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Reasons to Have That End-of-Life Conversation
Tweet Share on Facebook March 11, 2013 CommentBOSTON—Ellen Goodman won the Pulitzer Prize for her thoughtful Boston Globe columns. Now retired from that job but busier than ever, Goodman publicly laments that she won no prizes for easing her mother through illness and very hard decisions about how to care for her during the final months of her life.
"The last thing my mom would have wanted was to force me into such bewildering, painful uncertainty about her life and death," Goodman writes on the website of The Conversation Project, an effort she co-founded in 2010. "I realized only after her death how much easier it would have all been if I heard her voice in my ear as these decisions had to be made. If only we had talked about it. And so I never want to leave the people I love that uneasy and bewildered about my own wishes. It's time for us to talk."
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13 Social Security Planning Questions
Tweet Share on Facebook March 8, 2013 CommentSocial Security is often in the news these days. Congress regularly threatens to change and possibly reduce benefits. The program's financial soundness is the source of constant speculation and concern. And the economic downturn shone a light on the fact that more than half of all retirees depend on Social Security benefits for more than 90 percent of their income—an alarmingly high percentage for a program designed to provide modest retirement support.
With all this attention, you'd think older Americans would be sharpening their plans to use this important benefit program. Yet according to a new poll of more than 800 consumers ages 50 to 65, fewer than 1 in 5 older Americans have even begun serious planning for how to use Social Security.
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How the ReServe Program Helps Older Workers
Tweet Share on Facebook March 6, 2013 CommentBOSTON—Alan Greenfield has leverage and he loves it. A serial community volunteer for many years, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineer is one of the Boston area's earliest participants in a new program called ReServe. It places older professionals who are often retired (Greenfield, 65, is not retired) in part-time jobs with nonprofit and government agencies.
The leverage Greenfield has stems from his work as a site coordinator for a volunteer income-tax preparation program aimed at helping low-income people with their taxes. Using his decades of business and entrepreneurial experience, he fills a spot the program would otherwise not be able to afford and certainly not be able to fill with someone nearly as experienced.
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Why Immigration Reform Is a Big Senior Issue
Tweet Share on Facebook March 5, 2013 CommentWith Social Security and Medicare programs facing deficit-cutting proposals in the new Congress, seniors and their advocacy groups already have big issues on their plates. Yet a good case can be made that immigration reform is another emerging issue for millions of seniors who need care. The shifting outlook has several components: rising demand for care due to a growing elderly population, a sustained effort to provide elder care in homes rather than institutions, a shrinking workforce of Americans, and an economic recovery that will eventually reduce the supply of family members available to provide unpaid care.
Historically, many paid caregiving jobs have been filled by immigrants. Immigrants who are physicians and other skilled medical workers are particularly important in rural and underserved U.S. markets. The demand for less skilled in-home care aides also has been filled in part by immigrants, although precise data could not be obtained. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics does not ask immigration status in its research, and does not track caregivers as a separate job category.
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Why Social Security Benefits Require Careful Study
Tweet Share on Facebook March 4, 2013 CommentBOSTON—Social Security benefits are often explained in simple terms. Most people begin benefits near the earliest claiming age, which is 62 years old. A smaller percentage understands that benefits will rise by about 8 percent a year every year between age 62 and 70. A still smaller percentage knows it's possible to take spousal benefits and divorce benefits in certain situations without reducing one's own benefits at a later date. The percentages of informed people get smaller and smaller as the program's increasingly esoteric features present more rarified choices.
Finally, we reach the smallest possible sliver of Social Security wisdom. His is Larry Kotlikoff, an unconventional economist and thinker at Boston University. And it may be true that no one else covets this spot. But Kotlikoff has amassed an awesome amount of Social Security knowledge. He has been working for years to cram this information into a software product that will do all the heavy lifting to help people without such knowledge get the most possible money out of their Social Security benefits.
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Why Retirees Are a Threatened Species
Tweet Share on Facebook March 1, 2013 CommentBOSTON—With investment and real estate markets recovering, and cuts to Social Security and Medicare at bay for the time being, it would be comforting to paint a rosier picture of the retirement prospects for the surge of baby boomers continuing to reach retirement age every day.
Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, would like to don those rose-colored glasses as much as the next person. But she does not see a positive future for retirees. In fact, her outlook is, well, awful.
It's not that Munnell sees damaging cuts to Social Security or Medicare on the horizon, either. Her dour assessment includes some trims, but not necessarily deep cuts.
