Field Work

October 7, 2021

Each new reminder in the annual Trustees’ Report that Social Security’s trust fund will be depleted sometime in the 2030s causes a new round of angst. Some 40 percent of the workers in one poll expect to receive nothing from Social Security when they retire.

The media often play into this sense of unease with sensational headlines like “Social Security and Medicare Funds Face Insolvency” (The New York Times) or “Trust Fund to Run Dry in 2035” (Fox Business).

While these headlines do their job of attracting readers’ attention, they don’t reflect the fact that the payroll taxes paid by employers and employees will keep rolling in. If policymakers take no steps to prevent the depletion, the tax revenues will still cover about three-fourths of future retirees’ benefits, according to the 2021 Trustee’s Report released in August.

But a new study by the Center for Retirement Research shows that headlines focused on the trust fund’s potential depletion can fuel misperceptions about Social Security’s viability. In reaction to news stories with alarming headlines, some workers in an online experiment said they would alter their retirement plans.

The experiment was conducted during the June lull in the pandemic when COVID was less of a distraction. Everyone in the experiment saw the same article – except for the headline and the first sentence, which essentially repeated the headline.

The workers who read articles with headlines emphasizing the trust fund’s depletion predicted they would start their benefits about a year earlier – presumably hoping to protect them somehow by locking them in early – than those who saw the staid headline – “Social Security Faces a Long-Term Financing Shortfall.”

Two headlines in the experiment sent a more blunt message: “Social Security Fund Headed Toward Insolvency in 2034, Trustees Find” and “The Social Security Trust Fund Will Deplete its Reserves in 2034.” The people who saw a final headline, which alluded to the trust fund’s depletion – “Revenues Projected to Cover Only 75 Percent of Scheduled Social Security Benefits after 2034” – said that they, too, were more likely to start their benefits earlier.

Headlines also influenced how much workers in the experiment expect to get from Social Security when they retire. …Learn More

On the Web

September 30, 2021

U.S. retirement preparedness can best be described as mediocre: about half of workers are not saving enough money to continue their current standard of living once they retire.

Judging by a dozen blogs that attracted the most web traffic in the third quarter, our readers understand the importance of the issue. Some felt strongly that workers need to take responsibility for their retirement finances. Workers “disregard the notion of saving for the future,” one reader said in a comment posted to “Onus of Retirement Planning is on Us.” “They have lived their lives like there is no tomorrow and spend money on any and everything they want.”

To boost savings, growing numbers of state officials and employers are taking charge. The article, “State Auto-IRAs are Building Momentum,” was a roundup of states that are either implementing or weighing a requirement that employers automatically enroll their employees in an IRA. The workers can always opt out if they want to, but they often remain in the plans.

And automatic enrollment in 401(k)s and 403(b)s is gaining traction in the private sector. The plans, which were virtually nonexistent in 2003, now make up a significant minority of corporate and non-profit plans, according to a unique database that tracked the changes in plan design. A summary of this research appears in “401(k) Plans Evolve to Boost Workers’ Savings.”

Baby boomers never seem to get enough information about the nuts and bolts of retirement. In “Enrollment Trends in Medicare Options,” readers had a vigorous debate about the advantages and disadvantages of supplemental Medigap plans versus Medicare Advantage insurance policies. The article revealed a major shift away from Medigap and into Medicare Advantage, which has the benefit of relatively low premiums, with the tradeoff being that Advantage plans tend to provide less protection from large medical bills than Medigap.

Our readers are also interested in the difficult decisions boomers are making about when to retire. The article, “Not Everyone Can Delay their Retirement,” highlighted the racial and educational disparities driving these decisions. And “Disability Discrimination and Aging Workers” dealt with the choice facing aging workers whose bodies are breaking down but who can’t afford to retire.

Here are a few more articles that attracted readers’ attention – some about retirement and some not: …Learn More

Research

September 23, 2021

The option to start Social Security benefits at any age from 62 to 70 – with an actuarial adjustment – is a key feature of the program. However, the adjustments – reductions in the monthly benefit for claiming early and increases for waiting – are decades old and do not reflect improvements in longevity or other important developments over time.

The option to claim early was introduced just over 60 years ago, when Congress set 62 as the program’s earliest eligibility age. The option to claim between 65 and 70 on an actuarially fair basis stems from the 1983 Social Security amendments, which gradually increased the annual “delayed retirement credit” from 3 percent to 8 percent. Also in 1983, reductions for early claiming were changed in tandem with the gradual increase in the full retirement age from 65 to 67.

The goal of actuarial adjustments to the monthly benefits has always been to ensure that retirees with average life expectancy could expect to get the same total lifetime benefits, regardless of when they started. But calculating lifetime benefits requires assumptions about how long people will live and assumptions about interest rates. The current calculations are based on life expectancy and interest rates in the early 1960s or 1980s.

Much has changed since those dates: life expectancy has increased dramatically and interest rates have declined. Longer life expectancy and, to a lesser extent, lower interest rates would each call for a smaller penalty for early claiming and a smaller reward for delaying claiming.

Consider what this means for baby boomers whose full retirement age is 67. Under the current system, if they claim at 62, they receive 70 percent of their age-67 benefit. However, to reflect decades of increasing life spans and falling interest rates, the researchers calculated that the accurate monthly benefit would be 77.5 percent of the age-67 benefit. That is, early claimers are penalized too much.

For workers who delay claiming, a discrepancy also exists between the current and accurate delayed retirement credits, though the difference is smaller since the credit was initially too small. Specifically, workers who wait until 70 to start Social Security today receive 124 percent of the benefit they would’ve gotten at 67, whereas 120 percent of the age-67 benefit would be more accurate. …Learn More

September 7, 2021

In the second half of 2020, the number of retired homeowners who fell behind on their mortgage payments doubled to about 1 million per month.

