IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crr/crrwps/wp2012-13.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

How Important Is Asset Allocation to Financial Security in Retirement?

Author

Listed:
  • Alicia H. Munnell
  • Natalia Orlova
  • Anthony Webb

Abstract

Financial advice tends to focus on financial assets, but other levers may be more important for most households. This paper proceeds in three stages. The first section reports a simple Excel spreadsheet exercise that provides a stylized example of the tradeoff between returns and time spent in the labor force. The second section uses data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) on pre-retirees aged 51-64 to see how the gap between retirement needs and retirement resources is affected by working longer, taking out a reverse mortgage, controlling spending, and shifting all assets to equities with no risk. The third section uses a simple dynamic programming model to calculate a risk-adjusted measure of the value for the average household of moving from a typical conservative portfolio to an optimal portfolio. The answer from all three exercises is the same: the focus on asset allocation is misplaced.

Suggested Citation

  • Alicia H. Munnell & Natalia Orlova & Anthony Webb, 2012. "How Important Is Asset Allocation to Financial Security in Retirement?," Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College wp2012-13, Center for Retirement Research, revised Apr 2012.
    • Handle: RePEc:crr:crrwps:wp2012-13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://crr.bc.edu/working-papers/how-important-is-asset-allocation-to-financial-security-in-retirement/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Steven Diamond & Stephen Boyd & David Greenberg & Mykel Kochenderfer & Andrew Ang, 2021. "Optimal Claiming of Social Security Benefits," Papers 2106.00125, arXiv.org.
    2. Warshawsky, Mark, 2017. "Retire on the House: The Possible Use of Reverse Mortgages to Enhance Retirement Security," Working Papers 07626, George Mason University, Mercatus Center.
    3. Dillingh, Rik, 2016. "Empirical essays on behavioral economics and lifecycle decisions," Other publications TiSEM 0e2143e3-bd86-4302-90eb-e, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:crr:crrwps:wp2012-13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Amy Grzybowski or Christopher F Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/crrbcus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.