Household Portfolios and Retirement Saving Over the Life Cycle


Book Description

This paper documents the share of investable wealth that middle-class U.S. investors hold in the stock market over their working lives. This share rises modestly early in life and falls significantly as people approach retirement. Prior to 2000, the average investor held less of their investable wealth in the stock market and did not adjust this share over their working life. These changes in portfolio allocation were accelerated by the Pension Protection Act (PPA) of 2006, which allowed employers to adopt target date funds (TDFs) as default options in retirement saving plans. Young retail investors who start at an employer shortly after it adopts TDFs have higher equity shares than those who start at that same employer shortly before the change in defaults. Older investors rebalance more to safe assets. We also study retirement contribution rates over the life-cycle and find that average retirement saving rates increase steadily over the working life. In contrast to what we find for investment in the stock market, contribution rates have been stable over time and across cohorts and were not increased by the PPA.




Lifecycle Investing


Book Description

Diversification provides a well-known way of getting something close to a free lunch: by spreading money across different kinds of investments, investors can earn the same return with lower risk (or a much higher return for the same amount of risk). This strategy, introduced nearly fifty years ago, led to such strategies as index funds. What if we were all missing out on another free lunch that’s right under our noses? InLifecycle Investing, Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres-two of the most innovative thinkers in business, law, and economics-have developed tools that will allow nearly any investor to diversify their portfolios over time. By using leveraging when young-a controversial idea that sparked hate mail when the authors first floated it in the pages ofForbes-investors of all stripes, from those just starting to plan to those getting ready to retire, can substantially reduce overall risk while improving their returns. InLifecycle Investing, readers will learn How to figure out the level of exposure and leverage that’s right foryou How the Lifecycle Investing strategy would have performed in the historical market Why it will work even if everyone does it Whennotto adopt the Lifecycle Investing strategy Clearly written and backed by rigorous research,Lifecycle Investingpresents a simple but radical idea that will shake up how we think about retirement investing even as it provides a healthier nest egg in a nicely feathered nest.




Pay Yourself First


Book Description

Written by the founders of the Life Cycle Mutual Funds, a revolutionary age- and solution-based family of mutual funds, this guide demystifies the principles of retirement investing and shows readers how to take charge of their financial future. Using real-life anecdotes and examples, this text focuses on the human element involved in retirement planning. 20 charts.




Investing Retirement Wealth


Book Description

If household portfolios are constrained by borrowing and short-sales restrictions asset markets, then alternative retirement savings systems may affect household welfare by relaxing these constraints. This paper uses a calibrated partial-equilibrium model of optimal life-cycle portfolio choice to explore the empirical relevance of these issues. In a benchmark case, we find ex-ante welfare gains equivalent to a 3.7% increase in consumption from the investment of half of retirement wealth in the equity market. The main channel through which these gains are realized is that the higher average return on equities permits a lower Social Security tax rate on younger households, which helps households smooth their consumption over the life cycle. There is a smaller welfare gain of 0.5% of consumption when Social Security tax rates are held constant. We also find that realistic heterogeneity of risk aversion and labor income risk can strongly affect optimal portfolio choice over the life cycle, which provides one argument for a privatized Social Security system with an element of personal portfolio choice




Household Portfolio Allocation Over the Life Cycle


Book Description

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between age and portfolio structure for households in the US. We focus on both the probability that households of different ages own particular portfolio assets and the fraction of their net worth allocated to each asset category. We distinguish between age and cohort effects using data from the repeated cross-sections of the Federal Reserve Board's Surveys of Consumer Finances. We present two broad conclusions. First, there are important differences across asset classes in both the age-specific probabilities of asset ownership and in the portfolio shares of different assets at different ages. The notnion that all assets can be treated as identical from the standpoint of analyzing household wealth accumulation is not supported by the data. Institutional factors, asset liquidity, and evolving investor tastes must be recognized in modeling asset demand. These factors could affect analyses of overall household saving as well as the composition of this saving. Second, there are evident differences in the asset ownership probabilities of different birth cohorts. Currently, older households were more likely to hold corporate stock, and less likely to hold tax-exempt bonds, than younger households at any given age. These differences across cohorts are important to recognize when analyzing asset accumulation profiles.







Developments in the Economics of Aging


Book Description

The number of Americans eligible to receive Social Security benefits will increase from forty-five million to nearly eighty million in the next twenty years. Retirement systems must therefore adapt to meet the demands of the largest aging population in our nation’s history. In Developments in the Economics of Aging, David A. Wise and a distinguished group of analysts examine the economic issues that will confront policy makers as they seek to design policies to protect the economic and physical health of these older Americans. The volume looks at such topics as factors influencing work and retirement decisions at older ages, changes in life satisfaction associated with retirement, and the shift in responsibility for managing retirement assets from professional money managers of traditional pension plans to individual account holders of 401(k)s. Developments in the Economics of Aging also addresses the complicated relationship between health and economic status, including why health behaviors vary across populations and how socioeconomic measures correlate with health outcomes.




