s business school that the pandemic forced them to take a variety of stopgap financial measures. These have included dipping into retirement funds, delaying or reducing credit card payments, and getting food and rental assistance from non-profits. …Learn More

January 19, 2021

Manufacturing workers file more applications to the federal disability program than any other workers. What seems new is that jobs like administrative assistant and retail worker aren’t that far behind.

Is one possible explanation that the computerization of once-routine occupations like these plays a role in decisions to apply for disability benefits?

Consider the example of a retail worker with a bad back who is laid off, or perhaps she quits because she struggled to handle the cognitive challenges of increased automation. Even simple tasks such as processing customer transactions or locating a product at another store now require computer skills. And the worker’s skills may not match up with the technical qualifications needed to find a new job in a labor market where routine jobs are rapidly disappearing.

Given her disability, the worker might decide that her best – or only – option to ensure she has some income is to apply for disability benefits.

A study by Mathematica researcher April Yanyuan Wu did not find direct evidence that this skills mismatch triggers applications. But her findings suggest it might be a factor.

Wu provided new statistics on the types of jobs once held by disability applicants and on the changes over time in the job attributes, compared with the changes in job attributes facing the general working population.

Between 2007 and 2014, for example, the share of the applicants’ former jobs that required computer skills rose by 18 percentage points, outpacing the increase for the labor force overall. At the same time, jobs requiring moderate cognitive ability also increased more for people with disabilities than it did for all workers.

Stress is a telling indication of the challenges of increased job automation. The growth in high-stress jobs once held by people with disabilities was much larger than for workers overall, according to the study, which was funded by the U.S. Social Security Administration. …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

Behavior

September 8, 2020

Jennifer Lee wanted to work until 70 to max out her monthly Social Security checks – at least that was the plan before she was laid off three years ago from a Washington D.C. church.

The church’s newly hired pastor “decided he wanted a whole new staff,” she said. “I felt to a degree he was entitled to do that,” she said – except that “he was only eliminating people on the staff who were over 60.”

She wasn’t having any luck finding a new job and felt that her only choice was to sign up for Social Security at 63½ to pay her bills. Eventually, Lee, a one-time nurse and medical administrator, landed a nice part-time job as a Jack-of-all-trades in an oral surgeon’s office. Post-pandemic, her duties have expanded to include overseeing the COVID-19 safety protocols.

The recession is putting many baby boomers in a predicament similar to Lee’s: a layoff has derailed their plans to work full-time to build up their retirement savings. Since March, the unemployment rate for Americans who are at least 55 years old has more than tripled, to 9.7 percent in June.

“Most older people, when they’re laid off, will take Social Security right away,” but “that’s not their best short-term solution,” said Wendy Weiss, a Cambridge, Mass., financial adviser. She urges them to find other ways to generate income or reduce expenses, because delaying Social Security increases the monthly check by 7 percent to 8 percent for each additional year the benefits are postponed.

But, Weiss acknowledges, the recession is putting growing numbers of unemployed boomers in situations that aren’t easily solved. “It’s not going to be pretty,” she said about the next few years.

Lee, who is 65, was fully aware she should have postponed her Social Security. But it took her more than six months to find her current job, and she didn’t have any unemployment benefits to tide her over, because church employers don’t usually pay into state unemployment insurance funds. She wasn’t old enough for Medicare at the time of her 2017 layoff either.

“I waited five months to apply for Social Security. I waited as long as I could,” she said.

She sees a problem not in the difficult decisions she’s had to make but in a shortage of policies for older workers like herself, who may be more vulnerable to layoffs and also can have a tougher time finding a new job even in an expanding economy. …Learn More