Retirement and Older Americans

Publications on Retirement and Older Americans

Amid much conversation about the future of Social Security, personal retirement savings are becoming more critical than ever before. Many employers contribute to their workers' retirement savings, but who benefits most from this and how much do these people lose in wages as a result of these contributions? Karen Smith, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute's Program on Retirement Policy, talks about employer contributions to retirement savings, who benefits most, and who loses the most wages in return for retirement contributions.

The lackluster economy, eroding traditional pensions, and volatile stock market suggest that baby boomers - those born between 1945 and 1965 - face increasingly uncertain retirements. Our projections show that lower - and moderate-income boomers will continue to rely on Social Security for most of their retirement income. While the projections reflect some good news - women will reap the rewards of working and earning more than previous generations - they also raise alarms. Between 30 and 40 percent of boomers will not have enough income at age 70 to replace 75 percent of their preretirement earnings, a common standard for measuring retirement income adequacy.

The recession has increased joblessness among older Americans. These graphs and tables report unemployment rates and how they have varied by age, sex, race, and education since 2007.

Low-income Medicare beneficiaries are eligible for subsidies to help them pay premiums and cost sharing. However, these subsidies fall short of those contained in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) that help low-income families afford adequate health coverage. In this report we consider policy options to reform Medicare's low-income subsidies to better align with ACA provisions. We estimate that a significant simplification in low-income protection and cost-sharing rules could greatly reduce burdens on the poorest and sickest beneficiaries. Depending on how they are implemented, these reforms could either reduce or only modestly increase total public spending.

This report describes the work the Urban Institute performed to generate the Model of Income in the Near Term, Version 6 (MINT6). MINT is a tool developed for the Social Security Administration (SSA) to analyze the distributional consequences of Social Security reform proposals. MINT is a micro-level data file of individuals born between 1926 and 2075. It starts with a rich set of income and demographic characteristics from the 2001 and 2004 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data linked to SSA data on earnings and benefits. MINT then projects these characteristics until death or the year 2099.