The “future of retirement” seems very much on the public’s mind. The topic is surfacing in the press, in the institutional marketplace, and will be the focus of a Washington, D.C., policy forum I’m attending in May. Here are some of my thoughts. I welcome your comments and will try to incorporate them in my upcoming discussions.
It’s very clear that there is a future for retirement. But to me, it’s really a tale of two futures: the future of retirement income, and the future of retirement health benefits.
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What’s the typical income of a U.S. retiree? $40,000? $50,000? Higher, lower?
It’s $31,157 as of 2008.
That’s the median income of households age 65 and older as reported by Pat Purcell of the Congressional Research Service. The median means that half of older households had a higher income, half lower. Technically, it’s not the income of “retirees,” because it includes the income of older households whether they are fully retired or still working. Still, it’s a good metric of the income of retired Americans.
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I recently attended a conference in Washington on the question of retirement income—how baby boomers will generate income from their 401(k) accounts once they retire. Read more »
For many years, the government has published statistics on Americans’ age and employment. A version of that data is shown in the chart below. My sense is that these figures are the basis for much of the conventional wisdom on the age at which people retire, as well as for whatever general notions people have about when they’ll start to need “replacement income.”
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Given all the back and forth in Washington these days, with policy meetings and dramatic proposals to revolutionize retirement, I’ve got retirement-income solutions on the brain. So here’s a modest proposal for providing “Retirement Income Security for All.”
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