November 21, 2018

Holiday is Time to Recognize Our Readers

It’s the time of year to appreciate our readers. Thank you for supporting our blog on Twitter and Facebook too.

Squared Away, a retirement and personal finance blog, is sponsored by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.  To stay current on our latest blog posts, sign up for our free, weekly email alert with links to that week’s two blog posts.

Have a lovely holiday. …Learn More

November 15, 2018

Why Couples Retire Together – or Don’t

Married couples don’t necessarily know what the other spouse is thinking about retirement.

This insight came out of a new Fidelity Investments survey that asked some 1,600 people if they knew when their significant other planned to retire. Only 43 percent answered the question correctly. This disconnect reveals just how few couples are talking about retirement, said Fidelity spokesman Ted Mitchell, who worked on the survey.

Fidelity’s survey went out to adults of all ages, so the younger ones no doubt felt they’re too young to be thinking – much less talking – about what their lives will be like decades from now.

But things change as couples age. When retirement comes into sharper focus, it’s natural to start talking through the options – mine, yours, and ours.

One option is to retire around the same time, and prior research has shown that roughly half of older couples do so.

New research takes a more nuanced look at how couples retire and finds a more complicated picture.  Mixed arrangements are common in the pre-retirement years. Perhaps one spouse continues working full-time, even though their partner has retired, or one spouse might shift down to part-time work while the other is either still in a full-time job or has already retired.

Two sentiments are usually in conflict when older workers are trying to decide whether to retire: a longing for more leisure time and a need to bank more in savings, Social Security, and pensions.

Spouses often influence one another’s retirements for a variety of reasons, including their health, their relative ages, and how much each one likes their job. But financial security is usually a major consideration. …Learn More

November 8, 2018

A Proposal to Reduce Widows’ Poverty

A dramatic decline in widow’s poverty over a quarter century has been a positive outcome of more women going to college and moving into the labor force.

Yet 15 percent of widows are still poor – three times the poverty rate for married women.

A new study by the Center for Retirement Research takes a fresh look at Social Security’s widow benefits and finds that increasing them “could be a well-targeted way” to further reduce poverty.

Widows are vulnerable to being poor for several reasons. The main reason is that the income coming into a household declines when the husband dies.  The number of Social Security checks drops from two to one, and any employer pension the husband received is reduced, or even eliminated if the couple didn’t opt for the pension’s joint-and-survivor annuity.

While one person can live more cheaply than two, the drop in income for new widows often isn’t accompanied by a commensurate drop in expenses.

Another issue begins to develop as much as 10 years before a husband dies. Prior to his death, his declining health may increase the couple’s medical expenses and reduce his ability to work, depleting the couple’s – and ultimately the widow’s – resources.

The irony today for wives who worked is that their decades in the labor force generally improve their financial prospects when they become widowed. Yet, under Social Security’s longstanding design, they receive less generous benefits than housewives – relative to the household’s benefits prior to the husband’s death. …Learn More

October 30, 2018

Retire in Boston or in Naples, Florida?

My husband is newly retired, and we’ve spent hours talking about where we might want to live after I retire in a few years. Our imagined scenarios are always changing.

But I’m clear on one thing: I do not want to buy a house in Naples, Florida, where a couple we know did recently. No offense to Naples, which has lots to recommend it – no shoveling! But the typical resident is 65 years old. In fact, Naples is older than the state of Florida, where retirement communities are so pervasive that they distinguish between the “young-old” (ages 60-75) and the “old-old” (over 75).

Boston, where my husband and I live now, couldn’t be more different. It is swarming with college students and young people, including his two sons and daughter-in-law. Boston’s young people work in rapidly changing industries like high-tech or environmental engineering, and I like it that way. Boston’s median age is 32 – half of Naples.

As I get closer to retiring and am faced with change, I think to myself, “Who wants to live in the midst of a bunch of old people like me?”

But that’s precisely what many retirees do. There are many examples of cities that have moved dramatically in the direction of one or the other extremes – Boston or Naples; Madison, Wisconsin, or Scottsdale, Arizona. The Wall Street Journal reported that new retirement communities are popping up in places that weren’t traditional resting places for snowbirds: retired baby boomers’ net migration to the Appalachian region where Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee converge has quadrupled since 2011.

