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A new survey by ING Retirement Research Institute, by Forbes, revealed that Latinos aren't saving for their golden years.

Fifty-four percent of Latinos said that they felt "not very" or "not at all" financially prepared for retirement, a percentage that was higher than that of all other ethnic groups surveyed including African-Americans, whites and Asians.

The question now is why Latinos are not saving more money toward their retirement. While the ING survey reported that about a third of Latinos blamed insufficient income and a quarter pointed to debt as reasons why they haven't been able put more money aside, I think that the Forbes report on the survey was correct to mention that culture also plays a part. READ MORE

When Fernando Molina left central Mexico to move to Illinois, he was searching for affordable housing, job opportunities and established Hispanic neighborhoods with grocery stores, bakeries and clothing shops.

He didn't head for Chicago, a well-known magnet for Mexicans pondering the journey north. Instead, he settled in Aurora, about 40 miles to the west.

"It's like Mexico inside the United States," said Molina, 37, a social worker who has lived in the U.S. for more than a decade and now assists other immigrant families. "You can find everything in the stores."

Over the last decade, tens of thousands of others have followed his path to Aurora — more than 35,000 of about 55,000 new residents between 2000 and 2010 were Hispanic. The city, which is now 40 percent Hispanic, has surpassed Rockford to become Illinois' second-largest city.

The trend of immigrants heading directly to American suburbs instead of starting in a major city intensified from 2000 to 2010 — and was one factor in Illinois' 32.5 percent increase in Hispanic population in that period, according to recently released U.S. Census data.

Demographers say they aren't just seeing it around Chicago. The same thing is happening around other major cities that have long been entry points for immigrants, such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Even as the steep growth of the Hispanic population in Chicago tapered off, the arrival of Hispanics helped make Kendall County west of Aurora the fastest growing county in the U.S. for several years during the decade.

For many Hispanics in northern Illinois, Aurora supplanted Chicago as a cultural hub, and the growth has transformed smaller and smaller towns. READ MORE

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At the end of May 2007, Jorge Sanchez loaded his cousin's pickup truck and moved his young family from an apartment into a house in Fitchburg. The house was just three years old. Its light brown siding was accented by a bright red front door. A park sat invitingly down the street.

That was six years after Sanchez and his wife, Minerva Abrajan, natives of Puebla, Mexico, arrived in Madison. They're not citizens, but, as permanent residents who pay U.S. taxes, the UW-Madison janitors obtained a mortgage under a new loan program aimed at extending home ownership to people who previously couldn't qualify.

"We wanted a house because we had two kids already," Sanchez said. "We wanted something better for them."

The new program opened a door to home loans to non-citizens, helping usher in a sharp increase in homeownership among local Latinos in the second half of the last decade — shortly before a corresponding increase in foreclosure filings against the same group a few years later.

The loans, first offered through a Wisconsin Housing and Economic Authority (WHEDA) pilot program and later by an array of private lenders, allowed people with individual taxpayer identification numbers, or ITINs, to apply for home loans. But ITIN loans suffered from bad timing and, in some cases, left the intended beneficiaries more downtrodden financially than before they got the loans.

In 2004, when ITIN loans started being issued by a local lender, foreclosures were filed against eight Latinos in Dane County, based on a review of court documents identifying Latinos by what the federal Census Bureau defines as commonly occuring last names. In 2009, that number ballooned to 125 — Jorge Sanchez among them —an increase of 1,462 percent. Total foreclosure filings skyrocketed as well but at an increase of 302 percent. READ MORE

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Hispanics embrace social media such as Facebook, YouTube and Google+ more than the general population. But when it comes to sharing personal information about themselves, Hispanics are more cautious, according to survey results announced today.

uSamp, a leader in providing targeted audiences for global consumer insights, engaged 650 members from its newly inaugurated Hispanic panel, SuperOpinion.com, to survey participants on their attitudes toward social media compared to the general population.

The survey, captured in an INFOGRAPHIC, found that 90 percent of Hispanics are likely to be on Facebook compared to 81 percent of the general population; 57 percent of Hispanics access YouTube compared to 46 percent of the general population. Hispanics are also overwhelmingly more likely to be on Google+, 47 percent compared with 18 percent of the general population. The only social media platform that Hispanics largely ignore is LinkedIn. Only 4 percent of Hispanics surveyed said they use LinkedIn vs. 21 percent of the general population.

“Social media is a natural fit for Latinos. Latinos, by nature, are innovators. Social media allows us to create, recreate and take a shot at building communities around content that we want,” said Lance Ríos, president and founder, Being Latino, Inc. “Secondarily, Latinos are very loyal consumers. But in order to gain their trust, you have to assure them that you are legitimate. Culturally we tend to be sensitive to giving personal information so easily. Once trust is gained, Latinos will usually open up.” READ MORE

It’s becoming difficult to keep track of how many media companies have made the same announcement lately: We’re launching a website/television network/social media campaign for a Latino audience, but in English.

