Individual retirement accounts (IRAs) are a vital component of U.S. retirement savings, representing more than 25 percent of all retirement assets in the nation. A substantial portion of these IRA assets originated in other tax-qualified retirement plans, such as defined benefit (pension) and 401(k) plans, and were subsequently moved to IRAs through rollovers. This paper is the third examination of asset allocation from the EBRI IRA Database, an ongoing project that collects data from IRA plan administrators. For 2011, it contained information on 20.5 million accounts with total assets of $1.456 trillion. The number of IRAs in the database with complete asset allocation data was lower, at 18.4 million accounts with $1.388 trillion in assets. This analysis considers asset allocation on a dollar-weighted basis within IRA accounts, by IRA type and account balance, as well as by gender and age of the account owner. In addition to presenting the average asset allocation across the accounts, this study includes a presentation of the percentage of accounts with "extreme" allocations -- either less than 10 percent or more than 90 percent in a particular asset category. This helps illustrate the distribution of the allocations across the accounts. In the entire EBRI IRA Database in 2011, 44.4 percent of the assets were in equities, 10.7 percent in balanced funds, 18.0 percent in bonds, 13.0 percent in money, and 13.8 percent in other assets. Male and female IRA owners had virtually identical allocations to bonds, equities, and money. However, males were more likely to have assets in the "other" category, while females had a higher percentage of assets in balanced funds. For IRA owners above age 25, the percentage allocated to money and balanced funds decreased as the age of the owner increased, while bond allocations increased with age.The PDF for the above title, published in the October 2013 issue of EBRI Notes, also contains the fulltext of another October 2013 EBRI Notes article abstracted on SSRN: "Amount of Savings Needed for Health Expenses for People Eligible for Medicare: More Rare Good News."
