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The biggest financial challenge for most Americans is funding their retirement. In recent decades, working lives have not kept pace with increasing life expectancies, leading to longer retirements. (1) Longer [...]

Media reports predicted that the stock market decline in October 2008 would cause changes in retirement intentions, due to declines in retirement assets. We use panel data from the Health and Retirement Study to investigate the relationship between stock market performance and retirement intentions during 1998-2008, a period that includes the recent crisis. While we find a weak negative correlation between stock returns and retirement intentions, further investigation suggests that this relationship is not driven by wealth shocks brought about by stock market fluctuations, but by other factors that are correlated with both the stock market and retirement intentions. (Contains 3 figures, 7 tables, and 9 footnotes.)

Social Security is widely believed to protect its' recipients from inflation because benefits are indexed to the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). However, the CPI-W may not accurately reflect the experience of retirees for two reasons. First, retirees generally have higher medical expenses than workers, and medical costs, in recent years, have tended to rise faster than the prices of other goods. Second, even if medical costs did not rise faster than the prices of other goods, as retirees aged, their medical spending would still tend to increase as a share of income; that is, each cohort of retirees would still see a decline in the real income available for non- medical spending. We show that, for in the 1918 birth cohort, Social Security benefits net of average out-of-pocket medical expenses have declined relative to a price index for non-medical goods by around 20 percent for men, and by around 27 percent for women. We explore alternative options for indexing Social Security benefits and discuss the impact of these alternatives on Social Security's long- term finances. Keywords:: Social Security, benefit indexation, medical cost inflation JEL Codes: H24, H55, H6I, I. INTRODUCTION Social Security is widely believed to protect its recipients from a number of risks, including uncertainty regarding length of life and inflation, due to the inflation-indexed life annuity [...]

Derivation of optimal asset allocations and locations, for an investor saving for retirement, is discussed. It is seen that, the performance of retirement savings is significantly improved, by these locating assets.