Sen. Braun says the retired should be be able to stay retired

(FROM NETWORK INDIANA)

Sen. Mike Braun was in Indianapolis on Tuesday to hold a remote hearing of the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging.

The committee tackles issues as they relate to older Americans. Braun used the time to address several topics that he feels are directly impacting Americans who are of retirement age and they mainly had to do with the economy.

“Older Americans play such a critical role throughout the economy,” he said. “Even now some are considering coming out of retirement. A recent report showed that 43-percent of Americans are considering coming out of retirement. That’s probably not the plan that everybody was looking to happen.”

He said things like rising interest rates and the rising national debt are directly impacting retirement accounts and social security which help sustain older Americans in retirement.

Though Braun said that having older Americans in the workforce is crucial to the economy, they should not be having to come completely out of retirement in order to be financially solvent.

“For employers facing labor shortages, older workers can still fill those gaps,” Braun said. “A recent report showed that older workers will make up a quarter of the workforce by 2031.”

Braun said that number needs to come down. He said solutions to “reinvigorate the economy” need to be found so that workers can set more aside while they are working in order to avoid having to come out of retirement later on.

For starters, Braun suggests that the country quit borrowing so much money and driving the U.S. further into debt.

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Sen. Braun says the retired should be be able to stay retired

Bogus 'guardians' steal money, sometimes life | Opinion

Editorial Board, Lakeland Ledger

The concept of “retirement,” along with government social welfare programs to support old folks who no longer worked, dates to the 1880s. That’s when German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck concluded that a little socialism for the elderly — Germany set retirement its age at 70 — was better than blanket entitlement programs for all his constituents.

As Bismarck’s idea circulated across the Atlantic, Florida didn’t take long to catch on. The New York Times noted a few years ago that by 1910 middle-class retirees joined the wealthy in discovering the Sunshine State as an appealing place to live out their golden years. Retirement communities began popping up within the next two decades.

Thus, for a century Florida has marketed itself and catered to the elderly, becoming a top destination of elders seeking a retirement pasture.

But that influx of senior citizens made Florida a target-rich environment for hucksters, shysters and ne’er do wells out to con them — or harm them in other ways. And on occasion that abuse came from those entrusted to watch out for their interests.

Now, state Rep. Colleen Burton has joined an effort to better protect our seniors.

The Lakeland Republican has sponsored a bill that would toughen oversight of the state’s guardianship program for seniors, which is managed by the state Department of Elder Affairs.

At a guardian hearing in Judge Lisa Davidson's courtroom at the Moore Justice Center in Viera, guardian Manda Wright replaced Rebecca Fierle for two Brevard residents as their guardian. Judge Lisa Davidson at the hearing.  (Photo: MALCOLM DENEMARK/FLORIDA TODAY)

Focus on this arm of the tiny agency began last summer after media reports surfaced about Rebecca Fierle, an Orlando-based guardian. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigated her after one of her clients, Steven Stryker, 75, died from choking on food while hospitalized in Tampa. Fierle reportedly filed a “do not resuscitate” order, which precluded hospital staff from treating Stryker, without permission from either Stryker or his family.

Subsequently, an audit by Orange County determined Fierle had billed Advent Health more than $4 million over 10 years, double-billing the hospital system and court for the same services. Fierle also had clients in Volusia and Flagler counties, and after news of the Tampa case broke, Volusia County Circuit Judge Margaret Hudson started requiring that guardians seeking a DNR appear before her for an evidentiary hearing with medical testimony and notice to the ward’s family.

A few months before Stryker’s case became news, the website RealClearInvestigations.com reported on Lillie White, an 88-year-old from Palm Coast. During an August 2016 doctor’s appointment, while her niece remained in the waiting room, a guardian took White and declined to say where she went. Two years later White’s family learned that her sole granddaughter, who had been cut out of White’s will, had persuaded a judge White needed guardianship.