By July of this year, it had dropped to 680,000 retirees. The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which issued the report on homeowners over age 65, said about 12 percent of this population is vulnerable to imminent foreclosure and possibly homelessness. Some of the people who are having the hardest time paying their loans either have disabilities or are over 75.

But most the retirees in the CFPB report are largely reliant on Social Security, so their income is stable. To understand why they’re having problems paying the mortgage requires reading the tea leaves in the CFPB report. More than half of the retirees with past due mortgages live with at least two other people, including children and teenagers.

Lower-income people in multigenerational households typically share the burden of paying their living expenses. If a retired homeowner’s adult family member lost a job because of the pandemic, the homeowner might not be getting the money she needs to pay the mortgage. The CFPB survey confirms this is occurring: more than a third of older homeowners who are behind on their mortgages said a family member was unemployed.

Many of the people who are struggling had less than $25,000 in retirement income or were people of color. Their family members in the multigenerational households – presumably people of color – also may have worked in lower-paid jobs and bore the brunt of last year’s layoffs and reduced hours at work. …Learn More

August 31, 2021

Several million retirees have spent so much on their prescriptions in recent years that they crossed over into the “catastrophic” phase of their Medicare drug plans.

Once catastrophic coverage kicks in, Part D drug plans require retirees to pay only 5 percent of their medication costs out of their own pockets. But there’s a catch: there is no cap on total annual spending, which can quickly rise to thousands of dollars if they need chemotherapy or a brand-name designer drug for a rare medical condition.

Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Medicare policy program, said that could change, because proposals to place a cap on total out-of-pocket spending in Part D plans have a bipartisan tailwind behind them. Democrats in the House recently reintroduced a bill that would limit spending to $2,000. Last year, the Republican-controlled Senate Finance Committee approved a $3,100 cap, which is currently part of a Republican prescription drug bill.

Now, President Biden says he wants to limit retirees’ spending in their Part D plans. However, the bills circulating on Capitol Hill could also become tangled up in a more complex debate about a related issue: the best way to control drug prices.

A flat dollar cap – if it passes – would be simpler than the current system for determining out-of-pocket drug costs, though it would mainly help people with extraordinarily high spending. Cubanski said most people on Medicare spend less than $2,000 out-of-pocket annually.

But in a given year, she said, “that could be anybody.” And as baby boomers stampede into retirement, more people will be pushed into catastrophic coverage at a time of continually rising drug prices. …Learn More

August 24, 2021

Last year, millions of older Americans went into hiding to protect themselves from the ravages of COVID-19.

Did the isolation take a psychological toll? How did they respond to infrequent contact with friends and family? Researchers in a recent webinar tried to understand the unique phenomenon of loneliness in a modern pandemic.

What we know from the National Poll on Healthy Aging in the early months of the pandemic is that more than half of older workers and retirees between 50 and 80 said they “felt isolated from others” – twice the levels seen in 2018.

In a different survey conducted every two months for most of last year, loneliness was “common and it was incredibly persistent during the first six months of the pandemic,” said Lindsay Kobayashi, a University of Michigan epidemiologist involved in the COVID-19 Coping Study, a survey of adults over age 55.

Two groups in particular suffered rates of loneliness that were twice as high as their peers: older people who live alone and residents of senior communities and nursing homes, where staff often separated the residents or confined them to their rooms in an attempt to protect their health.

A larger share of Black Americans also expressed feelings of loneliness than whites and Hispanics, and women were generally more lonely than men. “I’m very afraid that we are going to get so used to being alone, on our own, by ourselves that we won’t reconnect the way we need to,” a 76-year-old woman told the Coping Study researchers last fall.

But the news isn’t all bad. Feelings of loneliness, especially among the oldest retirees, had subsided a bit as early as November as news reports emerged that the vaccines were effective. Older people also found ways to cope with their isolation, and some even felt the pandemic gave them a renewed sense of purpose, according to a pair of studies in The Gerontologist. …Learn More

On the Web

July 15, 2021

Many older Americans could benefit from using home equity for some much-needed income in retirement. But they have found many reasons not to.

Some want to preserve that housing wealth for their kids. Others don’t like the idea of cashing in on the equity if it means relocating to a smaller house or apartment or a less expensive neighborhood. They also have plenty of concerns about federally insured reverse mortgages, which are a way to extract equity but are complicated to understand.

These doubts, expressed in readers’ comments on recent articles, are persistent. But economists see things differently: home equity has great potential to ease retirees’ financial problems – after all, roughly $8 trillion of wealth is locked up in older people’s houses.

K. Friesen is a rare reader who agrees. She said a couple women in her family are proof of the benefits of deploying home equity. Thanks to a reverse mortgage, her aunt had “a roof over her head until she died at age 97,” Friesen wrote in a comment posted to “Tapping Home Equity – Retirees’ Relief Valve.” The article described a study demonstrating that using home equity is effective in reducing financial hardship.

Now Friesen’s mother has a reverse mortgage. “If she can squeeze every dime out of the little she has to have a better quality of life, I’m all for it.”

The advantage of reverse mortgages is that they don’t have to be paid back before the homeowner dies – the catch is that the borrower must continue to live in the house. A potential downside, as a reader noted, is that if a retiree has to sell the house and pay the loan back, the balance and accrued interest will have depleted equity.

But in fact, selling in retirement is an unlikely scenario. Nearly three out of four older workers either don’t move out of their current home or, when they retire, they sell their house, buy a new one, and stay put, according to research featured in “Most Older Americans Age in their Homes.”

Granted, these homeowners tend to be healthier than the older people who move around more. But Paul Brustowicz said even retirees who have health issues want the same thing as everyone else: to age in their own homes. …Learn More