Squared Away Blog

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CRR’s Squared Away blog helps individuals understand their own financial behavior and psychology so that they can make better decisions.

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About the Blog:

The Squared Away Blog has been recognized by both The Wall Street Journal and AARP.  “In clear, straightforward language,” writes AARP blogger and NBC Today financial editor Jean Chatzky, the blog “delves into what future and current retirees need to focus on.”

Squared Away: Financial Behavior: Work, Save, Retire is not a personal finance blog – there are dozens of those. This blog covers anything having to do with financial behavior, psychology and our U.S. money culture. We want to provide any information that might help Americans of all ages better understand their behavior so that they can act in their own best interest – and get their all-important financial matters “squared away.” Sponsored by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, this blog is for individuals, as well as practitioners in the field of financial literacy, including financial advisers, educators, employers, government and foundation officials, and researchers. The topic is so interesting and important that we hope everyone will want to read Squared Away.

Weekly blog posts will cover cutting-edge research on why some individuals handle their money well while others pile up debts, or how some individuals manage to prepare for retirement or college and others fail to save.  Squared Away will also explore the emotional and psychological – even neurological – reasons people do what they do and will cover employer and government initiatives to improve financial literacy.

Squared Away has five departments, including Research, Field Work, Behavior, and Money Culture.  And because the Web is the primary form of communication for most Americans, the fifth department – On the Web – is devoted to innovative ways people can learn about money online.

About blogger Kim Blanton:

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.

Squared Away writer Kim Blanton invites you to follow us on Twitter @SquaredAwayBC. To stay current on our blog, please join our free email list. You’ll receive just one email each week – with links to the two new posts for that week – when you sign up here. This blog is supported by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.