White, who was worth $4 million, was housed in an assisted living facility 35 miles from home. The guardian, without White’s family’s knowledge, sold her house and some of her other assets to pay the fees of the guardian as well as a court-appointed lawyer and other people overseeing her case.

WFTS in Tampa recently reported on a Pinellas County guardian charged with draining her 92-year-old client’s bank account of $541,000 in just 10 months. She had convinced him to grant her power of attorney over his affairs and proceeded to pay herself $1,600 a day.

Meanwhile, the state’s director of the program resigned last year amid a lengthy backlog complaints about guardians — which the Department of Elder Affairs now says has been addressed.

In response, Burton and Sen. Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, have filed bills that will strengthen protections for the more than 3,800 Floridians managed by guardians. Included in the proposals are requirements that:

• Judges look more closely at possible conflicts of interest and other disqualifying factors before appointing a guardian;
• Guardians seek court approval for DNR orders, and be prohibited from seeking their own appointment;
• Guardians could not recieve bonuses, referral fees, commissions or other potential kickbacks from service providers.

We believe that most of the state’s 500-plus guardians are professional, conscientious, devoted to the best interests of their wards and law-abiding.

But as noted above, some are not. In order to protect Florida’s elderly who need this service, as well as the state’s reputation as a haven for senior citizens, we must have stricter rules governing this program. For working for that, we applaud Rep. Burton and Sen. Passidomo.

This editorial was originally published in the Lakeland Ledger.

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Bogus 'guardians' steal money, sometimes life | Opinion

Retirement should not mean hardship – but many older Americans live in poverty

Vivian Majors at her home in Opelousas, Louisiana, on February 20, 2019. Photograph: Annie Flanagan/The Guardian

Vivian Majors spent her life cleaning houses while her husband, Martin, worked as a carpenter. Their bodies broke down in their 60s. She is now 71, living on her own and struggling to pay her bills. He is in a nursing home and has Parkinson’s disease. She survives on a $960 monthly social security check and $50 in food stamps. Hardened by years of physically taxing work that left her hovering around the poverty line, Majors, now retired, is girding herself for more years of financial hardship.

Elderly poverty was supposed to be a thing of the past. Social security supposedly wiped out the scourge of old-age penury, signaling one of the great social-policy triumphs of the modern era. But this is far from the whole story. Inequality, which has grown markedly in Europe and North America since the 1970s, has widened the gap between the secure and insecure in all age groups, and has exposed American seniors to financial distress in ways that often go unnoticed.

Opelousas, Louisiana, has the highest rate of elderly rate in the US. Photograph: Annie Flanagan/The Guardian

According to research from the University of Massachusetts Boston, material hardship bedevils millions of Americans such as Majors who are over 65.

Opelousas, Louisiana (population 16,480), where Majors and her husband grew up and raised their own children, has the highest rate of elderly poverty in the US. Seventy-five percent African American, Opelousas is home to men and women who have worked all their lives. But in 2017 the average per-capita income in the town was only $15,266 a year, and 45% of its population lived in poverty.

Mary Quick sweeps after the Holy Ghost Community Meal in Opelousas, Louisiana. Photograph: Annie Flanagan/The Guardian

Few Opelousas retirees received sick leave or healthcare coverage while they were working, and virtually none can count on a pension to support them when they can no longer work. A lifetime of poverty rarely translates into what the rest of the country defines as true retirement. Instead, the working poor often stay on the job past retirement age.

The statistics from Opelousas are extreme, but its labor market’s underlying conditions – which residents have faced all their lives – are echoed across the country. Of those who are still of working age, 62% of African Americans and 69% of Latinos have no retirement savings. Come retirement, they are almost entirely reliant on social security. When that is the sole source of income, economic hardship is likely to be the outcome – not to the extent it was before social security was created, but a great deal more than for workers with long histories in often better-paid private-sector jobs.

