June 4, 2020

Money, Virus Angst Combine for Low-Paid

There’s COVID-19 stress, and then there’s money stress. The combination of the two is becoming too much for many low-income workers to bear.

Two out of three people in families that earn less than $34,000 a year told the U.S. Census Bureau in April that they are “not able to control or stop” their worrying several days a week or more. The feelings are the polar opposite for families earning more than $150,000: two out of three of them said they are not worried at all.

The daily blast of pandemic news has pushed U.S. inequality into the spotlight, exposing the financial pressures low-income Americans are dealing with. Despite the unprecedented $3 trillion in financial assistance passed by Congress, the anxiety was probably a contributing factor in the protests that erupted in dozens of U.S. cities last week.

When governors shut down their economies to control the pandemic, the lowest-income workers – disproportionately African-American and Latino – had barely recovered from the previous recession. Yet nearly half of the increase in incomes for all U.S. families over the past decade has gone to the 1 percent of families with the highest earnings. One glaring example of this disparity is homeownership, which is usually the largest form of wealth by the time people reach retirement age. Homeownership rates across the board declined after the financial crisis, but African-American and Latino rates fell more and are still below 2007 levels.

Low-income workers are now bearing the brunt of the current downturn. Economists estimate the true U.S. unemployment rate could be as high as 20 percent. The layoffs have been concentrated among low-wage workers: nearly 40 percent of people living in households earning less than $40,000 have lost their jobs.

The fundamental challenge of surviving from day to day is evident in the miles-long lines of cars at some U.S. food banks. About a third of Americans are having problems paying for all kinds of essentials – rent, utilities, or food – but the number rises to almost half for African-Americans and Latinos, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll in mid-May. Children are being disproportionately impacted by rising food insecurity.

Spotty health care coverage is another layer of stress. Workers on the front lines in nursing homes, meat processing plants and grocery stores are more at risk of contracting COVID-19 but less likely to have health insurance from their employers. They may avoid seeing a doctor, even if they have symptoms, out of fear of being unable to afford the charges. …Learn More

May 14, 2020

Opioid Abuse Tied to Where People Live

In 2019, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in northern Oklahoma detained one doctor charged with operating a pill mill that prescribed opioids to addicts for the simple reason that he presented “a danger to our community.”

While mental illness and unemployment are familiar culprits in the opioid crisis sweeping the country, the environment that people live in – including the prevalence of unscrupulous doctors – is actually important as well.

That’s one conclusion in a new study that found that people are more likely to become addicts if they move from an area with a relatively low level of prescription opioid abuse to a high-abuse area.

The research looked at more than 3 million people on federal disability insurance (DI) – a group that uses opioids at much higher rates than the general population. More than half of DI recipients are prescribed opioids in a given year. And since they are covered by Medicare, the researchers had access to the prescription records for Oxycontin, Vicodin, and morphine.

To gauge the impact of moving to a new location, the researchers created an index that estimated the extent of prescription opioid abuse in each U.S. county. The index took into account several factors, including the amount of opioids prescribed to patients and their use of multiple prescribers.

When DI recipients moved from a county at the low end of this index – the 25^th percentile – to the high end – the 75^th percentile – their rate of prescription opioid use increased nearly 5 percent, according to the study conducted for the Retirement and Disability Research Consortium.

People with a prior history of prescription opioid use were at particularly high risk of prescription opioid abuse if they moved to a high-use area. …Learn More

May 12, 2020

Estimate Your Unemployment Check Here

Florida’s unemployment office, after denying benefits to some 260,000 residents, said that it made a mistake. From Maine to California, laid-off workers scheme to outfox crashing websites or wait for hours on the phone to apply for benefits at state unemployment offices.

Thirty million people have filed for unemployment benefits so far, and countless others are trying. Frustration is a way of life for millions of people desperately in need of money for essentials.

If you’re curious about how much your benefit will be – when you eventually get through – or if you fear a layoff is in your future, Zippia has something for you.

The job listing and career advice website has created a calculator that will provide a ballpark estimate of your weekly benefit. Just enter your income and the state you live in, and Zippia’s estimate will be calculated using your state’s unique benefit formula.

The estimate is the total of your benefit from the state, which is based on your pay, plus the $600 additional payment Congress recently threw in. These new federal payments are scheduled to expire at the end of July.

The size of the unemployment check roughly corresponds with each state’s cost of living. Nevertheless, the weekly maximum benefits in some states are disproportionately higher, including in Massachusetts, where the maximum is $823 per week, followed by Washington ($790). The lowest maximum benefits are in Arizona ($240) and Mississippi ($235).

“Our goal is to give as much useful information for people who are in a really tough situation,” said Zippia’s Kathy Morris, who was involved in collecting the state data and designing the calculator.

Whatever your state provides to the unemployed, if you’re entitled to a benefit, you should get it. …Learn More

May 7, 2020

Parents Cut Back Aid to Kids in Downturn

When the economy tips into a recession, as it is doing in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of whether parents will give financial help to their adult children could conceivably go either way.

Parents looking for some peace of mind might throw a financial lifeline to their struggling or unemployed offspring. Or parents who’ve been providing some support might pull back.

One study of how parents in the United States and Germany handled this dilemma found that they retrenched in both countries during the Great Recession.

Parents are often an important source of support for their adult children. But between 2005 and the peak of the recession in 2009, the share of U.S. parents providing financial or in-kind support fell from 38 percent to 35 percent.

