December 24, 2019

Happy Holidays!

Next Tuesday – New Year’s Eve – we’ll return with a list of some of our readers’ favorite blogs of 2019. Our regular featured articles will resume Thursday, Jan. 2.

Thank you for reading and posting comments on our retirement and personal finance blog. We hope you’ll continue to be involved in the new year. …
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December 5, 2019

College Graduates Cope with Money

College upperclassmen and recent graduates have a lot on their minds. One thing they don’t always like to think too hard about is money.

But Maggie Germano, a financial coach, encourages them to get things out in the open and talk about it. At a recent personal finance session here at Boston College, she answered students’ questions about their credit ratings, student loans, and how to avoid spending money they do not have.

Here are the five best tips from Germano, a 2009 graduate of the State University of New York in Fredonia. She now lives in Washington D.C.

Pay attention. The first step to getting control of one’s finances is to pay attention to them, she said. Not dealing with credit card bills and student loan statements doesn’t make the problems go away. “The opposite is true: the more you pay attention, the more in control you’ll be,” she said.

Get a credit rating – or fix it. The key is to have a credit card but use it judiciously. Germano advises young adults to get what’s known as a secured credit card with a low spending limit – say $500. Secured credit cards typically require users to put up a cash deposit. To slowly establish a sound credit history, spend no more than 30 percent of the card’s limit and pay it off at the end of each month.

Student loans are hard work. Germano said that, after she graduated, her rent and student loan payments equaled all of her income. She signed up for the federal government’s income-based repayment program. In this program, the government reduces the payments to reflect the low incomes many recent graduates are earning at the start of their careers. Germano said she paid off her $26,000 loan balance off about four years ago.

The secret to not overspending. She learned this trick from a client. Set up two separate checking accounts. One account is for paying monthly bills – rent, Netflix, electricity – and the payments are deducted automatically. For all other spending, use a second account with a debit card and “don’t touch” the money in the first account. Using a debit card for discretionary expenses makes it easy to keep track of how much is left to spend each month – maybe it’s better to walk than take another Uber.

“It’s very human to want new things, be social, and spend money you’ve never had before,” she said. So put “systems into place that will prevent [that] from getting out of control.” …Learn More

October 3, 2019

The Secret to Feeling Younger

You’re as young as you feel!

This cliché is meant to be uplifting to older people. But it really just begs the question: what, exactly, is it that makes a person feel young?

Having a sense of control over the events in one’s life is the answer that emerged from a 2019 study of 60- to 90-year-olds in the Journal of Gerontology. “[B]elieving that your daily efforts can result in desired outcomes” lines up nicely with what the researchers call “a younger subjective age.”

This makes a lot of sense. Feeling in control becomes important as we age, because it counteracts our growing vulnerabilities – we can’t move as fast, hear as well, or remember as much. Wresting back some control can rejuvenate older people, instill optimism, and improve memory and even longevity, various studies have found. …Learn More

September 19, 2019

Many Demands on Middle Class Paychecks

Ask middle-class Americans how they’re doing, and you’ll often get the same answer: there are still too many demands on my paycheck.

Several recent surveys reach this conclusion, even though wages have been rising consistently at a time of low inflation.

Student loans trump 401(k)s. Two top financial priorities are in conflict: student loan payments, which people described as a “burden,” and saving for retirement, which they viewed as “important” in a TIAA-MIT AgeLab survey.

The debt seems to be winning: three out of four adults paying off student loans say they would like to increase how much they save for retirement but can’t do it until their loans are paid off – and that can take years. One woman described her loans as “draining” her finances.

A promising sign on the horizon is that some employers are finding creative ways to help employees pay down college debt, giving them more leeway to save money in their 401(k)s. But these efforts impact a small number of workers, and the amount of debt continues to rise year after year for every age group, from new graduates to baby boomers who helped send their children and grandchildren to college, a Prudential study found.  

Buying a house isn’t an option. The good news is that about half of Millennials already own a home. Most of the others want to buy a house but can’t afford it, 20- and 30-somethings told LendEdu in a survey. Their top reasons were student loan and credit card payments and a lack of savings, which is the flip side of having too much debt.