Holy Ghost Community Diner in Opelousas, Louisiana. Photograph: Annie Flanagan/The Guardian

In the US, the poverty line was set by the Department of Agriculture as a multiple of the price of a typical “food basket” in the 1960s. It has been updated and benchmarked for family size every year since. The incidence of poverty for Americans over 65 has declined significantly, even further if measured against the poverty rate in the 1930s and 40s. Social security expenditures have played a crucial role in bringing about this improvement. As this safety net spread and the benefits available increased, poverty moved decisively downward.

We tend to think of inequality as shaping the lives of children and working-age adults, depending on their educational attainment. But the trajectory of inequality powerfully affects older people as well. Their lives in old age are a natural extension of their experiences in the prime working years. Social security is, in the end, insufficient to protect a surprisingly large number of older Americans from poverty.

Vivian Majors takes care of her husband Martin who has Parkinson’s disease. Photograph: Annie Flanagan/The Guardian

The US is an outlier in terms of elderly poverty – in the wrong direction. Retirement expert Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor at the New School, points out that a higher proportion of older Americans are below the threshold set by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development than all other advanced economies in the world except for Australia and Switzerland.

This perspective is corroborated by the Gerontology Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Its Elder Economic Security Standard Index provides a more fine-grained understanding of hardship, conditional on household size, location, housing and health status, among other variables. The index shows that in 2016 a majority of American seniors lacked “the financial resources required to pay for basic needs”. The numbers are higher for those living alone than those in two-senior households, but overall the material hardship of the elderly is significant. The variation across the states is pronounced. But “in every state, the share of older adults living ‘in the gap’ between the federal poverty line and the Elder Index is larger than the share living in poverty”.

Rates of old age poverty in the world. Illustration: Forbes

Theirs is an economically uneasy life. Like the “near poor” more generally, older households above the poverty line miss out on federal and state benefits – from Snap, or food stamps, to housing grants to Medicaid – designed to assist those in need. They are on their own and yet facing significant shortfalls in the resources needed to survive at a minimally acceptable level.

Gaps were particularly problematic for women who, on average, received $4,500 less per year in social security benefits than men because they had lower lifetime earnings and worked fewer quarters to take time out for caregiving.

The gender gap reminds us of one of the most important aspects of elder poverty: it does not generally descend at the end of a career. Instead, it is a function of the inequalities that beset people during their working years. In this sense, elder poverty isn’t really about elders; it is about lifetimes spent under conditions of accumulated economic marginality.

Vivian Majors at her home in Opelousas, Louisiana. Photograph: Annie Flanagan/The Guardian

Poorer seniors are likely to have been poor, or among the working poor, most of their lives. They have held jobs that paid low wages, were often involuntarily part-time, provided for no sick leave or health insurance and provided nothing at all in the way of pensions.

Majors is a frugal woman. She is inclined to shut down the air conditioner in the height of a humid Louisiana summer rather than see her electricity bill rise beyond what she can afford. Even in her old age, with such limited resources, she lends a hand to her grown children when they need it. “A lot of people sometimes wonder how you’re making it,” she says. “But you manage, you know. You’re going to survive.”

That is no doubt true. Yet we can ask ourselves why merely being able to “manage” is the best that can be expected for a hardworking woman like Majors. Retirement should not mean hardship in the 21st century.

Opelousas, Louisiana. Photograph: Annie Flanagan/The Guardian

Katherine S Newman is the interim chancellor of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, the Torrey Little Professor of Sociology, and author of Downhill from Here: Retirement Insecurity in the Age of Inequality (Metropolitan Books)

• This article was supported by the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and The Economic Hardship Reporting Project

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Retirement should not mean hardship – but many older Americans live in poverty

This is Not Your Grandma's Retirement

By Joan Hunt

Grandma Minnie always had a jar of chocolate chip cookies on hand. If you dropped by her house and she wasn’t home, Mr. Burling next door, or Cora across the street, always knew where she was—and they would offer you a lemonade, so you could go sit on her porch swing and wait for her to return. She always had a lap to sit on, an ear to lend, and good advice if you asked her for it. For as long as I can remember, she sold Avon door to door in her little town of 580 people. A talker, she exchanged more conversation than products, but my dad and my uncles had her back financially, so the Avon was mostly to make her feel independent.

