Seniors Badly Misjudge Key Retirement Risks
New CRR Brief finds Americans worry way too much about one specific retirement risk while downplaying two other more likely issues
by Brian Anderson | Originally posted on 401K Specialist
Seniors, you’re worried about the wrong things when it comes to retirement. You place too much emphasis on some retirement risks and not enough on others.
That’s the underlying message in a new research brief from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College authored by Wenliang Hou, a quantitative analyst at Fidelity Investments and a former research economist at the Center.
The brief, titled “How Well Do Retirees Assess the Risks They Face in Retirement?” finds that retirees do not have an accurate understanding of their true retirement risks, and there’s a large disconnect between how actual and perceived risks are ranked.
The analysis finds actual risks should be ranked as such: 1) longevity; 2) health; and 3) market. But perceived risks are ranked: 1) market; 2) longevity; and 3) health.
Specifically, Americans ages 50 and older are about three times as worried about market risk as Hou’s modeling suggests that they should be, 50% less worried about their own longevity risk than they should be, and 30% less worried about healthcare costs in retirement than they should be.
“In short, retirees overestimate market volatility and underestimate how long they will live and their health costs,” a summary of the brief states.
Perceived longevity risk and health risk rank lower, because retirees are pessimistic about their survival probabilities and often underestimate their health costs in late life, Hou writes in the brief.
Retirees face numerous risks in retirement, including outliving their money (longevity risk), investment losses (market risk), unexpected health expenses (health risk), the unforeseen needs of family members (family risk), and even retirement benefit cuts (policy risk). (SEE “The 5 Major Risks in Retirement” BELOW).
The brief explores how important these risks actually are, and whether Americans properly perceive these risks when making their consumption and investment decisions. To answer these questions, the brief systematically values and ranks the impacts of these various risks from both the objective and subjective perspectives.
The analysis, which uses data from an earlier research paper (the Health and Retirement Study), involves constructing a lifecycle optimization model to quantify each risk by estimating how much wealth retirees are willing to give up to insure against it.