UM08-01: Are All Americans Saving Adequately for Retirement
Researchers
Abstract
Many people fear that Americans are preparing poorly for retirement. But developing rigorous evidence on this issue is difficult. In this paper we briefly discuss evidence on the adequacy of retirement wealth accumulation. We conclude that existing descriptive evidence does not seem consistent with dire assessments of poor financial preparation. We then extend the straightforward, but computationally complex dynamic programming approach used in our earlier work to assess the adequacy of retirement wealth preparation of Americans born before 1954. We find only 4 percent of HRS households have net worth below their optimal targets in 2004, though this percentage is somewhat higher for more recent HRS cohorts. While our work is preliminary, we find little evidence that Americans born before 1954 have prepared poorly for retirement.
Publications
- Are All Americans Saving 'Optimally' for Retirement? (Research Brief)
- Are All Americans Saving ‘Optimally’ for Retirement? (Working Paper)
- Are All Americans Saving 'Optimally' for Retirement? (Conference Paper)