June 12, 2018

Luck – or a Deliberate Path to Wealth

It’s usually not talent or street smarts or brains that make people wealthy and comfortable. It’s the luck of having rich parents.

But there is another way to get there, one that is within reach: becoming the first generation in the family to earn a college degree.

A new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, using the latest federal data on household finances, measures the impact of having that degree – or not having one – on wealth and income.

Although the ranks of college-educated Americans have grown over the past quarter century, people lacking a degree still make up a substantial majority – two out of three Americans. …Learn More

June 5, 2018

First-Generation ‘Imposter Syndrome’

Education is the fastest ticket to a higher income, more opportunities, and a better quality of life. But four-year college is often a tough road for the pioneering first in their families to attend.

They have at least two big disadvantages – apart from the well-known financial one.  Unlike the teenagers of the highly educated professionals who usually take for granted that their children will go to college, first-generation students might not have the benefit of high expectations at home. College is outside their comfort zone, which creates psychological barriers to attending and succeeding.

A second disadvantage is that they aren’t always going to learn, through a sort of parental osmosis, to cope with higher education’s mores and attitudes or be as resilient to its challenges.

UCLA student Violet Salazar says in this video that she used to feel she didn’t fully belong, “because I am first generation or because I am Latina, and also coming from a low socioeconomic background.” She went on to organize an entire dormitory floor specifically for first-generation students to make them feel more at home. …Learn More

May 10, 2018

Tiny House Fixes Millennial’s Money Woes

Sky-high city rent, college loan payments, and the low-paying days of an early career are a bad combination for today’s Millennial.

Liz Patterson has solved all that.  The carpenter built herself a 96-square-foot house on top of a flatbed truck for less than $7,000 in Manitou Springs, Colorado, a hip neighborhood near Colorado Springs.

The house “represents my monetary freedom – it’s the whole reason I did it,” the 27-year-old said.

Tiny houses, which average 500 square feet, are only about 1 percent of U.S. home sales. But builders say that sales continue to grow as Generation-X buys them as Airbnb rental properties, and baby boomers park their “granny pods” in an adult child’s backyard.

Tiny houses actually make the most sense for 20-somethings in rebellion, given their financial constraints and a distaste for all the junk their parents accumulated over a lifetime, said Shawna Lytle, a spokeswoman for Tumbleweed Tiny Homes Company in Colorado Springs, which built its first tiny house in 1999. The national tiny house price is $23,000.

Five years earlier, the tiny house movement had started in Tokyo. Recently, a handful of U.S. communities, including Spur, Texas, and Berkeley, California, have modified their zoning rules or building codes to accommodate them. The laws are a patchwork: houses on wheels must sometimes be classified as RVs, and some cities set size minimums for houses with foundations. …Learn More

March 22, 2018

Creating Paths to Latino-owned Business

Rank-and-file workers’ wages have barely gone up since the 2008-09 recession, despite a U.S. job market firing on all cylinders for several years.

Latinos struggle more than most. Take restaurant workers. They are overrepresented in an industry that expanded rapidly post-recession, putting hundreds of thousands of cooks, waiters, and busboys to work. But “those are some of the worst jobs” says Carmen Rojas, who heads The Workers Lab in Oakland, which supports small entrepreneurs.

Food-service and other low-paying jobs not only lack benefits and security but typically don’t invest heavily in training and don’t provide upward mobility, “proving what it means to debase the promise of work away from opportunity and toward survival,” said Marie Mora of the University of Texas in the Rio Grande Valley.

She and Rojas were panelists at a recent Aspen Institute event to discuss Latino economic challenges and solutions. The focus was on new avenues to increasing their presence among small businesses, which are a good fit for their particular interests, needs, and culture.

There are, of course, extraordinary models of success in the Latino community. Maria Rios emigrated from El Salvador as a teenager and has the gumption of a character in a 19^th century Horatio Alger novel. In the early years of her multi-million-dollar recycling and waste company in Houston, she drummed up commercial clients by showing up and pointing out their overflowing dumpsters.  “When I see trash, I see opportunity!” she says on Nation Waste Inc.’s website.

“I feel that if I did it, anybody can do it,” she told the other panelists and audience. …Learn More

March 20, 2018

New Use for College Loans: Spring Break!

Yup, more than half of college students are using some of their student loan money to pay for spring break.

It’s the peak season, and 21^st century ingenuity is being applied to the age-old problem of paying for college trips to popular, sunny climates like Miami and Cabos San Lucas in Mexico’s Baja Peninsula.  LendEdu decided to do a survey to answer a question that Mike Brown put so succinctly in his blog:

How can “so many students living on a shoestring budget afford to go on a not-so-cheap weeklong getaway”?

The mechanism allowing this can be found in college financial aid offices, which funnel loan money directly to students after, wisely, deducting tuition and fees.

Fifty-one percent of the students who were surveyed are financing their beer, hotels, and air fares with another popular source: parents. Spring break is typically paid for with whatever they can scrape together from parents, loans, and part-time jobs – frequently in that order.

LendEdu, a New Jersey credit card and student loan refinancing firm, hired Pollfish for its March survey of 1,000 college juniors nationwide who have student loans and are planning spring break 2018.

Brown is 24 and earned his University of Delaware degree in 2016. His parents paid for his Cancún trip during junior year, and he did not have to use his loans, which he’s still paying off.

“If my parents found out I was using that loan check to pay for spring break, they would’ve had a couple words with me,” he said.Learn More

January 30, 2018

WSJ Recognizes our Retirement Blog

I was honored to be in the company of some excellent retirement writers recognized in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, “My Favorite Writers on Retirement Planning.” Since I started writing this blog in May 2011 for the Center for Retirement Research, which is funded by the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA), retirement writers have come out of the woodwork to help the swarms of retiring baby boomers – and many of us need it!

Others featured in the article by the Journal’s Glenn Ruffenach – some new, some veterans – include financial planner Michael Kitces, whom I’ve interviewed about tax strategies for retirement plan withdrawals. Most everyone knows Jonathan Clements, a former long-time Journal reporter now editing and writing a blog. Last but not least, I’ll mention Mike Piper, a certified public accountant – someone new to interview! – and Christine Benz of Morningstar, a Chicago firm that is a long-time source of data and information for this blog.

Each writer is distinct. So, what do we try to do here at Squared Away? …Learn More

January 23, 2018

Millennial Retirement ‘Discouraging’

Baby boomers have limited time and only a few options to improve their financial prospects when they retire and give up a regular paycheck. Millennials have more time to do something about it.

They should start thinking about it, indicates a study by the Urban Institute’s Richard Johnson, Karen Smith, Damir Cosic, and Claire Xiaozhi Wang.

Their test of a comfortable retirement was set at a 75 percent replacement rate, meaning retirees need 75 cents in monthly income for every dollar earned in their final decade of working. For this analysis, the researchers estimated retirement income at age 70 – an age when most people have already retired – for every individual in the federal data sources used in their analysis.

They found that about a third of boomers and boomers’ parents don’t have enough retirement income to make that 75 percent cutoff. Millennnial households will be significantly worse off at age 70: nearly half are at risk.

The prospects for Millennials are “discouraging,” the researchers said. …Learn More