The Tradeoff Between Mortgage Prepayments and Tax-Deferred Retirement Savings

Gene Amromin, Jennifer Huang and Clemens Sialm

No 12502, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We show that a significant number of households can perform a tax arbitrage by cutting back on their additional mortgage payments and increasing their contributions to tax-deferred accounts (TDA). Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we show that about 38% of U.S. households that are accelerating their mortgage payments instead of saving in tax-deferred accounts are making the wrong choice. For these households, reallocating their savings can yield a mean benefit of 11 to 17 cents per dollar, depending on the choice of investment assets in the TDA. In the aggregate, these mis-allocated savings are costing U.S. households as much as 1.5 billion dollars per year. Finally, we show empirically that this inefficient behavior is unlikely to be driven by liquidity considerations and that self-reported debt aversion and risk aversion variables explain to some extent the preference for paying off debt obligations early and hence the propensity to forgo our proposed tax arbitrage.

JEL-codes: G11 G18 H24 H31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-08
Note: AG AP PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Amromin, Gene & Huang, Jennifer & Sialm, Clemens, 2007. "The tradeoff between mortgage prepayments and tax-deferred retirement savings," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(10), pages 2014-2040, November.
Published as The Tradeoff between Mortgage Prepayments and Tax-deferred Retirement Savings , Gene Amromin, Jennifer Huang, Clemens Sialm. in Public Policy and Retirement, Trans-Atlantic Public Economics Seminar (TAPES) , Blomquist and Gordon. 2007

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Chapter: The Tradeoff between Mortgage Prepayments and Tax-deferred Retirement Savings (2007)
Journal Article: The tradeoff between mortgage prepayments and tax-deferred retirement savings (2007)
Working Paper: The tradeoff between mortgage prepayments and tax-deferred retirement savings (2006)
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