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The Tradeoff Between Mortgage Prepayments and Tax-Deferred Retirement Savings

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Author Info
Gene Amromin
Jennifer Huang
Clemens Sialm

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Abstract

We show that a significant number of households can perform a tax arbitrage by cutting back on their additional mortgage payments and increasing their contributions to tax-deferred accounts (TDA). Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we show that about 38% of U.S. households that are accelerating their mortgage payments instead of saving in tax-deferred accounts are making the wrong choice. For these households, reallocating their savings can yield a mean benefit of 11 to 17 cents per dollar, depending on the choice of investment assets in the TDA. In the aggregate, these mis-allocated savings are costing U.S. households as much as 1.5 billion dollars per year. Finally, we show empirically that this inefficient behavior is unlikely to be driven by liquidity considerations and that self-reported debt aversion and risk aversion variables explain to some extent the preference for paying off debt obligations early and hence the propensity to forgo our proposed tax arbitrage.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 12502.

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Date of creation: Aug 2006
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12502

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
G18 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Government Policy and Regulation
H24 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Personal Income and Other Nonbusiness Taxes and Subsidies
H31 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Household

References listed on IDEAS
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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Marcel Marekwica & Raimond Maurer, 2007. "How unobservable Bond Positions in Retirement Accounts affect Asset Allocation," Working Paper Series: Finance and Accounting 176, Department of Finance, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. [Downloadable!]
  2. Karen E. Dynan & Donald L. Kohn, 2007. "The rise in U.S. household indebtedness: causes and consequences," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2007-37, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
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