Today’s Retirees, The Lucky Few, Are Riding High—Why?

A study performed by the Employee Benefit Retirement Institute and the Blackrock Retirement Institute discovered that a majority of retirees retained 80% of their pre-retirement savings almost two decades after leaving the workforce. The survey was based on a total 7,148 households in terms of assets and a smaller sub-sample of 1,660 retirees on the expenditure side. The survey results challenge the conventional paradigm developed by Nobel Laureate Franco Modigliani. Quite opposite of the expected result, over one-third of retirees in predetermined wealth groups actually increased their assets in retirement. Anne Ackerley, managing director and head of BlackRock’s defined contribution business, believes a possible explanation for the unexpected result is retirees’ cognizance of the very real possibility of outliving their money.

See Evan Simonoff, Today’s Retirees, The Lucky Few, Are Riding High—Why?, Wealth Management.com, February 23, 2018.

Special thanks to Joel C. Dobris (Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law) for bringing this article to my attention.