Financial Regret at Older Ages and Longevity Awareness

Abigail Hurwitz and Olivia Mitchell

No 30696, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Many older people express regret about undersaving; here, we extend prior work by reporting regret about five other critical financial topics. Using the Health and Retirement Study, we first show that older people who regret past financial decisions differ significantly from those who do not. Second, in an experiment, we demonstrate that informing people about objective survival probabilities increases regret about not buying lifetime income by 42% overall, and by more among the high income or those in good health. We also document that, for some, providing such information increases regret about having claimed social security early and undersaving. These results may explain previous findings about why survival information can alter financial decisions.

JEL-codes: D14 D15 D83 G22 G41 G51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dem, nep-exp and nep-hea
Note: AG LS
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