Aging and the Macroeconomy


Book Description

The United States is in the midst of a major demographic shift. In the coming decades, people aged 65 and over will make up an increasingly large percentage of the population: The ratio of people aged 65+ to people aged 20-64 will rise by 80%. This shift is happening for two reasons: people are living longer, and many couples are choosing to have fewer children and to have those children somewhat later in life. The resulting demographic shift will present the nation with economic challenges, both to absorb the costs and to leverage the benefits of an aging population. Aging and the Macroeconomy: Long-Term Implications of an Older Population presents the fundamental factors driving the aging of the U.S. population, as well as its societal implications and likely long-term macroeconomic effects in a global context. The report finds that, while population aging does not pose an insurmountable challenge to the nation, it is imperative that sensible policies are implemented soon to allow companies and households to respond. It offers four practical approaches for preparing resources to support the future consumption of households and for adapting to the new economic landscape.




The Beginner's Guide To Saving For Retirement


Book Description

Learn the basic, fundamental principles of saving for retirement and ensure a comfortable, secure financial future for you and your family. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine your dream retirement. Picture where you are, who you're with, what you're doing, and how you feel. Take a deep breath and really let the visualization sink in and transport you to this alternate reality. Now open your eyes and ask yourself: Do you think you'll ever get to personally experience this vision of your dream retirement at any point in your life? If you answered no, you're not alone! Nearly 40 million working age households in the U.S. have no retirement savings, and a whopping 78% of Americans say they're either "extremely" or "somewhat" concerned about not having enough money for retirement. You probably already know that you need to be saving for retirement, but where do you even begin? From the alphabet soup of retirement accounts like 401(k)s, IRAs, 457s, and the like, to the confusing array of fund options with cryptic-sounding names and enormous hidden fees, knowing where to start is no easy task. And chances are you never learned this stuff in school, either--despite the fact that it has a greater impact on your happiness and quality of life than almost any other subject you can think of. Fortunately, building a nest egg to fund your dream retirement is easier than you think. In this book, Amazon bestselling author Dan Clay breaks down the steps of saving for retirement into easy, digestible chunks written specifically for those who have little to no financial background. Here are some of the things you'll learn: What the concept of retirement means and how to engineer it to fit your desired lifestyle The Retirement Income Equation for calculating how much money you need to retire--and why it might not be as much as you think! The magic of compound interest and how it can make you RICH Demystifying the role stocks and bonds play in your investment portfolio and why they should be embraced, not feared The dirty little secret Wall Street doesn't want you to know (that can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime) The Ten Golden Rules of Saving for Retirement that will put you well ahead of the majority of savers Why you could be leaving thousands of dollars of FREE money from your employer on the table, and how to take advantage of it How to decipher the alphabet soup of retirement accounts including 401(k)s, IRAs, and Roth IRAs The Goldilocks approach to managing your portfolio that will save you thousands of dollars in management fees over the course of your lifetime The proper mindset and habits you need to adopt in order to crush your retirement goals PLUS, you'll also gain access to a free companion website containing a bonus chapter packed with advanced tactics for supercharging your retirement savings, a list of Dan's favorite finance book and blog recommendations, and other bonus materials designed to help you make the right decisions with your money. Whether you're a recent graduate starting your first job, someone who's been meaning to start saving for retirement but just hasn't gotten around to it yet, or a person who's already saving for retirement but still isn't exactly sure what they're doing, this comprehensive guide aims to be THE fundamental resource you need for saving for retirement and securing your financial future. What are you waiting for? Scroll to the top of the page and click BUY NOW to start seizing control of your financial destiny today!




How to Invest Over the Life Cycle


Book Description

We analyse the state of the art in the field of life cycle portfolio choice, a recent strand of the literature on intertemporal portfolio selection. Life cycle models are designed to identify optimal savings and portfolio policies over the lifetime of investors. They can help to improve pension schemes by showing how these could be specifically tailored to the individual employee's circumstances to overcome the quot;one-size-fits-allquot; philosophy still prevailing in parts of the mandatory retirement savings system. To facilitate comparison, we first describe set-up, solution method and characteristic results for a basic model and then derive a general framework to classify existing contributions. We highlight the models' strengths and weaknesses and assess their ability to resolve existing portfolio puzzles. Lessons from the literature are summarized and promising areas for further research identified.