Millennials are also putting off other goals until they get a house – marriage, children, even pets. “It’s quite obvious that this uphill battle” and debt “is having secondary effects,” said LendEdu’s Michael Brown.

Medical debt looms large. Americans borrowed $88 billion last year to pay their hospital, doctor, and lab bills. That debt fell hardest on the 3 million people who owe more than $10,000, according to an estimate by the Gallup polling company and a group of healthcare non-profits. …Learn More

September 12, 2019

Social Casinos: Stay Far, Far Away

This report about online casinos is incredible.

The PBS Newshour reports that these gambling websites – for poker, roulette and slots – are able to target people who are the most vulnerable to gambling addiction. The video features a site that assigns VIP status to encourage vulnerable customers to keep playing.

That’s not the only problem. Customers pay real money to buy chips to gamble or cover their losses on the gambling site. But when the customer wins, the website “do[es]n’t pay real money. They only…give you virtual chips to continue to play on their apps,” said a Dallas woman who said she lost $400,000 while gambling online.

Only 1 percent of Americans are gambling addicts, so the problem, while very serious for them, is not widespread. However, in the video, Keith S. Whyte of the National Council on Problem Gambling said that online social casinos are far more addictive than brick-and-mortar casinos.

Whyte said these social casinos are not regulated. The social casino profiled in the video said that it strives “to comply with all applicable standards, rules and requirements.” …Learn More

March 7, 2019

Graduates’ Pay Ranked for 1,650 Colleges

Decisions about which college to attend or degree to pursue are increasingly driven at least in part by this consideration: will I be able to pay back my student loans?

Countless things determine how much someone earns – smarts, rich or poor parents, high school or graduate degree, being in the right place at the right time. But LendEdu’s new ranking of starting salaries for graduates with bachelor’s degrees from some 1,650 U.S. colleges is essential information, especially when debt is the only option to finance college.

A degree is almost always worth the investment. Georgetown University estimates workers with a bachelor’s degree earn $1 million more over their lifetime than high school graduates. Post-secondary degrees have even bigger payoffs.

The salary rankings turned up some useful and quirky findings. LendEdu, a personal finance website for consumers that sells advertising to financial firms, compiled the salary data for the first five years of employment from payscale.com surveys.

• Ever hear of Harvey Mudd College? The typical recent graduate of this engineering school 40 miles west of Los Angeles earns a bit more ($85,600) than an MIT graduate ($83,600). Harvey Mudd is Silicon Valley’s No. 2 feeder school.
• Graduates overestimate what a degree is worth. The typical college student expects to earn $60,000 but earns only $48,400 in the work world. …

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January 15, 2019

Savings Tips Help Millennials Get Serious

This is young adults’ financial dilemma in a nutshell: you’re well aware you should be saving money, but you admit you’d rather spend it on the fun stuff.

Yes, paying the rent or student loans every month takes discipline. But it isn’t enough. Even more discipline must be summoned to save money, whether in an emergency fund or a retirement plan at work.

Tia Chambers, a financial coach in Indianapolis and certified financial education instructor (CFEI), has put some thought into how Millennials can overcome their high psychological hurdles to saving.

The 32-year-old lays out six doable steps on her website, Financially Fit & Fab, which she recently elaborated on during an interview.

Get in the right mindset. “It is the hardest part,” she said. “When I speak with clients, money is always personal, and it’s also emotional.” The best way to clear the emotional hurdles is to keep a specific, important goal in mind that continually motivates you, for example buying a house. Or create a detailed savings challenge, such as vowing to save $1 the first week, $2 the second week, $3 the third week, etc. This adds up to $1,378 at the end of the year, she said.

Cut expenses. Some cuts are no-brainers. Scrap cable for Hulu and Netflix subscriptions. Drop that gym membership you never use. The biggest challenge for young adults is saying no to friends who want to go out for dinner or drinks. Chambers suggests enlisting your friends to help – after all, they’re probably spending too much too. She and her friends have agreed to go out one weekend and save money the next weekend by hanging out at someone’s apartment. Another idea is happy hour once a week instead of twice. …Learn More