Alrededor del 14 por ciento de trabajadores y trabajadoras aquí hablan español. El Seguro Social tiene un sitio web para usted. Translation: About 14 percent of the working-age population here speaks Spanish. Social Security has a website for you. It’s critical that workers who speak only Spanish or are more comfortable with the language have a clear understanding of how Social Security benefits work. It’s estimated that Americans 65 and over receive just under a third of their income from the benefits, and lower-income people rely on it for much more than that. Social Security’s Spanish-language website, which has been around in some form since the mid-1990s, provides general information about the program and also addresses issues especially relevant to this population. One example is an employer’s responsibility to report income for the one in four domestic workers in this country who are Latina. Below are some of the general…

Originally Published on https://squaredawayblog.bc.edu/

Kim Blanton Squared Away Blog Writer

I’m a veteran financial and economics reporter, most recently for The Boston Globe, who has also written for The Economist and other publications. I uncovered scandals during the savings and loan crisis in Texas back in the late 1980s, trekked around the world to cover finance and economics in the 1990s, and ventured into Boston neighborhoods to cover the recent subprime mortgage crisis.

While covering subprime mortgages, I began to see the importance of financial behavior and literacy. Wall Street excesses certainly fueled the crisis, but a poor understanding of complex financial products also played a major role. I interviewed dozens of homeowners in the grip of foreclosure who had agreed to home loans that they did not understand and that their brokers did not or could not explain to them. The consequences for these individuals – and the country – were disastrous.

I use the same dogged reporting skills to cover financial issues of growing importance today, including the personal crisis that concerns millions of baby boomers: Retirement.

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