Germans are less likely to help their children in the first place, and they pulled back even more over the four-year period, from 24 percent to 10 percent of the parents, according to the 2017 study, which was funded by the U.S. Social Security Administration.

By 2011, the two countries had started to diverge: the Germans were stepping up their support again, while Americans continued to pull back. One obvious reason German parents snapped back earlier was that their economy recovered more quickly. …Learn More

March 26, 2020

Money Shame Surfaces in Tough Times

It’s easy to overlook the emotions that swirl around money. But they often come to the surface when our financial security is thrown into question.

The spread of the coronavirus has kicked Americans’ financial anxieties into high gear, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found last week. More than half of the workers who were surveyed fear they will lose income when their workplace is closed or their hours are reduced.

Reduced income is hitting low-wage, part-time and hourly workers hardest and fastest. But even among people with more financial resources, more than half are concerned they’ll have to dip into retirement savings or college funds.

Even when financial problems stem from events that are outside of an individual’s control, a feeling of shame can take over. Shame is the thread running through three TED videos that explore the emotions around money.

With economists increasingly predicting a recession in the wake of the virus, it might be useful to keep in mind the insights and coping mechanisms discussed by the speakers in these videos.

Shame is that “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed … based on our bank account balances, our debts, our homes, or our job titles,” Tammy Lally explains in the first video.

Lally, a financial coach, believes her brother was driven to suicide by his shame about his bankruptcy filing earlier that same day. She said she was judgmental at first but, after encountering financial problems of her own, came to a better understanding of the intense pressures her brother was feeling.

Lally’s and her brother’s shame around money was rooted in their childhood, she said: the siblings learned from their parents that money would make them happy. “We internalized that into the money belief that our self-worth was equal to our net worth.”

As the coronavirus pummels the stock market and slows the economy, many workers are feeling under enormous financial pressures. But Thasunda Duckett, who runs the consumer division of a major bank, said in a second video that people only compound the pressures when they blame themselves.

“We have a fraught relationship with money, because it comes with judgment,” she said.

Duckett and Lally both recommend one thing people can do if they’re experiencing money issues. To overcome some of the shame and anxiety requires letting the burden go by talking openly with others about money – you will quickly learn that you are not alone.

“Money can no longer be a taboo topic,” Lally said.

In 2007, a year before the financial crisis hit, Elizabeth White, a Harvard Business School graduate and one-time international consultant, was tumbling into “economic freefall.” …Learn More

March 12, 2020

Market Drops Hit Those Who Don’t Invest

How fitting that I would see the play “Sweat” on Feb. 28 – a Friday night at the end of a week in which the stock market dropped 12 percent and the specter of recession reared its ugly head.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning “Sweat” – I saw the Boston revival – is about the havoc the boom-bust economy and falling financial markets wreak on working people’s employment security and their personal lives. In fact, the timeline of the play is bracketed by 2000, when the stock market crashed, and 2008, when it crashed again.

At the beginning of each scene, a voice-over broadcasts the day’s bad financial news. The stock market never crosses the lips of the characters in the play, which is set in a local bar that is the social center of the working class town of Reading, Pennsylvania. Their chief concern is the fate of their jobs at the steel tubing plant. But the unspoken stock market is an invisible character shaping their plight.

Playwright Lynn Nottage got her inspiration for “Sweat” during visits to Reading over 2½ years. Two female characters and each of their sons work at the plant – very typical of a factory town. The bartender used to work there until he injured his leg. An immigrant who is a busboy at the bar briefly gets a shot at the American dream as a scab worker when the company locks the union out of the plant. There is tension between the immigrant and the long-time residents, and between the assembly line workers and the one worker who is promoted to management. But in the end, all of their lives are tragically upended by the plant closing.

Factories began shutting down in the 1980s, in part because U.S. manufacturers learned they could hire workers at much lower wages overseas. But manufacturing’s long-term decline was perpetuated by the 2001 recession, which was triggered by a market drop, and a second recession that began with the 2008 market collapse.

Which brings us to 2020. …Learn More

January 30, 2020

A Cost in Retirement of No-Benefit Jobs

Only about one in four older Americans consistently work in a traditional employment arrangement throughout their 50s and early 60s. For the rest, their late careers are punctuated by jobs – freelancer, independent contractor, and even waitress – that do not have any health or retirement benefits.

Some older people are forced into these nontraditional jobs, while others choose them for the flexibility to set their own hours or telecommute. Whatever their reasons, they will eventually pay a price.

The Center for Retirement Research estimates their future retirement income will be as much as 26 percent lower, depending on how much time they have spent in a nontraditional job. During these stints, the issues are that they were not saving for retirement or accruing a pension and may have had to pay for health care out of their own pockets.

The researchers estimated the losses in retirement income to these workers by comparing them with people who have continuously been in traditional jobs with benefits. The workers in their analysis were between the ages of 50 and 62 and were grouped based on how their careers had progressed. The groups included people whose careers were primarily traditional but were interrupted by periods of nontraditional, no-benefit work, and people who spent most of their time in nontraditional jobs.

This last group lost the most: they had accrued 26 percent less retirement income by age 62 than the people who consistently held a traditional job. Who are these workers? They are a diverse mix that includes people who dropped out of high school and are marginally employed and people who are married to someone who is also employed and has benefits. …Learn More