Are All Americans Saving 'Optimally' for Retirement?
32 Pages Posted: 4 Feb 2009
Date Written: September 1, 2008
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.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
The Adequacy of Household Saving
By Eric M. Engen, William G. Gale, ...
-
Perspectives on the Household Saving Rate
By William G. Gale and John Sabelhaus
-
The Trajectory of Wealth in Retirement
By David A. Love, Michael Palumbo, ...
-
By John Karl Scholz and Ananth Seshadri
-
Lifetime Earnings, Social Security Benefits, and the Adequacy of Retirement Wealth Accumulation
By Eric M. Engen, William G. Gale, ...
-
Effects of Stock Market Fluctuations on the Adequacy of Retirement Wealth Accumulation
By Eric M. Engen, William G. Gale, ...
-
Market Value vs. Financial Accounting Measures of National Saving
-
Do Newly Retired Workers in the United States Have Sufficient Resources to Maintain Well-Being?
By Robert Haveman, Karen Holden, ...
-
Are Successive Generations Getting Wealthier, and If so, Why?
By William G. Gale and Karen M. Pence