Understanding the spending patterns of the elderly and forming an educated estimate of households’ budgets throughout households’ old age is a key element of retirement planning. In this Issue Brief, the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) explores variations in spending of older...

Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey (CAMS), we examine spending behavior of older Americans for the 50–64, 65–74, and 75-or-older age groups between 2005 and 2017, biennially.Average annual total spending is lower for households in older...

This paper examines in detail the differences in out-of-pocket health care spending between couple and single older households. The data for this paper come from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a study of a nationally representative sample of U.S. households with individuals over age 50....

We use new data from the 2019 wave of the Consumption and Activities Mail Survey to help interpret the observed decline in spending as individuals age. At one extreme, forward-looking individuals optimally chose the decline; at the other, myopic individuals overspent and were forced to reduce...

While the life-cycle hypothesis predicts that consumption remains smooth during the transition from work into retirement, recent studies have shown that consumption declines at retirement. This empirical result has been referred to as the retirement consumption puzzle. Previous literature has...

Prices of real and financial assets fell substantially in the UK during 2008-09. The fourth wave of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) was in the field throughout this 'financial crisis'. We use these data and earlier ELSA waves first to document the effect of the crisis on the...

The increase in the share of the number of older people in the Polish population requires constant diagnosis of the degree of satisfying their needs. One of the ways of such assessment is the dynamic analysis of changes in the goods and services consumption. The author's research task was to...

This paper reports on a study of how spending in older American households (ages 50 and above) varies across different census regions and divisions. The study shows large variations in household spending across the country, suggesting that both individual households and financial firms might...