Collectively, Americans are woefully unprepared financially for retirement. This retirement problem actually reflects a collection of diverse issues. This paper identifies the most important ones: longevity; access; contributions; portability; behavioral mistakes; funded status; expenses; and...

Dr. Brown shares his thoughts on how the defined contribution system could leverage its resources and expertise to provide a new tool for managing the key risks in retirement – longevity, medical expenditures and inflation – with a holistic Retirement Security Product (RSP)

To establish current savings behavior, one necessary measurement of retirement preparation is identifying the percentage of workers with employment-based retirement plans, as well as understanding the characteristics of workers with and without access to such programs. The findings from this...

To establish existing savings behavior, it is necessary to estimate the percentage of workers with an employment-based retirement plan, and to know the characteristics of workers with and without a plan - the subject of this paper. The findings show that there has been a significant increase in...

Given 1) a history of asset returns, 2) an individual's life expectancy table, and 3) a utility function describing a retiree's tradeoff between income, variability, and risk of shortfall, there is a spending and asset allocation strategy that would have historically provided maximum utility....

Retirement planning is an issue that must be tackled early and solved backward. It must be tackled early because with a few working years to go there is little that can be done if an individual is not on the right path; and it must be solved backward because it makes little sense to aim for a...

This article calls attention to the Department of Labor's imposition of the “prudent investor rule” on financial advisers to retirement savers. The article also canvasses the customary role of an investment policy statement in promoting compliance with the prudent investor rule by...

A recent US Treasury regulation allowed deferred longevity income annuities to be included in pension plan menus as a default payout solution, yet little research has investigated whether more people should convert some of the $15 trillion they hold in employer-based defined contribution plans...

This paper focuses on a critical factor in retirement security: the presence of income or assets from an employment-based retirement plan. It is the third in a series of EBRI publications based on the Retirement and Pension Plan Coverage Topical Module of the 2001 Survey of Income and Program...