Grandma didn’t retire at a specific point, because she had never really worked outside the house. She raised a family, and after my grandfather died she found ways to stay valuable. She took in boarders, volunteered at the church, and would take any of her nine grandchildren for a weekend or so to take the burden off their families. I was lucky enough to earn that honor quite often. And in those days, I vowed to be just like her when I became a grandma. It seemed like she had all the time in the world, and no matter how busy she was, you could always get her attention.

Flash forward. After decades of editorial deadlines and juggling work, kids, household chores, and personal needs, I wake up wired for activity. That is after three years of being retired! Sometimes I dream about all the things I must accomplish during the day, just as I used to do when I was responsible for 15 weekly newspapers and a staff of a dozen people. In the morning, my partner, also retired, does the crossword puzzle with his coffee, while I read a few pages of my current novel.  Then we hit the ground running. We often skip breakfast because it takes too much time.

Three days a week, we babysit his three grandchildren. One day a week, I take one of my grandchildren for the day. We often take kids to their doctor’s or dental appointments or run errands for our children who are at work. We have a beautiful yard, a garden, and a koi pond that require a lot of maintenance. We take the dog to the dog park almost daily. My partner does taekwondo, I exercise, we walk a lot. I freelance for the local paper and two other clients. We also have a beach house in Old Lyme, which is about an hour away. In the summer, we try to get down there as often as we can—and, of course, it requires regular maintenance, as well as our home. Are you exhausted yet?

The other day, it occurred to me that we are working so hard at retirement we aren’t enjoying it. We’ve just turned it into another job. Many of our retired friends are just like us, so I have determined that it is a real “thing.” We need to chill out. But how? All these responsibilities are valid, and I don’t see them going anywhere. What needs to change, I have decided, is our mindset.

Most of us gauge our value in life by what we accomplish. We pride ourselves on being able to juggle activities. And my generation wants to remain vital and self-reliant for as long as we can. “Use it or lose it” is our motto. I think we are afraid to stop and smell the roses.  But if not now, when?

I can’t help contrasting my lifestyle with my grandmother’s. She got just as much done, but she wasn’t neurotic about it. And I think the difference is that her generation didn’t feel guilty about renewing themselves. After mowing the grass, Grandma might sit on the front porch for an hour or more with a magazine, or a neighbor, or maybe singing silly songs with one of us kids if we were there. She could lose herself playing the piano for half the afternoon. Work ended with dinner dishes. Sundays were for family entertainment: ballgames, the movies, a picnic in the backyard. The ebb and flow of life for her was not goal-oriented, it was grounded in common sense. Relaxation was part of that.

So, at 70, I am teaching myself to relax. I have taken up drawing and painting as a hobby, and now I am working on not feeling guilty about the time it takes. I have a charming little studio in the loft where I can lose myself for half a day if I want. What I am turning out up there may not be all that valuable, but it makes me happy—and that is the quality I most identify with my Grandmother Sahling.

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This is Not Your Grandma's Retirement

Family: Retirement facility didn't notice man was dead for two weeks

Anderson Township, Ohio — An Ohio family is distraught after they say it took two weeks for someone to discover their loved one had died.

According to WCPO, Paul Patterson, 77, moved into SEM Manor in Anderson Township after he suffered a stroke. He felt he needed to live somewhere where he could have more support.

SEM Manor describes itself as a "retirement & assisted living facility" on its Facebook page.

Patterson's family was stunned when they recently received a call from a detective stating that he had died.

"Nobody ... should hear something like, 'Your brother has been dead for two weeks in an apartment,'" Patterson's sister, Martha McKee, said.

The coroner told family members that Patterson's body had been decomposing for two weeks before anyone at the facility noticed he was dead. Management finally noticed when someone complained about the smell.

"That it took somebody next door to say there's a foul odor is very upsetting," Foster said.

