Living the dream, or forced retirement?

Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial insight, gathered from around the web:

No Coloradans need apply

Businesses are avoiding Colorado in job ads, said Chip Cutter at The Wall Street Journal. Job listing from companies "across the internet," including Johnson & Johnson, McKesson, and CBRE insert disclaimers that "the work can't be done in Colorado." The issue is a new state law, the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, that requires companies "to disclose the expected salary or pay range for each open role they advertise." The law was intended to "narrow gender wage gaps and provide greater pay transparency." But business leaders call it overly burdensome. Some companies have started including pay information — one ad for an Amazon software engineering job "notes that the range for the position in Colorado is $116,400 to $160,000 a year" — but say that pay in other places can vary.

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A new way to invest in rental property

A Seattle-based startup, backed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' investment company, "lets regular people invest small amounts of money in single-family rental properties," said Patrick Clark at Bloomberg​. So far, Arrived Homes has acquired 15 homes and is in contract for 18 more, but it expects to be buying as many as 100 properties a month by the end of the year. Arrived seeks to democratize real estate investing, "offering shares in rental properties for as little as $100," though the average investment has been around $1,800 across two or three houses. The firm "spreads acquisitions across markets, allowing investors to buy shares in homes that vary by geography or expected rent."

Living the dream, or forced retirement?

Two recent studies found differing reasons for why more people retired early last year, said Stephanie Asymkos at Yahoo. "More than 1 in 10 Baby Boomers said the pandemic caused them to retire sooner than expected, according to a recent survey from MetLife," but nearly a third of those say they did so because of a newfound "life-is-short mentality." That contrasts with a Federal Reserve study, which found that 29 percent of last year's retirees "were more likely to say they were forced to retire or that work was not available." In some cases, it may have been a little of both. One woman described her "apprehension" after being laid off. But she was "buoyed by unemployment insurance benefits," kept her expenses low, and gradually "became more and more comfortable with the idea of retirement."

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