Squared Away Blog

Money Culture

July 7, 2011

Julie Taylor-Cooper, who worked for decades as an accounting manager, now scrapes by on her late husband’s Social Security checks and a $145-a-week job.

Many baby boomers like Taylor-Cooper may not realize there are various strategies for claiming full Social Security benefits that can have a dramatic impact on their retirement security.

“There are eight or nine options for retirees, spouses, and widows,” said Stephen Richardson, spokesman for the Social Security Administration. (Full disclosure: SSA funds this blog.)

Julie Taylor-Cooper from Over Fifty and Out of Work on Vimeo.

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July 5, 2011

J. Michael Collins, faculty director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin – Madison

People often have a tough time deciding whether they would benefit from hiring a financial advisor.

J. Michael Collins, who specializes in consumer decisionmaking in the financial marketplace at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, attempted to answer some questions on the topic in an online interview by a Chicago money manager.

Most agree that fee-based advisors are preferable to those who earn commissions by selling products to their clients – being a broker or a salesman conflicts with giving advice. This troublesome conflict is eliminated by paying an advisor a fee for his or her work.

But even the prospect of hiring a fee-based advisor typically raises more questions than answers. What do advisors do? Is the service worth the fee an advisor charges? What exactly am I paying for?

Read here what Collins had to say on the topic.Learn More

June 30, 2011

“The Big Chill” was the iconic movie for baby boomers in their prime in 1983.  Perhaps The Big Freeze is the best way to describe where we’ve ended up.

 
Two recent reports based on in-depth interviews with retirees and pre-retirees arrived at the same conclusion about how we are approaching the dreaded retirement: paralysis.

A report commissioned by Boston College’s Financial Security Project, which sponsors the Squared Away blog, found that the baby boomers and pre-retirees felt “immobilized in retirement planning efforts by a combination of practical and emotional factors.”

These emotions include fear and confusion about not having enough money, not knowing how much they’ll need, and not knowing how or where to get information or help.Learn More

Research

June 28, 2011

Most people think they’re above average when it comes to financial knowledge. And it’s not easy to educate people who think they know more than they actually do.

But hubris – or something like it – is what financial educators are up against, indicates research by professors Annamaria Lusardi at the George Washington School of Business and Olivia Mitchell at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Their paper used data from 1,200 respondents to a survey they conducted for the Investor Education Foundation or FINRA, the self-regulatory agency for the securities industry. It may be the most comprehensive study on Americans’ financial literacy.

Seventy percent of the survey’s respondents believe they know more about basic financial concepts than most other people. But they scored poorly on the survey’s three rudimentary financial literacy questions. One-third to one-half of them answered the questions incorrectly or indicated they didn’t know the answers.

The results “paint a troubling picture of the current state of financial knowledge in the United States,” the authors said.

Further, this low level of knowledge, when combined with overconfidence about that knowledge, does not bode well for attempts to educate people about money and their personal finances.

Before I provide more detail about Lusardi and Mitchell’s findings, take the quiz yourself. Here are the questions¹:
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Field Work

June 23, 2011

In a May 5 Squared Away blog post, I provided a list of financial planners’ five favorite tools for helping people control their spending. In this post, I’m providing their motivational suggestions.

Here are the five tips, based on my informal survey of planners. Each tip includes the psychological rationale behind it.

Find the “Aha! Moment.”

Some clients respond when they see, in detail, how much they’re spending and what they’re buying. Bonnie A. Hughes, a northern Virginia planner, is a big believer in mild shock therapy. She’s had great success by showing clients how much their income would fall if they were laid off, divorced, or dropped out of the workforce. Or she shows them just how much they’ll need in retirement, and it’s usually a big number.

Reason: The Aha! Moment provides the self-motivation that clients must possess and that planners can’t provide. …Learn More

June 21, 2011

Financial-product complexity isn’t talked about on Capitol Hill, where Congress is arming itself for battle royale over the appointment of Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

But some economics and business professors are sticking up for the financial consumer, who they say faces an “ever-widening set of financial options” and “dizzying amount of information.”

“Households are expected to make decisions about pension plan contributions and payouts, to choose from a wide array of credit instruments to fund everything from home purchase to short-term cash needs, and more generally to assume a greater level of responsibility for their financial well-being,” Harvard economists Brigitte Madrian and John Campbell, Harvard Law professor Howell Jackson, and Peter Tufano at the Harvard Business School wrote in a recent paper.

“There is growing evidence that consumers make avoidable financial mistakes” with “nontrivial financial consequences,” they said.

Published in the latest issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the paper used three case studies to support their call for more creative regulation: mortgages, payday loans, and 401(k)s. …Learn More

Money Culture

June 16, 2011

There is a race between financial companies and their consumers, and the consumer is dead last.

It has become virtually impossible for regular folks to keep pace with Wall Street’s increasingly complex financial products or the confusing bells and whistles being attached to once-familiar products. Look no further than the “basic” checking account, which is no longer basic, according to a recent study by The Pew Charitable Trusts. And forget about deciphering “universal variable life insurance.”

Evidence of this complexity abounds in the personal finance section of The Wall Street Journal, which recently ran an article about the profusion of “draw-down” products to help retirees use their 401(k)s to lock in a steady stream of income. The newspaper also warned about the banking industry’s new push to sell “professional credit cards,” which aren’t subject to regulations that limit controversial billing practices.

Even with checking accounts, the devil is in the details. In “Hidden Risks: The Case for Safe and Transparent Checking Accounts,” Pew analyzed fees in 250 checking accounts – that’s how many were offered just by the nation’s 10 largest banking companies. Learn More