SEM Manor declined to comment. A sign outside their facility indicates they receive taxpayer money through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

According to the facility's website, residents receive scheduled transportation, activities and attention from a caring staff in exchange for 30 percent of their income.

Patterson's family feels he was not taken care of.

"Somebody laying there for two weeks, it's just wrong," McKee said.

The sheriff's office said the death is still under investigation. The coroner's office has not yet determined a cause of death.

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Family: Retirement facility didn't notice man was dead for two weeks

A message from Kathy Greenlee to our colleagues in the aging and disability networks

Dear colleagues,

Earlier today, I shared the news with my staff that I will be leaving ACL at the end of July. Edwin Walker, who currently serves as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Aging, will assume the roles of Acting Administrator of ACL and Acting Assistant Secretary for Aging.

This kind of announcement is really hard. On one hand, it’s no surprise to anyone. It’s an election year, and new administrations mean new administrators. This is how the system works—and it’s good that it does. It’s good to get a fresh perspective and new energy.

But it is still really hard to leave. This has been a wonderful experience and an extremely rewarding seven years. And as I told the ACL team, I am proud of what we have done together. We have brought our communities together in a way that gives us a larger voice and more influence, and ultimately makes us more successful as advocates.

Consolidating aging and disability work in one place raised some eyebrows. These seemed like very different groups of people. And they are. But there are a lot of similarities in the services and supports people need in order to live independently. So it made sense to bring the federal efforts to support community living together under one umbrella.

But it worked because you made the leap of faith with us. You worked with us to build the agency the right way from the beginning, and you’ve continued to work with us as the agency has grown. I want you to know how much I appreciate your advice, support, and even your tough assessments. We’re better because of it.

It has been my great honor and privilege to work with you. I am grateful to Edwin Walker for stepping into these roles. And I am looking forward to seeing ACL continue to build upon the foundation we’ve created together.

Kathy

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A message from Kathy Greenlee to our colleagues in the aging and disability networks

How the Dream of Retirement Is Becoming a Nightmare

(This article originally appeared on Slant.com.)

None of us expected to be here — broke or near broke, unemployed or underemployed, working part-time at a job we hate with little to nothing in our savings account.

We grew up thinking retirement meant Florida and golf, not that most of us really wanted that. It definitely didn’t mean living in our brother’s basement or in some modest one-bedroom rental. We never thought in our 50s and 60s we’d be scrimping and scraping, borrowing money from our adult children or 84-year-old mother.

And yet, here we are…millions of us and millions more on the way.

Excessive spending is not what landed millions of Americans here. The truth is for many households, there’s nothing left to save after the bills are paid.

Half of Households Have No Retirement Savings

How bad is it? According to a May 2015 study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on retirement preparedness, half of American households have no retirement savings at all. That’s zero: no 401(k)s, no IRAs, not a dime.

You’re thinking maybe that’s because near-retirees have a fat pension stashed away somewhere. You’d be wrong. According to the GAO, around 29 percent of households age 55 and older have neither retirement savings nor a pension.

And among those who do have some retirement savings, the median value of retirement accounts for households age 55 to 64 is about $104,000. Now $104,000 sounds a lot better than zero until you look at the retirement monthly income this savings would actually generate.

Drum roll please. According to the GAO, your $104,000 nest egg will generate an inflation-protected annuity of about $310 per month.

I stopped mid-mascara when I heard that.

Even when you add in the average monthly Social Security benefit of $1,335, it’s still depressing.

Why Aren’t Americans Saving More?

There’s a lot of hand wringing about why Americans aren’t saving more. Blaming and shaming is so deliciously tempting. We’re told that it is our fault that after a lifetime of work we have not managed to save the 15 to 20 times our annual salary that financial experts tell us we’ll need to maintain our current standard of living in retirement.

The same pundits finger wag and chastise us for being poor planners. After all, why on earth would we draw down our 401(k) to cover medical expenses, the monthly shortfall on our mother’s nursing home care, our kid’s education or just to survive? What were we thinking paying off that credit card debt (or something else; you fill in the blank)?