This age segregation is a relatively new area of interest to demographers. Almost 60 percent of the neighborhoods and other subdivisions within U.S. counties have moderate or high levels of segregation, which is similar in degree to the level of segregation between the U.S. Hispanic and white populations, Richelle Winkler found in a 2013 study of federal Census data.

Age segregation also occurs in rural areas, as younger people leave for jobs and older people move in. In some rural parts of the Great Plains, Winkler writes, there are two times more seniors than young adults. …Learn More

October 25, 2018

Longevity Affects Social Security Benefit

It’s long been known that people with high earnings tend to live longer than low earners. But this gap in life expectancy has widened into a gulf.

For example, high-earning men born back in 1912 lived about eight months longer than their counterparts in the bottom half of the income range. This longevity gap increased to five years for men who were born in 1941 and are now in their late 70s. The disparity for women is similar, but not as extreme.

This growing longevity gap has important implications for Social Security. The program’s intent is to be progressive – more generous to lower-income retirees.  But the unequal life spans have significantly reduced that progressivity, concludes Matt Rutledge in a new synopsis of research in this area for the Center for Retirement Research, which sponsors this blog.

The reason low-income workers are losing ground is that they don’t live as long, so they don’t collect Social Security for as many years as high-income workers do.

A study by the National Academy of Sciences, one of several demonstrating the decline in the program’s progressivity, found that the value of lifetime Social Security benefits, adjusted for inflation, increased nearly 30 percent for the highest-income retirees born in 1960, compared with the top earners born 30 years earlier. But benefits either fell or stagnated over that time for retirees on the lowest two tiers of the income scale – the people who rely far more on Social Security. …Learn More

October 16, 2018

Millennials Give Saving a Low Priority

Retirement clearly is not a priority for far too many young working adults.

Large minorities of the 22- to 37-year-olds who responded to a recent LendEdu survey said their retirement saving every month amounts to less than they spend on various categories of consumer goods. Nearly half of them report they spend more on dining out than on retirement saving. Almost one in three spend more on alcohol or new clothes, and one in four spend more on streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify. What that indicates is that a lot of them aren’t saving very much.

It might seem unfair that saving for retirement is such an urgent matter for someone not yet out of their 30s. After all, they aren’t earning very much yet, are managing household expenses for the first time, and might have a big student loan payment.

But the reality today is that Millennials were not lucky like some of their parents born into a world where they had a decent shot at a job with a pension. And a Social Security check alone is definitely not enough for a retiree to live on.

More and more employers are countering a reluctance to save by automatically signing workers up for the company retirement plan – nearly 50 percent of employers are doing this, compared with just 20 percent a decade ago, according to Vanguard’s client data. The idea behind automatic enrollment is that, just as inertia prevents people from signing up for a 401(k), inertia will keep them in the plan if the employer puts them there.

The strategy seems to be working: 92 percent of workers in their mid-20s to mid-30s whose employers have auto-enrollment are contributing part of their paychecks to their 401(k) plans, according to Vanguard. Contrast that to just 52 percent of workers in this age group whose employer plans are voluntary.

There’s nothing better than to be young and carefree, but the young adults who aren’t saving are already putting their well-being in old age at risk. …Learn More

October 11, 2018

The Marshmallow Test for Retirement

Walter Mischel, who used marshmallows to test children’s ability to delay gratification, died recently, but his lesson never grows old.

For those who aren’t familiar with his famous test, a young girl or boy sits at a table with a single marshmallow on a plate. The tester tells the child that he or she can eat the marshmallow right away, but waiting to eat it until the tester comes back into the room will bring a big payoff: a second sweet, puffy morsel.

Watching the children in this video squirm as they wrestle with their decisions brings to mind the adult equivalent. A desire for immediate self-gratification can come at the detriment of any number of personal financial decisions.

Like the marshmallow test, consuming now means having less money in the bank later.  The test also applies to deciding when to retire. Retiring becomes extremely tempting for baby boomers who want to escape from work after decades in the labor force.  But those who wait patiently for a few more years will have a sweeter retirement: a much larger Social Security check and more 401(k) savings distributed over fewer total years in retirement.

Children, when faced with the marshmallow test, struggle mightily to exercise self-control. They pick up the marshmallow to examine it, play with it, nibble it, and move it out of reach – but impulse gets the better of them, and they pop it into their mouths.

The lesson here is the same for children and adults: resist temptation and be rewarded. …Learn More