How much should a family save for retirement? A prescriptive life cycle savings model is presented. Scenarios are developed with simulations to provide implications for personal financial planning. The percent of income to save today depends on the expected lifetime non-investment income...

This research sought to further understanding of factors related to low-income household saving behavior. Saving behavior, defined as whether a household spent less than income, was analyzed by applying institutional theory, which proposes that households' institutional environment has a...

The purpose of this study was to examine associations between saving goals and saving behavior from a perspective of Maslow's Hierarchy. Using 1998-2007 Surveys of Consumer Finance data, we analyzed responses given to an open-ended saving reason question, and categorized responses into six...

The Survey of Consumer Finances was used to assess the explanatory power of self-control mechanisms, controlling for other important constructs from the standard life cycle model of saving. The analysis focused on saving goals, foreseeable expenses, and saving rules as mechanisms of...

An analysis of 6,113 households with four quarters of expenditure data in the 2004-2005 U.S. Consumer Expenditure Interview Survey found that 43% of households had outlays more than aftertax income, and 25% of households had outlays that were 127% or more of aftertax income. Black and...

In the 1995-2004 period, 48% of U.S. households owned stock assets, 11% owned private business assets, and 18% owned investment real estate other than a primary residence. These risky, high return investment assets accounted for 45% of household assets in the aggregate, even though 44% of...

This research extends the work of Yao, Hanna, and Lindamood (2004) and others in attempting to ascertain how stock market fluctuations affect the risk tolerance of households. We used the 1992 to 2013 datasets of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), and found that whether respondents were...

Fudenberg's (2006) model of bounded rationality posits that greater complexity should result in households being less likely to achieve rational outcomes. Some households have higher complexity in retirement planning because expected retirement income varies during retirement. Based on 1995 to...

Household time preference for US households, as measured by the planning horizon, was fairly stable for many years, but sharply changed with the onset of the Great Recession. Based on an analysis of a combination of the 1992-2013 Survey of Consumer Finances datasets, time preference increased in...