General Wealth and Savings Reports

  • Typical Wealth Held by Those at the Verge of Retirement (Urban Institute, February 2008). A great way to assess how well adults have accumulated wealth is to look at their finances in the years shortly before they retire. We show wealth among households with an adult age 57–61 in 2004, using the Health and Retirement Study.
  • Who is Ready for Retirement, How Ready, and How Can We Know? (AARP, January 2008). Recent literature on retirement income adequacy among boomers is examined in this AARP Public Policy Institute Issue Paper...The paper underscores the impact of marital status and education level on standard of living in retirement. It concludes that the news is generally good for boomers in terms of retirement income, but that most of the studies do not take into account the risks that retirees face, including risks related to investment, longevity, and health care costs and needs.
  • How Many Struggle to Get By in Retirement? (Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, December 2007). This paper uses data from the 2004 Health and Retirement Study to demonstrate how the poverty rate of adults age 65 and older changes using alternative resource and threshold measures.
  • Income and Poverty Among Older Americans in 2006 (Congressional Research Service, September 2007). As Congress considers reforms to Social Security and the laws governing pensions and retirement savings plans, it may be helpful to examine how changes to one income source would affect each of the others, and thus the total income of older Americans.
  • Consumer Spending by Older Americans, 1985 to 2005 (Congressional Research Service, September 2007). This CRS report presents data on spending by Americans aged 55 and older collected by the U.S. Department of Labor through its Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES). From 1985 to 2005, the average annual expenditures of older Americans rose along with their incomes, and the distribution of spending among expenditure categories changed.
  • Older Workers: Employment and Retirement Trends (Congressional Research Service, September 2007). As the members of the “baby boom” generation — people born between 1946 and 1964 — approach retirement, the demographic profile of the U.S. workforce will undergo a substantial shift: a large number of older workers will be joined by relatively few new entrants to the labor force.
  • Is There Really a Retirement Savings Crisis? An NRRI Analysis (Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, August 2007). This brief summarizes an exercise that reconciles seemingly contradictory conclusions of studies that seek to determine whether or not households will have enough to live on in retirement. It demonstrates the importance of the age group and time period being examined.
  • Social Security and Retirement Income Adequacy (National Academy of Social Insurance, May 2007). Experts say that retirees need 70-80 percent of their prior earnings to keep up their standards of living in retirement. Social Security today replaces less than that – about 40 percent for an average earner at 65. Yet most retirees rely on Social Security for most of their income. This brief focuses on the role of Social Security in producing adequate retirement income.
  • National Savings Rate Guidelines for Individuals (Journal of Financial Planning, April 2007). This study creates savings guidelines for typical individuals with different ages, income levels, and initial accumulated wealth so the public can more easily determine how much to save for retirement...The authors recommend that their findings be adopted as national savings guidelines.
  • Retirement Savings: How Much Will Workers Have When They Retire? (Congressional Research Service, January 2007). This report presents information on trends in retirement plan design and then summarizes data collected by the Federal Reserve Board on the retirement savings accumulated by workers and the rates at which they are saving for retirement. The report also presents the results of an analysis conducted by CRS on the amount of retirement savings that workers might be able to accumulate by age 65 under a number of different scenarios.
  • What Moves the National Retirement Risk Index? A Look Back and an Update (Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, January 2007). In June 2006, the Center for Retirement Research released the National Retirement Risk Index. This brief looks at the three major factors that have caused the Index to increase since the early 1980s and updates the Index from 2004 to 2006.
  • What Happens to Household Portfolios After Retirement? (Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, November 2006). This brief analyzes how portfolios evolve with age and how health shocks such as the death of a spouse or a heart attack or stroke affect the composition of household portfolios.
  • Will Reverse Mortgages Rescue the Baby Boomers? (Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, September 2006). This brief examines the extent to which homeowners can count on housing wealth to support their consumption in retirement, using reverse mortgages.
  • Topics in Aging: Income and Poverty Among Older Americans in 2005 (Congressional Research Service, September 2006). Older persons receive income from a variety of sources, including earnings, pensions, personal savings, and public programs such as Social Security and Supplemental Security Income. Using data from the March 2006 Current Population Survey, this report describes both the number of elderly receiving income from each of 10 major sources and the extent to which income from each source is either concentrated at the high end or low end of the income distribution or is more evenly distributed among the elderly population.
  • A New National Retirement Risk Index (Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, June 2006). The National Retirement Risk Index measures the share of working-age households who are at risk of being unable to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living in retirement.
  • Retirement Savings and Household Wealth: Trends from 2001 to 2004 (Congressional Research Service, May 2006). Once every three years, the Federal Reserve Board collects data on household assets and liabilities through the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). According to the most recent survey, 47.9% of workers under age 65 participated in employersponsored retirement plans — both DB and DC — in 2004, down from 49.6% in 2001.
  • Sorting Out Social Security Replacement Rates (Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, November 2005). The Social Security Administration provides two sets of replacement rates. The methods used to calculate the two involve different measures of pre-retirement earnings, different employment patterns, and different retirement ages. This brief explains these differences.

Click the links below to read reports on the following topics:

General Pension Studies
General Wealth and Savings Reports
Defined Benefit vs. Defined Contribution Plans
Defined Benefit Plans
Defined Contribution Plans
Pension Plan Freezes, Changes, and Trends
Women's Retirement Security
Polls Related to Retirement Security
Public Pension Plans