Income and Wealth

The retirement savings of American households took a big hit when the stock market crashed in 2008. Recently, however, a good portion of these losses has been reversed. This fact sheet follows trends in retirement account balances since the beginning of 2005.

Women's labor force participation and earnings dramatically increased after World War II. Those changes have important implications for women's Social Security benefits. This article uses the MINT model to examine Social Security benefits for current and future beneficiary wives. The projections show that fewer wives in more recent birth cohorts will be eligible for auxiliary benefits as spouses because their earnings are too high. Most wives will still be eligible for survivor benefits because they typically have lower earnings than their husbands. The share of wives who would be ineligible for widow benefits is projected to double between cohorts.

As national attention turns to the federal deficit, some policymakers have proposed reforms to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security that could have significant implications for current and future generations of Americans. This data brief describes the income and assets of the current Medicare population, and examines the extent to which income and assets are likely to be higher for the next generation of beneficiaries. For most of the next generation of Medicare beneficiaries, average incomes will be moderately higher than the incomes of the current beneficiaries, after adjusting for inflation; however, the projected growth is concentrated in the upper incomes.

This article examines how retirement income is likely to change for boomers and persons born in generation X compared with current retirees. We use the MINT model to project retirement income, poverty rates, and replacement rates for current and future retirees at age 67. We find that retirement incomes will increase over time, and poverty rates will fall. Projected income gains are larger for higher than for lower socioeconomic groups, leading to increased income inequality among future retirees. Boomers and GenXers are less likely to have enough postretirement income to maintain their preretirement standard of living compared with current retirees.

Minority and divorced women have historically experienced double-digit poverty rates in retirement, and demographic trends will increase their representation in future retiree populations. We might expect an increase in the proportion of economically vulnerable divorced women in the future. Factors associated with higher retirement incomes include having a college degree; having strong labor force attachment; receiving Social Security benefits; and having pensions, retirement accounts, or assets, regardless of race and ethnicity. Because divorced minority women are less likely than divorced white women to have these attributes, their projected average retirement incomes are lower than those of divorced white women.