Saving and Wealth Accumulation among Student Loan Borrowers: Implications for Retirement Preparedness

Lisa Dettling, Sarena Goodman and Sarah Reber
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Sarena Goodman: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/sarena-f-goodman.htm

No 2022-019, Finance and Economics Discussion Series from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Abstract: Borrowing for education has increased rapidly in the past several decades, such that the majority of non-housing debt on US households' balance sheets is now student loan debt. This chapter analyzes the implications of student loan borrowing for later-life economic well-being, with a focus on retirement preparation. We demonstrate that families holding student loan debt later in life have less savings than their similarly educated peers without such debt. However, these comparisons are misleading if the goal is to characterize the experience of the typical student borrower, as they fail to account for student borrowers who already paid off their debt. We develop strategies to locate families that ever financed their education with student loans in two large datasets which enables us to draw more meaningful comparisons. We find that student loan borrowers roughly follow the earnings, saving, and wealth trajectories of other college-educated families into late-career ages and are much better off financially than those that did not attend college.

Keywords: College; Retirement; Saving; Student loan debt; Survey of consumer finances; Wealth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E21 G51 I22 J24 J26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 p.
Date: 2022-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-ban, nep-mac and nep-ure
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2022-19

DOI: 10.17016/FEDS.2022.019

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