But let’s get real.

Excessive spending is not what landed millions of Americans here. The truth is for many households, there’s just nothing left to save after the bills are paid.

According to the Social Security Administration in 2014, the average U.S. worker’s pay was $44,569. If we set aside in savings the 20 percent financial experts tell us we’ll need to maintain our current lifestyle in retirement, we’re left with $35,655 to live on before taxes.

You might say: hard, but not impossible with some extreme belt tightening.

But here is the kicker. Sixty-seven percent of American workers make less than the average. The median wage in 2014 was $28,851. Subtract 20 percent, or $5,770 in savings, and you have $23,081 to live on.

FUGEDDABOUTIT.

You’re not going to save on these wages. It barely keeps you above the federal poverty line of $20,090 for a family of three. And you fall below it at $24,250 for a family of four.

Given this reality, no one should be surprised that more than half of Americans have less than $1,000 in their checking and savings accounts. This is paycheck-to-paycheck living, one surprise event from financial catastrophe.

The looming retirement income security crisis is also not caused by “a set of isolated individual behaviors,” according to Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist and leading authority on the economics of retirement.

In other words, we’re not here because we’re a country of irresponsible slackers or because we overspent on luxury items trying to keep up with the Joneses.

Squeezed between 30 years of flat and falling wages and escalating costs in housing, healthcare and education, it’s doubtful that kicking our daily latte habit (if we had one) would have made much of a difference in our retirement savings.

America’s Structural Problem

The real problem is structural and baked right into our retirement security system.

The three-legged stool of retirement income we boomers thought we could count on — Social Security, company pensions and personal savings — has gone wobbly. With the declining availability of employer-funded pensions; the inadequacy of 401(k) plans with their steep fees and dependence on people’s voluntary savings for 40 years; stagnant wages and the sharp drop in personal savings, many near-retirees are left with what some experts describe as the “pogo stick” of Social Security to negotiate their Golden Years.

And how much is that? According to the Social Security Administration, the average retiree is receiving just $1,335 per month or $16,020 annually, just above the federal poverty guidelines ($15,930) for a two-person household.

What this means is that most of us will not be buying that condo in Costa Rica advertised in glossy retirement living publications. We won’t be traveling the world anytime soon or forging those remarkable second and third acts we read about in the popular press. Many of us are facing a work-for-life proposition, isolated and alone, worried about how we’re going to survive when our money runs out.

And how big is the shortfall? According to the Pension Rights Center, the deficit between what Americans have and what we need to retire is $7.7 trillion

Wrap your brain around that number. It assumes we will be spending down ALL of our assets, including home equity.

A Plea to the Presidential Candidates

Now you’d think that a problem of this magnitude and urgency would have garnered some serious airtime in the presidential debates, but so far not so much.

Certainly, it is a big concern and top priority for millions and millions of Americans, and not only boomers. Millennials, too, are worried about what to do with their parents who are now running out of money. As one friend said to me recently: “You better get along with your adult offspring, you’re going to end up living with them.”

So presidential candidates, what’s your plan for dealing with the retirement security crisis?

As you know, we boomers are a little old for hollow reassurance. We know the debates, heavy on sound bites and entertainment, are not the best platform to address a subject as complex and serious as retirement-income security. But you can lay out your priorities.

Oh and one last thing: Puleeeze, don’t talk to us about cutting Social Security.

For millions of Americans, Social Security is The Retirement Plan: 65 percent of beneficiaries depend on it for half or more of their monthly income. Without it, nearly half of women 65 and older would live in poverty or extreme poverty. Let’s not gloss over what extreme poverty means. It means living on less than $5,885 per year or $490 a month.

So when you threaten to cut entitlement programs like Social Security, what you’re really talking about is dooming millions and millions of boomer-age women to misery and destitution. Boomer-age women who vote.

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How the Dream of Retirement Is Becoming a Nightmare