Just in the last year-plus we’ve seen the launch of English-language digital ventures like Fox News Latino and HuffPost Latino Voices. A partnership between the latter and AOL has been involved in launching Spanish-English hyperlocal Patch Latino sites.

This week brought reports that Univision and Disney were working together to produce a 24-hour news channel for Latinos in English. It also brought the launch of Voxxi, a English-language website for “acculturated Latinos” headed by an editor from Spain’s EFE news agency. It’s one of a host of English-language sites, some more professional than others, that have launched in the past couple of years with the goal of reaching, well, acculturated Latinos.

There are other ventures in the works, most with an emphasis on digital content. What gives, and why now? Giovanni Rodriguez is a social-technology and marketing expert with Deloitte Consulting who studies and writes about the Latino media market. In a short piece last week for Forbes, he wrote about how media companies are “beginning to gain a finer grasp of the Latino population,” including their language and engagement preferences. Here, he provides details. READ MORE

SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.

This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles. READ MORE

Employment among Hispanics and Asians in the U.S. has climbed back to levels seen prior to the last recession, while hiring of whites and blacks has lagged behind, a study found.

The number of Hispanic workers reached 20.7 million in the last three months of 2011, up from 19.9 million in the final quarter of 2007 when the economic slump began, according to a report by the Washington-based Pew Hispanic Center, a non- partisan research group. Employment among Asians climbed by about 263,000 during the period, while it was 4.9 million lower for whites and 763,000 for blacks.

While all categories have shown gains since the recovery began in 2009, the speed of the improvement has tracked the rate of growth in each group’s working-age population, leaving the share of those employed little changed. The economic rebound has also been less kind to women than men, even as the opposite was the case during the contraction, the report showed.

“Two years after the U.S. labor market hit bottom, the economic recovery has yielded slow but steady gains in employment for all groups of workers,” according to the paper, written by Rakesh Kochhar, the group’s associate director of research. “The gains, however, have varied across demographic groups.”

Using the employment rate, or the share of the working-age population with the job, as a gauge, reveals a different story. The rate for Hispanics and blacks was at least 5 percentage points lower at the end of 2011 than when the recession began. The deficit was about 4 percentage points for whites and Asians. READ MORE

For years, America’s growing and mobile Latino population helped transform cities such as Atlanta and Las Vegas as well as many smaller communities. But the deep recession slowed this great dispersion, a new analysis shows, raising economic and political implications.

Between 2000 and 2010, the nation’s Latino population jumped 43 percent to 50.5 million, growing especially fast throughout the South and in smaller metropolitan areas in the Midwest and Northeast. The Latino populations more than tripled in such places as Palm Coast, Fla.; Knoxville, Tenn.; and Wausau, Wis. Job opportunities and an influx of new immigrants from Mexico and Latin America helped drive the boom.

But with the economic downturn that began in 2007, the meltdown of the housing market and a slowdown of new foreign arrivals, many of these same communities have seen the Latino growth rates flatten out. READ MORE

Businesses take notice; Hispanics are taking their growing $1 trillion buying power online.

According to Boostability, an online marketing company based in American Fork, Utah, there are more than 30 million Hispanics actively online, and businesses across the country are now catering to this growing online segment. The Internet has rapidly become an integral part of daily life. Hispanics are using the Internet to shop for large retail items, find local businesses and to look up entertainment information such as movies, concerts and places to eat. Today, social media sites like Facebook and YouTube are the second and fourth most popular websites among Hispanics according to Captura Group.

A powerful study by OTX, a global consumer research firm, found noteworthy facts about Hispanic Internet use. They found that 78 percent of Hispanics use the Internet as a primary source of information with 84 percent of Hispanics using search engines to find that information. They also found that 54 percent of these searches led to purchases online while 43 percent led to in-store purchases.

The data showed that the Hispanic market is more receptive to online advertising than non-Hispanics. Small businesses need to move beyond their perceived language barrier and commit to reaching this growing online market. READ MORE

Wow. Or should I say wepa? The first month of the year is not over, and already we have seen three big indicators that media companies and advertisers are chasing the Latino market, and language is the story. Last week, Fox announced that they will be launching a Spanish-language TV network. This morning, NBC Latino, an English-language operation, announced their launch on Facebook and Twitter. Also this morning is news from Ooyala that it is powering the introduction of cable network NuvoTV — whose audiences prefer English and a little bit of Spanglish — into a range of social and mobile environments.

I say that language is the story in each of these announcements because of an interesting experience I had a few days ago. I was in Pasadena to take part in a panel discussion at Southern California Public Radio and someone in the audience asked why so many media companies were confused about their Spanish language strategy. I replied that media companies are not at all confused but instead are beginning to gain a finer grasp of the Latino population and their preferences for language, content, and engagement. The three announcements throw the situation into sharp relief. READ MORE