The recent decline in stock market values will have only a muted impact on the retirement of the average early baby boomer, according to NBER Research Associate Alan Gustman and his co-authors Thomas Steinmeier and Nahid Tabatabai. In What the Stock Market Decline Means for the Financial Security and Retirement Choices of the Near-Retirement Population (NBER Working Paper No. 15435), they explain that with only around 15 percent of the wealth of workers aged 53 to 58 in stocks, they aren't likely to see a huge hit to their retirement portfolios, despite the market losing roughly a third of its value from its 2007 peak through the fall of 2009. More than a quarter of the household wealth of this group is instead concentrated in anticipated Social Security payments.
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