About the Blog
The Wall Street Journal in October 2011 called Squared Away “a new blog worth following.”
Squared Away: Financial Behavior: Work, Save, Retire is not a personal finance blog – there are dozens of those. This blog is for practitioners in the field of financial literacy, including financial advisers, employers, government and foundation officials, and researchers. Squared Away will cover anything that might help them do a better job of helping Americans of all ages act in their own financial best interest – and help them get their all-important financial matters “squared away.” But this topic is so interesting and important that we hope everyone will want to read Squared Away.
Weekly blog posts will cover cutting-edge findings 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 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 literacy. Wall Street excesses certainly fueled the crisis, but easy credit and a poor understanding of complex financial products played major roles. I interviewed dozens of homeowners in the grip of foreclosure who 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’ll use the same dogged reporting skills to cover financial literacy issues of growing importance today, such as the personal crisis that concerns millions of baby boomers: Retirement.
If something of interest to the financial education community catches your eye, please alert me at kimberly.blanton@bc.edu.
